[Lilug] Fwd: [lidmug] Long live bitcoin XT

Rocco Laudadio testing1567 at gmail.com
Mon Aug 24 18:00:39 PDT 2015


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rocco Laudadio <testing1567 at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 7:58 PM
Subject: Re: [lidmug] Long live bitcoin XT
To: The LidMug Mailing List <list_admin at lists.lidmug.net>


I already switched over the node running on the LidMug server over to XT
and several companies have released a public statement saying that they
will support the larger block patch (called BIP101) by December.
http://blog.blockchain.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Industry-Block-Size-letter-All-Signed.pdf

It is important to note that there are two different things being discussed
here. There is Bitcoin-XT which is an alternative client that was created
by someone who required a modified client for their startup business. (It
has a couple extra query functions available in its API.) The other thing
is BIP101. BIP stands for bitcoin improvement proposal. BIP101 is the
proposal to increase the block size to 8mb and double it every 2 years to a
max of 8gb in 2036.  A change like this requires a hardfork in the
blockchain. What that means is that new blocks under the new rules won't be
backwards compatible with the old protocol rules. That creates a risk of
there being two different blockchains depending on what version of the
software you use.  To mitigate this risk, BIP101 requires a trigger event
before it switches to the new rules.  It has the miners vote to turn BIP101
on by embedding a specific version number into the mined blocks. Once 75%
of the last 1000 blocks have this version number, it will trigger a 2 week
grace period countdown until the new rules take effect.  If the trigger
occurs before 2016, it will extend the grace period to January 1st 2016.

There have been several BIPs proposed to deal with the growing block size
requirements, including one extremely conservative proposal to raise the
block size to 2mb by 2020. All proposals have been rejected by the core
developers and this has been a source of anger in the community. They are
trying to promote a fee market where people will need to out bid each other
to get their transactions mined into the limited 1mb space.  As a result of
this anger against the core developers, the creator of Bitcoin-XT decided
to merge BIP101 into his code and release it, allowing people to run it and
allowing miners to vote for the fork.

Currently, talking positively about the software fork is a banable offence
on the /r/bitcoin subreddit and on the bitcointalk forums. Those are the
two largest bitcoin communities and they are both operated by the same
person.  It is in full on censorship mode right now and the core devs are
turning a blind eye to it.  They see this as dangerous code and an attack
on network consensus.  A lot of people see running XT as a vote of no
confidence against the core devs.

XT has some other semi controversial changes that have nothing to do with
the block size.  It has a peer priority list that allows the node to drop
Tor clients in the event of a ddos attack on the node.  It also will relay
double spend attempts while the standard clients will reject the
transaction.  The reasoning for this is it flags the transaction as a
double spend attempt when it relays it in the hopes that it will make you
aware of the attempt to defraud you. In theory, wallet apps can leverage
this and create a double spend attempt warning system, although none exist
currently.  With the standard method of just dropping the transaction, it
is much harder to get a double spend to propagate through the network, but
you won't know about the double spend until after it is mined into a
block.  The question is, what's better? Should the nodes attempt to block
double spends based on trusting which ever transaction they see first,
slowing there propagation down, or should they let them propagate, and
attempt to get a warning out?

The creator of XT does have a big blocks only branch of his git hub which
is essentially just the standard client with BIP101 merged, but he is not
making binaries available. You need to compile it yourself.  There are
other people compiling binaries and hosting them though.
On Aug 24, 2015 4:21 PM, "odinson VIA The LidMug Mailing List" <
list_admin at lists.lidmug.net> wrote:

>
> Time to fork IMO.  It's a human right.
>
> http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/08/op-ed-why-is-bitcoin-forking/
>
> This 'permission asking' is killing it.  The community will choose wisely.
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Matthew Newhall, M.A.Newhall at warcloud.net
> A.S. in Computer Science, SUNY Farmingdale
> President and founder of LILUG;  president at lilug.org, http://www.lilug.org
> My theory; Psychopaths precede the conscience,
> http://civgene.matthewnewhall.com
> My maker blog; "The modness", http://themodness.wordpress.com
> Scifi book; "Thicker Than Blood"  http://www.thickerthanbloodthebook.com
> Giselle's husband, Sebastian and Maxximus's father.
> http://www.warcloud.net/~odinson/us/
> You either let people defend themselves or you watch and control every
> aspect
>  of their lives.  With enough time and 'events', there is no middle ground.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
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