The price is besides the point here. Thing thing to learn from the Ethereum hard fork is that there were factors that they did not anticipate that would happen. Instead of doing only the hard fork, the original chain lived on and became a competing chain. The effect of it on Ethereum may be minimal because the network is quite young. So yes they have that luxury to make drastic measures. My question is how will this affect a more established blockchain like Bitcoin?
It's called freedom, friendo. A fork, it's the open source way.
It's why little Johnny
is better off if Mommy and Daddy (who hate and abuse each other, in front of the
investors kids), find separate houses.
Then why don't you fork? Why do people like you just constantly talk about forking, rather than following through? Is it because most of the technical community isn't interested? Is it because you are waiting for miners to pressure opposing users with their hash rate?
I don't see why you guys can't just fork, if not for fear that no one would support your chain. Go ahead and fork; it's the open source way. I'm guessing you won't get very far.
controversial forks (intentional splits) are not good.
that is why THE COMMUNITY wants a CONSENSUAL FORK meaning the majority continue on a single path, but have the upgraded features, higher capacity buffer, where the orphaning mechanism built into bitcoin take care of the minority.
I think me and franky1 differ in opinion about this point, I have come to realize that we are past the point where a non controversial hard fork by a client that is not Core is no longer possible without causing a split in the network because of the particular beliefs of certain participants within the network.
You should look up the meaning of "consensual"....it relates to "consent". The "majority" as you say cannot "consent" for the minority. Consensual means every user agrees, not tyranny of the majority.
I actually agree with you here, which is why splitting the chain is such a graceful solution to this age old problem. It solves the problem of the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of the minority.
Orphaning is irrelevant here---why would you even mention it? If a hard fork gains the majority of hash rate, the minority just stays on the weaker chain. They can't even see the "longer chain" because it's invalid according to their consensus rules. They just ignore it. Two separate blockchains. This is why there is no such thing as a "majority rule consensual hard fork".
I actually agree with you that there is no such thing as "majority rule consensual hard fork", that is a practical impossibility, unless it can never change, but that can only be achievable by ignoring the splits and attempting to maintain social consensus, that is no guarantee, and in my opinion not a good approach.
However there is such a thing as a non controversial hard fork, where the chain is not split because of there not being any major opposition to the change. I think this is what franky1 is referring to. This is how Ethereum, Monero and Dash have been able to hard fork many times without splitting the chain, Ethereum Classic is the first major split we have seen in cryptocurrency history and Ethereum is doing just fine, it proves to me that this solution is viable. Whether the chain splits or not at least it does give people the freedom of choice over important issues.
It's called freedom, friendo. A fork, it's the open source way.
It's why little Johnny is better off if Mommy and Daddy (who hate and abuse each other, in front of the investors kids), find separate houses.
But you're not advocating finding separate houses, you're casually arguing for the right to evict the legitimate owners and burn the house down.
You have twisted this analogy into something horribly inaccurate.
It would be more accurate to say that in this breakup the house gets copied and mommy and daddy both got a copy of the same house, the kids (investors) then get to choose where they want to live, they can even spend time in both houses, the value of the house is determined by the proportion of kids (investors) that want to stay in each house.
But the market seems generally opposed to a hard fork---that's the overall sentiment on social media, the forum, slacks and mailing lists....backed by nodes and miners.
The only way the "market" can truly express itself right now is by moving away from Bitcoin, that is exactly what is happening right now, Bitcoin is losing market share. Splitting the blockchain actually gives the market a much clearer choice, when that happens we will see where the value will flow.
So what happened to that Bitcoin fork that was slated to activate in April? Much excitement on bitco.in if I recall. Funny, no one seems to be talking about it.
Why don't you fork? Is it because that fork failed, and now you must try to lobby miners to leverage their hash power to force a split?
You do not know what you are talking about, that fork has not even been launched. We did test it on the Bitcoin network, splitting the chain and most people did not even notice, the sky did not fall from the heavens.
Perhaps it's more important to note that the market can't change the rules of the Bitcoin network---it can only switch to a new network with new tokens. In the process, you'll probably split the community into multiple blockchains.
The market can change the rules of the Bitcoin network, that is one of its fundamental and most important principles, I have already explained why I think that is the case in this thread.
The market can't change the rules of the network. This is a matter of fact. The market
could migrate to a different network with different rules. Could you point me to the protocol documentation that suggests changing the consensus rules is "one of its fundamental and most important principles?" Perhaps something from the whitepaper? The whitepaper only talks about the possible need to enforce new rules (and incentives) if needed. That suggests soft forks, not consensus break.
That passage in the whitepaper also refers to hard forks, Satoshi even left behind instructions on how to increase the blocksize using a hard fork:
It can be phased in, like:
if (blocknumber > 115000)
maxblocksize = largerlimit
It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.
When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.
There is nothing you can do to stop the split from happening except for compromise. You keep asking how come we have waited this long to initiate the hard fork? It is out of courtesy and respect, and it is in the hope that we can find compromise and agreement so that we can move forward together as one, splitting the chain is a measure of last resort. But it has come to this, we have radically different ideologies on what we think Bitcoin is and what it should become. Therefore it does make sense for these different groups of people to go their separate ways.
Yes, just fork already. I'm tired of hearing about it---you're not going to convince the people who have not budged for the last year. Splitting the network could have disastrous consequences for users and custodians, but the blood will be on the hands of those that initiated the split.
You claim that it will be a "disaster" yet Ethereum has proven not to be a disaster at all.
If it is possible now for any small minority to split the chain now over any reason and you think this would have disastrous consequences for users. I hope you are not invested in Bitcoin. That would seem like a very fragile network if that was true, I do not think it is, I think that this process of splitting the chain should be considered as part of Bitcoins design, a mechanism to resolve disputes within the network by splitting the network, freedom of choice for all of the participants involved, this is the only way to achieve such a real consensus.