[–] KurtB 4 points 1 point 5 points (+5|-4) ago
Some people want to change the Blockchain in a substantial way to further their own agenda of what they think BTC should be.
They try this by spawning zombie miners that appear like normal miners until they receive a special signal. The special signal is a certain signature on a certain number of blocks.
There is nothing to worry though, smart people have figured out their plan and decided to put the signature on every block to lure them into a trap so that they will end up mining orphaned blocks that won't yield any Bitcoin until they ran out of funds or go elsewhere with their scam.
Meanwhile, buy low, sell high, ... enjoy.
[–] Brolo_El_Cunado 0 points 4 points 4 points (+4|-0) ago
I know you are getting downvoated (accurately, it would seem) but I'm curious for more of your point of view as I'm still struggling to figure out the XT issue.
What is the agenda of these nefarious actors that they are trying to advance on the bitcoin community? What ends are they seeking and how is increasing the size of a block from 1MB to 8MB going to achieve them?
I ask because you are the only person who has taken a strong stance against it that I have seen.
[–] stevenroose 0 points 6 points 6 points (+6|-0) ago
The two extreme opinions are the following:
People in favor of XT claim that the Core devs that are against BIP 101 (the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal that XT implements and supports 8MB - 8GB blocks up to 2036) are mainly Blockstream employees. Blockstream is the company that debuted sidestreams and are developing the Lightning network, a Bitcoin sidechain that will exist alongside Bitcoin and make faster and cheaper transactions possible.
People against XT claim that blocks as big as the ones BIP 101 introduces will make Bitcoin less decentralized because only big companies will be able to run full nodes. A number of exchanges and (primarily Chinese) mining pools expressed doubts of they would be able to keep up with the network if 8MB blocks (and even bigger ones over time) come up.
A lot of hard feelings and shouting from both ways. This is not a big problem an sich, since clashes of opinions are normal and will eventually be solved.
The only real bad thing happening right now is r/bitcoin being severely censored by their moderators. They will tell you XT is an altcoin and suddenly don't allow altcoin discussion on the sub. A massive amount of posts are being deleted and people are being banned. The r/bitcoin community is outraging against the mods and primarily theymos (the guy that also runs BitcoinTalk.org and never had much sympathy from the Bitcoin community. Mainly because he is sitting on a huge pile of donation money from the old days and refuses to invest it in improving the BitcoinTalk forum.)
[–] KurtB 0 points 4 points 4 points (+4|-0) ago (edited ago)
I am not here for cheap votes, I didn't follow the debate until this week. Basically, the block size matters as much as the number of Bitcoins that can possibly exist. -- Which is: Not at all; provided they don't change.
What matters is stability.
Theoretically: If 2 US developers can drum up enough popular support to impose changes of that scale, Bitcoin isn't worth a quarter Fed. Technically: I am not getting into this debate.
If some people want to make a lot small, cheap, transactions they can a) bundle/compress, b) use other chains, c) Append 7MB of XT to a core block, d) be creative ... Bitcoin is not and should not be the only solution.
If some people want to store more information cheaply on a trustless layer, they should help build the safenetwork.io.
However, it's best to listen to the diverse arguments, what you find is that everybody had a different idea of what Bitcoin could be/should be. Some like it to be Western Union, or Visa, others Dropbox, NASDAQ a Casino or a voting back-end for elections.
They forget what the Bitcoin Blockchain is: Free of disorder and uncertainty, the most stable place in the known universe.
[–] EgotisticalGiraffe 0 points 3 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago
I downvoted him not for his XT hate but because he is promoting sabotaging XT users. When he talks about "lure them into a trap" he is referring to Not Bitcoin XT which is a wallet implementation that appears to be an XT node but once a consensus is reached it will not relay XT blocks. It has no other purpose but to fork the network early when real XTnodes are still a minority so users on the XT fork users will see their coin's value plummet. If XT were to succeed normally then a majority of people would use it and people that were adamant for 1MB blocks would find themselves in the minority.
[–] chalbersma 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
I kinda want to see this happen...
[–] stevenroose 0 points 6 points 6 points (+6|-0) ago
The two extreme opinions are the following:
People in favor of XT claim that the Core devs that are against BIP 101 (the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal that XT implements and supports 8MB - 8GB blocks up to 2036) are mainly Blockstream employees. Blockstream is the company that debuted sidestreams and are developing the Lightning network, a Bitcoin sidechain that will exist alongside Bitcoin and make faster and cheaper transactions possible.
People against XT claim that blocks as big as the ones BIP 101 introduces will make Bitcoin less decentralized because only big companies will be able to run full nodes. A number of exchanges and (primarily Chinese) mining pools expressed doubts of they would be able to keep up with the network if 8MB blocks (and even bigger ones over time) come up.
A lot of hard feelings and shouting from both ways. This is not a big problem an sich, since clashes of opinions are normal and will eventually be solved.
The only real bad thing happening right now is r/bitcoin being severely censored by their moderators. They will tell you XT is an altcoin and suddenly don't allow altcoin discussion on the sub. A massive amount of posts are being deleted and people are being banned. The r/bitcoin community is outraging against the mods and primarily theymos (the guy that also runs BitcoinTalk.org and never had much sympathy from the Bitcoin community. Mainly because he is sitting on a huge pile of donation money from the old days and refuses to invest it in improving the BitcoinTalk forum.)
[–] stevenroose 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
That could possibly be an error on my side. I recalled statements from Chinese mining pools about "bigger blocks", but I was unsure which proposal it was about.
[–] Gilius 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago (edited ago)
To really know what's going on you kinda need to know the build up to this.
The question of how to scale bitcoin has been going since the beginning. Many actions have been taken to improve scalability in the past, all of which where technical problems. The next barrier of being able to do more transactions is not technical but an arbitrary limit set by satoshi, which is the blocksize limit. This limit is being discussed for years, but has gotten more attention earlier this year since Gavin Andresen did some calculations to prove 20mb blocks are possible. It is his and some others believe that the blocklimit will soon be reached and we need to prevent this. Other developers pointed out some flaws in his calculations and the new calculations brought the limit to 8mb. The reason for increasing it so much is that this requires a hard fork, and hard forks are dangerous, so it's best not to do it too often.
This big increase has some downsides however. There have been so many things tossed around, some valid arguments, some disputable, if you want to know more about that you'll need to do some research. The main argument seems to be an increase in centralization of miners and nodes.
There have been different proposals for increasing the blocksize to 8mb, all of which where heavily disputed by other developers. A counter proposal has been given in the form of BIP103, which increases the blocksize very gradually (17% per year), starting from 2017. Because these viewpoints are so far removed from each other, Mike Hearn with support from Gavin Andresen developed bitcoin XT. This client has the rules that if 75% of miners run this client by January 16, bigger blocks will be accepted, meaning it will fork from the bitcoin core client once a bigger block has been mined.
XT will enable 8mb blocks and this limit will double every 2 years and stop in 2036 when the blocklimit is 8Gb. XT also includes an IP blacklist mechanism to block TOR IP's. An XT client has been released, and nodes can run it. Essentially nodes "vote" for their support for XT by running it. The node count for XT has no real effect though, it's the miners that need 75%. At the time of writing 13.2% of all nodes are XT-nodes and 2 of the last 1000 blocks are mined on XT.
This approach has been scrutinized by most other developers, because the 75% is pretty low, the XT code has hardly been reviewed, and it overall goes against the consensus approach bitcoin developers use.
Most non-XT developers want a wait and see approach, letting a fee-market develop until sidechains and/or lightning network are ready, both of which can take transactions away from the main-chain.
Obviously there are more issues being raised on both sides, but you'll have to do some research to really get into that.
[–] InternetTuffGuy [S] 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
Thanks! The blacklist and centralization really turn me off. Plus, I'm no fan of Gavin. Didn't he try to flood the network with small transactions to prove that the 1MB limit is too small and wasn't able to complete it or was that someone else? I heard they were padding it to make it seem like it was getting close to 1MB when it really wasn't.
[–] Milty 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago (edited ago)
Many of the arguments against increasing the block size are somewhat...silly...if you ask me.
Originally the block size cap was put in place so that malicious nodes posing as regular nodes couldn't overload the system by creating massive blocks (like 20gigs worth) filled with garbage transactions. That security threat still doesn't really threaten XT though because the block size is set to increase a little at a time (like 1MB to 8MB and so on) as it's needed basically, so even if a node tried this attack it would still be easily handled by the network because anything excessively large would be discarded without being processed.
The alternative is only processing 1MB worth of transactions every time a block is mined, which is about every 10 minutes. Hence if the block size is never increased, the bitcoin network will never be able to process more than it's current approximate cap which is about 4 transactions a second.
It should be noted that this cap is already being hit on some blocks which means as a user you have to wait longer for your transaction to be put into a block. If your transaction is not yet in a block, it basically isn't set in stone yet, it's just a "proposed" transaction, once it's in a block it's confirmed and once it's got a few blocks behind it in the chain it's basically not coming off the record until bitcoin and probably the internet are dead and gone. If the limit is constantly being hit at every block, that means more transactions are being generated than can fit into the blocks so every time a block is mined a big backlog of transactions are just left behind and don't get confirmed. Sucks to be one of the ones who gets left behind, better hope your transaction makes it into the next block...or it could be in the backlog...again...
Believe it or not some people actually argue that this is a good thing because they think it will create a 'market' for mining fees. Basically to get a transaction through you'd have to put a high enough fee on it to ensure the miner selects your transaction to put into it's block because the miner would obviously select the transactions with the most fees to put through so it can claim the fees and make money. So then whatever transactions don't have high enough fees are left behind. I personally think this situation sounds kinda shitty and probably wouldn't use bitcoin if I had to "fee battle" to get my transactions confirmed...like wtf?
The community (or rather the main developers of bitcoin core) has been torn up until this point on how to proceed as many people are advocating the "lightning network" which is a whole other proposed method of solving the problem involving a side chain to the bitcoin network that would allow micro transactions and things like that. I think the way it works is keeping track of a shitload of tiny transactions and then lumping them all into a big transaction on the regular bitcoin block chain. That's the gist of in anyway. I definitely understand this less but I do know that there is no code for it yet. So the choice is between Mike Hearn's solution (BitcoinXT) which is ready to go NOW when we need it OR this theoretical lightning network which somebody will have to implement (code) while the current network slowly gets shittier and shittier...
Finally, increasing the block size increases the amount of data being moved around and the amount of processing a node has to do to check all the transactions in a given block. This fact means that the computing power required to run a full node will be slightly higher if the block size is increased. Some argue that this makes the network less decentralized because it's harder for the "average joe" to run a full node and that the result will be less full nodes on the network and therefore more power in the hands of the nodes who are still running and more potential for something like a 51% attack which is a security threat if it can be pulled off. This argument has some validity to it IMO, but it also seems kinda negligible too. The first increases in block size are pretty tiny, 8MB isn't that much, and computing power and bandwidth have been getting cheaper over time so I'm optimistic that these will balance out and keep it relatively easy to run a full node. I really don't think the effect would be big enough, if it's even observable at all, to destabilize the network completely.
I'm sure I missed something but that's my understanding of the situation so far...
[–] InternetTuffGuy [S] 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Not an ELI5, but from what I gather it wont effect security but it will effect the amount of transactions processed per minute. I believe it would slow it down from a few thousand to about a few dozen.
[–] KurtB 0 points 3 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago
Substantially.
the size of the city is the Blockchain and the height of its walls is the network's hashrate. "As such, the larger the Blockchain, the more hashpower is required to maintain the same level of security,"
http://www.econotimes.com/Nick-Szabo-Rapid-block-size-increase-a-Huge-Security-Risk-77728
[–] CryptoAnarchist 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
From what I can tell so far, there IS a need for larger blocks and I don't think you will have to be a large company to run a node.
The problem is that the XT software includes banning certain IPs if they are Tor nodes. I haven't read the actual code yet, but it seems more like a slippery slope type thing and not necessarily crippling to bitcoin immediately.
[–] BitsenBytes 3 points 12 points 15 points (+15|-3) ago (edited ago)
XT is basically a forked version of Bitcoin that supports larger block sizes. It uses the same blockchain as Bitcoin Core so at the time being it's basically like any other wallet. The only significant difference is that when the 75% of the miners support and only after Jan 11, 2016, then there will be a fork in the chain and larger blocks can then be mined by the miners and forwarded by the nodes. Those that don't support it are working very hard to censor any information getting out on r/Bitcoin and other forums with the exception of this one and also r/bitcoinxt.
Running an XT node is a vote for bigger blocks and shows the miners that the people are interested in having bigger blocks. If you don't want bigger blocks then you can run Bitcoin Core and show your support there.
If you want up do date info on the adoption of XT or want to download the software you can get it here
http://www.xtnodes.com/