Last Forking Warning For Bitcoin

ASDFnz writes "It has been just over two months since the bitcoin block chain was rocked by a near disastrous fork causing the bitcoin price to crash. The culprit of the crash was found to be a bug that prevented pre version 7.1 bitcoin clients accepting large blocks that could be generated by version 8 clients. A temporary fix was put into place by Bitcoin Project lead developer Gavin Andresen that forced version 8 clients to generate blocks that version 7.1 could understand. It is important to note though, the fix was a temporary one! In just under two days on the 15th of May the fix will expire and version 8 clients will once again be able to make large blocks that older clients will not be able to understand."

Comments

Crap, the sky is falling

[roman_mir]

Oh shit, the sky is falling.

Total disaster, never happens in real world, not virtual one. Except for all the times when 'real world' currencies undergo devaluations, revaluations, forced exchanges, just plain old inflation, all the things that lead to currencies collapsing. I mean name me a paper currency that lasted longer than 80 years on this planet without a major restructuring, without collapsing?

This is a technical problem, I am pretty certain it will be addressed. Not that I care much about Bitcoin in itself, but I like the idea of competing currencies and this is definitely a revolutionary one, so it's interesting to observe. I don't think it's going away any time soon even with technical issues.

Re:Crap, the sky is falling

[MadKeithV]

There is a pretty long list actually of places with serious inflation in recent times. It's not unlikely that there are slashdot posters from those areas, who have indeed experienced a currency collapse or at least runaway inflation in their lifetime.

Re:Crap, the sky is falling

[roman_mir]

I was born in the USSR, I lived through a number of currency collapses just in THAT country and then after the dissolution through collapse of new currencies created AFTER that country collapsed.

Yeah, I remember.

I also know enough history and geography that if you want, I can name close to 50 currencies of top of my head that collapsed. Oh, USA also had that, it was called the Continental. Today it's called the Federal.

Re:Crap, the sky is falling

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

What is the actual 'real world' basis for this sudden notion that major 'real world' currencies can collapse any time? Yes, they can fluctuate a few percentages, that is very very very different than 60-70% loss of value recently for Bitcoin (or 90%+ the last time the price crashed).

The question I would ask is less 'can real world currencies collapse?'(yes occasionally one does, albeit generally one of the lower-tier ones); but 'do real-world currencies collapse outside of conditions where things are going all to shit across the board?'

Given how much fun it isn't, it's not as though you go through a round of hyperinflation just for giggles. It's not as though everybody wakes up one morning and says "I can see it so clearly now! My fiat currency is nothing but a political construct subject to the whims of politicians! It's all over!" and the currency's value against real assets suddenly dives for the floor. If the situation, as measured in actual economic activity, commodity availability, etc. goes to shit, the currency may well follow; but at that point your problem isn't that your currency is a paper lie; but that things have gone to shit, at least within the jurisdiction that minted the currency, if not more broadly.

Re:Crap, the sky is falling

[pla]

It's just that the new Bitcoin and the old Bitcoin are becoming two different currencies. People need to convert all their old Bitcoins to new ones to avoid this.

Bzzzt. Users of Bitcoin don't need to do anything beyond download a client written in the past year. They don't need to convert anything, they don't need to send themselves their balance to make sure the new program sees it, they don't even need to re-download the block chain. Just update their software.

Nothing about the currency itself has changed; just the removal of an artificial cap on block size placed in the original client, from back before the early developers expected it to take off so well.

Re:Crap, the sky is falling

[pla]

Fortunately, it's only mining software that needs to be updated. Anyone just handling ordinary transactions doesn't really need to worry.

Just so you know - You have that exactly backward.

Damn

[MadKeithV]

Damn, I thought this was going to be the last forking warning against posting Bitcoin stories on Slashdot.

Argentina, Iceland, Hungary, Ukraine,

[Anonymous Coward]

"What is the actual 'real world' basis for this sudden notion that major 'real world' currencies can collapse any time?"

There's quite a few currency collapses, you really don't need to go back far, Argentina was the last major one in 2002, since then Iceland, Hungary, Ukraine, Zimbabwe, quite a few African ones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_economic_crisis_%281999%E2%80%932002%29

It's the usual problem with fiat currencies, they spend more than they earn, they print money to cover it, the currency collapses.

When the US had a meltdown in 2007, they did a massive currency swap with the Eurozone. The effect of that meant that the US central bank had euros to sell as well as dollars, and could sell euros and buy dollars to prop the currency up if panic ensued. You came a lot closer than you realize, I find your comment somewhat glib, based on ignorance of how bad 2007 asset collapse was.

Re:In the 2020s bitcoins will run out anyway

[AmiMoJo]

Consider this. Since there a some limit on the maximum number of Bitcoins any that are lost are gone forever. Wallet file misplaced or destroyed, coins stolen but unspendable (because although they are anonymous they are traceable), or simply sitting on forgotten hard drives somewhere.

Governments can print new notes to replace old ones that no longer exist or are presumed lost. Bitcoin has a hard limit.