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Bitcoin Blockchain Forked By Backward-Compatibility Issue
New submitter jhantin writes "The Bitcoin blockchain has forked due to a lurking backward-compatibility issue: versions older than 0.8 do not properly handle blocks larger than about 500k, and Slush's pool mined a 974k block today. The problem is that not all mining operations are on 0.8; blocks are being generated by a mix of several different versions of the daemon, each making its own decision as to which of the two forks is preferable to extend, and older versions refuse to honor or extend from a block of this size. The consensus on #bitcoin-dev is damage control: miners need to mine on pre-0.8 code so the backward-compatible fork will outgrow and thus dominate the compatibility-breaking one; merchants need to stop accepting transactions until the network re-converges on the backward-compatible fork of the chain; and average users can ignore the warning that they are out of sync and need to upgrade."
Turns out there's an approximately 512K limit to atomic updates in Berkeley DB which were used by versions prior to 0.8. 0.8 uses a new database, allowing blockchains that old versions won't accept to be created.
It's not the preferred solution.
The value of the currency is in the people who use it and most major exchanges have already reverted to 0.7, hence 0.7 blockchains are the de-facto standard at the moment. There was a bit of back-and-forth when the problem was discovered but all the large exchanges have settled on 0.7 as the standard for now.
It's like saying we're going to upgrade the dollar, and yet nobody moves to the "new dollar". The new dollar ends up valueless and everyone just stays on the old one.
The client fix is to accept large transactions but not create them - there's already code in a lot of BitCoin software to do that, but not all clients are running it - someone now has to force them to upgrade to a good version in order to stay compatible, and a lot of people might be generating coins that will later fail without knowing it.
I tend to think of fiat currencies as being on the 'lead standard', with their reality largely measured by how many guys with guns are available to uphold them. USD, among others, passes the test.
"except for miners who lost their reward for mined blocks on the abandoned (v 0.8) chain."
Which currently amounts to about $25,000 of BitCoins, last I heard. That's $25,000 of BitCoins that might have been spent, sent, transferred, etc. but never existed in the chosen chain and the knock-on effects on your own wallet if you're dealt with someone who dealt with someone who dealt with someone.... (ad infinitum) ... who dealt with one of those mined blocks.
Sure, it'll "catch up", but saying nobody lost out is plainly false. And isn't the point of BitCoin that everyone is a miner in some small way?
Just ask yourself what Ayn Rand would do in the same situation.
Die in penniless poverty while dependent on the state to provide basic income and medical facilities that are necessary to maintain her life, all while maintaining that such a system is inherently evil? It's what I like to think of Ayn Rand doing in *any* situation.
It's called "society". Billions of us all have to live together, and to do so well, we need to agree on a common method of exchange. Your silly "men with guns" strawman is patently silly, and is the result of a serious lack of understanding about society at large.
I don't respond to AC's.
The Weimar republic and Zimbabwe suffered massive inflation, not deflation.
A cryptographic currency system needs to be secure regardless of how it is implemented
That's kind of an impossible standard, don't you think?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
You laugh, but some of the developers, the lead developer Gavin, and another core developer Mike Hearn, are pushing really hard to get the current 1MB limit (7 transactions/second) on blocks lifted so Bitcoin can directly scale to VISA-like volumes.
Never mind that Bitcoin is inherently an unscalable O(n^2) network - every transaction has to be broadcast to every node - and the issue they ran into was also a problem scaling. Mike's solution is to just throw thousands of dollars worth of hardware at the problem. Never mind that for Bitcoin *any* issue the means that some nodes can process a large block, and some can't, turns into the same hard-fork we just saw. Never mind that it will make Bitcoin centralized, and lead to perverse incentives for large miners to attack smaller ones.
You'd think they'd say "OK, hold on, how about we just use ways to transfer funds that don't have to go into this shared state ball of mess?" but no, they're desperate to take the easy way out at any cost.
I really wonder if my Bitcoins will be worth anything in a few years.