Archived Can someone please give me a rundown on this whole XT thing? (bitcoin)
submitted ago by InternetTuffGuy
Posted by: InternetTuffGuy
Posting time: 5.3 years ago on
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Archived on: 2/12/2017 1:51:00 AM
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Archived Can someone please give me a rundown on this whole XT thing? (bitcoin)
submitted ago by InternetTuffGuy
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[–] 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.
[–] Gilius 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
There has been a stress-test and spam attack, but there's nothing that points towards Gavin Andresen. I doubt it's him, but who knows. Fact is though, this attack was done for like $5000, which is a problem.
[–] KurtB 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Such is the limit of 21 Mio. Who will fix that next?
1MB block size is a feature not a bug!