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Bitcoin Fork Divides Community
HughPickens.com writes: The Bitcoin community is facing one of the most momentous decisions in its six-year history. The Bitcoin network is running out of spare capacity, and two increasingly divided camps disagree about what, if anything, to do about the problem. The technical issue is that a block, containing a record of recent transactions, currently has a 1MB limit. Increasing the block size would allow more transactions on the network at once, helping it to scale up to meet growing demand. But it would also make it more difficult for ordinary users to host full network "nodes" that validate new transactions on the network, potentially making the digital currency more centralized as a result. Now Rob Price writes that two high-profile developers have released a competing version of the codebase that risks splitting the digital currency in two.
Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn have released Bitcoin XT, an alternative version of the core software that supports increasing the block size when required. Bitcoin users will now be forced to decide between "Bitcoin Core" and Bitcoin XT, raising the prospect of a "fork," where the digital currency divides into two competing versions. According to Price, Core and XT are compatible right now. However, if XT is adopted by 75% of users by January 2016, it will upgrade to a larger block size that will be incompatible with Core — meaning that if the other 25% don't then choose to convert, it will effectively split the currency into two. So far, 7.7% of the network has adopted XT, according to website XTnodes.com. "Ultimately, how the dispute is resolved may matter more than the specific decision that's reached," says Timothy B. Lee. "If the community is ultimately able to reach a consensus, the process could become a template for resolving future disagreements. On the other hand, if disagreements fester for months — or, worse, if a controversial software change splits the Bitcoin network into two warring camps — it could do real damage to Bitcoin's reputation."
Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn have released Bitcoin XT, an alternative version of the core software that supports increasing the block size when required. Bitcoin users will now be forced to decide between "Bitcoin Core" and Bitcoin XT, raising the prospect of a "fork," where the digital currency divides into two competing versions. According to Price, Core and XT are compatible right now. However, if XT is adopted by 75% of users by January 2016, it will upgrade to a larger block size that will be incompatible with Core — meaning that if the other 25% don't then choose to convert, it will effectively split the currency into two. So far, 7.7% of the network has adopted XT, according to website XTnodes.com. "Ultimately, how the dispute is resolved may matter more than the specific decision that's reached," says Timothy B. Lee. "If the community is ultimately able to reach a consensus, the process could become a template for resolving future disagreements. On the other hand, if disagreements fester for months — or, worse, if a controversial software change splits the Bitcoin network into two warring camps — it could do real damage to Bitcoin's reputation."
...and two increasingly divided camps disagree about what, if anything, to do about the problem.
Any bitcoiner worth his salt will tell you that any problem will be taken care of by the market!
There wasn't much left of a reputation before this new crisis...
slashdot lists articles you may also like WRT bitcoin flamewars:
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HAHAHAHA what the hell, Bitcoin's reputation is fucking awful as a scammers paradise. How the hell can you damage something no sane person would touch?
Hope you got your money out of the pyramid scheme early.
"Centralisation never makes any sense. Regulation is for idiots and never solved any problems."
Bye, bye, bitcoin. May those who got into the Ponzi scheme early on retire happy, and everyone else learn a lesson without having lost too much.
This Week In Dunning-Kruggerands
the price is cratering. might have to buy later.
Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn need to be shot in the head... with a shotgun... repeatedly...
Their idiocy could very well ruin it, prices are in a freefall since their monumental bullshit XT client. If I ever meet either of them they will suffer... badly.
All I'm hearing is that I'm going to have twice as many bitcoins, but just split over 2 different networks.
money
My ass, those numbers are inflated because they got tons of free trial VPS's to run their crappy client on, not even hashing, so maybe (and that's a BIG maybe) there are 7.7% XT clients connected to the network, but no way in hell 7.7% of hashing power.
Once the free trial expires their "network" will be gone.
I'll believe you when I can buy dead cow sandwiches with bitcoins. Right now, Wendy's takes dollars.
One thing I don't understand about this, and that the articles never cover, is how much of a problem it is that the current block size is limited to 1MB in "core" Bitcoin. Is the situation that the Bitcoin network is coming dangerously close to having enough transactions to exceed that 1MB limit? Is it that Bitcoin has a problem like IPv4, where it has a set date at which it will likely exceed that 1MB limit and start having issues?
I would think that there must be some sort of issue, but then again it seems like the people behind Bitcoin XT stand to make a lot of money if the big Bitcoin exchanges switch over to their version of the currency, so I'm not so sure.
What does this mean for people mining? The hashes are just maths... if you fork the chain, can you start double spending on your mining wins? Does putting them into one system imply a race with someone validating that transaction on getting it into the other?
This will push Dogecoin north of USD$100.
bytecoin before I jump into digital currency. bits are too low-tech and too easy to lose (their too small). bytes, on the other hand, are 8x times larger - much easier to not lose.
You can't pay me in BitCoins. No real food. No firewood. No rent. No clothing. Millionaires starving out on the street because all they have are BitCoins. Sad.
I'm always amazed at how otherwise smart people get taken in by the idea that bitcoin is anything other than a scam. /boggle
From this day forward, a Bitcoin fork shall be known as a "bork".
It is so decreed.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Tulip bulbs sold for a quarter million in today's dollars, then someone realized that was crazy. What is a bitcoin again? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... they started churning out 50 different currencies like dogecoin. Seriously, who can keep track these days?
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
It doesn't seem like there is anyone left on slashdot who is informed about interesting tech matters. There are currently 48 posts, none of them are even worth moderating.
I thought the point of Bitcoin was anonymity and that was quickly debunked because literally every transaction is recorded for all to see by the nodes (some of which are probably government run).
The cost of you (a) sending a bitcoin is borne by: (b) miner, (c) users running nodes - who have to store and verify your transaction for all eternity.
The miner and sender arrive at a fair price in this free market. Neat, right?
But, you do see that that conclusion rests on (c) being negligible, right? And, that's where the block size debate comes in.
Already, people's hard drives (and backups) are filling up because Joe sent Jack some 0.0000001 bitcoin somewhere. Imagine your hard drive, and everyone's hard drive filling up every time one of the billion users sends another of the billion users one cent for a negligible cost (because cost above 0 is free extra money to the miner.)
If blocksizes are not limited, (a) and (b) together maximize their profit by externalizing their costs to (c) where the cost gets amplified manifold.
So I'm not sure I understand the issue.
The 1MB block, what does it store exactly? What happens when it fills up under the current implementation? Is Joe unable to send Jack the 0.0000001 bitcoin? Is it really laggy? Do the records of some old transactions get discarded?
I stole this Sig
OH! The ironing! We can stratify anything!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
People who received a play-money system from a mysterious unknown person and actually convinced themselves that it has value are now facing a schism over the money market failing to grow without bounds. Unless, that is, the software is modified in a way that might, over time, disincent people from playing the game.
I can't be the only one who is thinking that the only problem is that these folks believe bitcoins have value.
Hell, I thought that the fiat currency of nations was a bad deal. This is an order of magnitude worse.
Bruce Perens.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Each transaction has a few KB worth of data.
You make a transaction of say 0.5 btc to an address. In a few seconds all nodes know about it, but it is not validated until it finds its way into a block
Miners choose a few of the unvalidated transactions to form a block and perform all the math needed to get a hash with the desirable characteristics (I wont expand on this here)
They are more likely to choose transactions that pay the fee (which is optional and can vary in generosity)
A new block is added to the blockchan network from the competing miners (whoever get the right hash faster). The difficulty of the right hash is adjusted every two weeks so that on average that happens every ten minutes
I had to say all that to explain the 1MB size. The way thigs are now, 1MB block size allows for about 7 transactions per second, so about 4200 per ten minute block. The size of the bitcoin quantities moved matters but does so relatively little so small transactions have relatively high cost in bandwidth (and bandwidth is what you pay for)
So imagine each block as a 4200 passenger seat train or plane. Thousands of passengers are waiting to get a seat. Some might get the next plane, other might get the next one or the one after. Naturaly, those that pay more will be guaranteed a seat while the freeloaders will be defered to the next one. As more candidate transactions appear all the time and paying ones get prioritized by the miners, some free or cheap ones will never get through and if a transaction doesnt get through in 48 hours (I think) it is simply dropped from the network like it never occured at all
So if nothing changes, people will simply avoid making pointless transactions of a few cents worth because the fees required to make them validated will not be worth it.
If the block size increases, fees might not have to but the blockchain will continue to get bloated and so will bandwidth costs for nodes.
I prefer the former. We can always use other coins for small transactions and keep btc as the standard for longer term store of value
So, bigger tulip bulb receipts now?
Thanks for that, probably the most enlightening of the thread so far.
I'm still trying to think all this information through, but would it make any difference if (for example) the size of the transaction was limited - so for example, to use a silly case, instead of allowing 0.00000000001 bitcoin as a valid 'unit' of transaction, you would only allow 0.001 as the smallest, meaning that certain types of transactions would become 'extinct' - a bit like how they removed the half-penny coin in the UK's currency because of the extra 'cost' of making and managing what was essentially becoming a piece of the currency that no one was using.
I can't believe that 30 years after it was first published,
When we set the upper limit of PC-DOS at 640K, we thought nobody would ever need that much memory. — William Gates, chairman of Microsoft (April 1985)
That people are still thinking small-time even when we've known for a decade that data usage is increasing at an exponential rate.
1MB is half of a Intel Celeron CPU cache, and even the N720 Atom has 512kB.
And you expected to run a digital currency system from 2009 until the end of time?
Inexcusable to have a hard-coded limit.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Well as this points out, at the current block size 7tps isn't achievable, more like 3.2:
http://hashingit.com/analysis/33-7-transactions-per-second
So 1920 per 10 minute block and falling as the complexity goes up.
Here in the netherlands we have thuisbezorgd.nl, which as webset where you can order food from many restaurants, they accept bit coin.
Restaurants include a hamburger place, a lot better then wendy's I might add.
Where's your math? This whole 5-point score rant is basically a big long ad-hominem argument, with not even a single link to back up your claims (who disagrees with Gavin?...).
If you want more transactions per minute, you're going to need a higher limit; a higher limit puts more stress on the nodes and the network. That's where the argument lies.
Adoption rises and technology progresses, so, from continuity, there is some point in time where the higher stress is not as much an issue, and we will need the room for more transactions. Gavin et al say that point is not far, and we should take action now to avoid problems later. I think hearing the arguments so far, I agree with them.
I am not advocate of Paypal (in fact I find it ridiculous and prohibitively expensive). Paypal over in the UK accepts Bitcoin from a 3rd party provider for funding payments sent through Paypal and you could order off a fair few fast food places with Paypal here.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Never any mod points when you need them! Someone vote this informative please!
Reputation?
I suppose since a pyramid scheme needs a fresh supply of suckers to function that would be a very major worry. If it isn't such a scam then it doesn't matter so much does it?
Everything the Feds need to trace it back to a drug dealer a few transactions ago and take it off your hands if they want once they take bitcoin seriously. Oh, you thought it was harder to trace than cash? You people really thought that? You were not joking?
Let's ignore the issue of small value transactions for a moment, please.
The way thigs are now, 1MB block size allows for about 7 transactions per second,
Da fuq?
Bitcoin proponents like to talk about how Bitcoin provides an alternative to regular monetary transfers. So let's say it catches on: all transactions which are currently done in regular currency are now done in Bitcoin. Are you really suggesting that 7 transactions per second is sufficient to handle the global economy?
Say Bitcoin takes off and I do 1 transactions per day in Bitcoin. At 7 transactions per second, the current 1 MB system has only capacity for about 600 000 people like me, doing 1 Bitcoin transation per day. There are 300 million people in the US alone. The current Bitcoin system thus has capacity for only 0.2% of people in the US to use it at the rate of 1 transaction per day -- and Bitcoin is supposed to be an international system, so there's another order of magnitude right there that Bitcoin can't handle.
1 transaction per day isn't much - on average, with coffee and lunch and errands, I'd guess I do on average 2-4 monetary transactions a day. None of those would be considered "trivial value" transactions - they're certainly not too small for MasterCard/Visa to handle them.
More than anything else, this 1MB/7 tps limit tells me that Bitcoin is useless for being a major player in the financial market place. And the fact that some of the people in charge can't see that the (fixed) 1 MB limit is woefully inadequate boggles my mind.
A final note on "small transations". Bitcoin is supposed to be international, right? Well a US$0.10 transaction may be laughably tiny to you, but it may represent a substantial sum to someone in a third world country. Implicitly forcing a transaction value limit (or forcing poor people in third world countries bid for access against comparatively wealthy people in the US) greatly limits the use of Bitcoin for those people.
Bitcoin proponents like to talk about how Bitcoin provides an alternative to regular monetary transfers. So let's say it catches on: all transactions which are currently done in regular currency are now done in Bitcoin. Are you really suggesting that 7 transactions per second is sufficient to handle the global economy?
No argument there. Bitcoin is sometimes touted as a micro-transaction system, but in reality it isn't really scalable even as a macro-transaction system.
I could see how it could evolve into some kind of large-scale currency exchange/basis/reserve system that other more scalable micro-transaction systems become based on. So, bitcoin controls the overall supply of currency but all the day-to-day happens elsewhere. I'm not sure how that would even work.
However, the idea of the average person doing average transactions in bitcoins just can't work with the current design.
The distributed nature of the system also can't handle simply increasing the supported transaction rate. You can do it, but eventually you need to be the size of Visa to handle all the transactions.
The distribution of bitcoin isn't about splitting up storage of transactions across many parties. The distribution in bitcoin requires every party to have a copy of every transaction. That obviously created fundamental scaling issues.
What I find interesting is that if only about 7 transactions per second are possible, Bitcoin is by design invalid for the very purposes people are aggressively trying to adopt it. You can never pay with bitcoin on a convenience store and you can never use it to exchange trivial things, as even the slightest hint of acceptance for this kind of business would immediately saturate the network - small towns process much more transactions per second than this, let alone the whole world.
Also, if I read that right, doesn't that process imply that the blockchain increases in size by 6 MB every hour? Won't it mean that the size of the chain will be completely unwieldy in the future?
Get X wallets together and pass around .00000001 bitcoin between them as fast as they can.
How can you defend the 7 TPC limit? It's global. That's the max for the entire world. Period. The implications of this are obvious at even a cursory glance.
You can't handwave that. It's a critical design flaw (and just one among many!) that hamstrings real scale-out.
Um, no one thought Bitcoin was anonymous or untraceable. In fact the Bitcoin FAQ mentions it is not, quite the opposite. It is amazing how many people who hate Bitcoin know nothing about it.
You are a cow. Cows say Mooo. Mooo Cows Mooo! Mooo say the cows. YOU COW!!!
Transactions are already verified in seconds. Each node in the network looks at an incoming transaction, and performs a number of tests on it (is the digital signature valid, did they have sufficient funds to make the transaction, etc.). If it fails any test, the transaction is not relayed to other nodes. Verified transactions eventually reach miners, who attempt to find a checksum (hash) for a block of transactions. Finding a valid hash is computationally difficult, on purpose. That makes it hard to edit past transactions, since you also have to find a corresponding hash for the edited data.
So: verified = seconds, included in a block = 10 minutes on average. How long you wait depends on the nature of the transaction and how sure you want to be. You run a convenience store, and a customer is buying a snack? Seeing the transaction appear on a distant network node is enough, since it had to travel through 3-4 nodes to get there, and each one verified it. There is less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of the transaction being invalid. If you are using a payment processor, most of them guarantee the validity of the transaction, so there is no reason to wait once they OK it.
If you are selling a house, it would be wise to wait an hour or two for multiple blocks to appear *after* the one with your sale. Each block is chained to the one before it by including the previous block hash as part of the current block data. So they are time-ordered, and each one requires intense computation to create. Any attempt to change an old transaction requires re-doing all the computation for all following blocks, because all the hash values change. Since the vast majority of chips capable of doing the computation are working on *new* blocks, to win the bitcoin reward that comes with a block, there are not enough chips to *redo* the work, and your payment is secure. In the case of a house sale, the rest of the paperwork takes hours, and the escrow agent typically demands the funds be delivered the previous day anyway, so waiting a few hours for maximum security isn't a problem either.
> I haven't studied to know if the larger block size significantly addresses the speed of verification issue
Larger blocks don't change the network verification time. What they do is increase the number of transactions that can fit in a block afterwards. If transactions are not yet in a block, they are held in a "memory pool" of recently arrived transactions. When a block shows up, the included transactions are deleted from the memory pool. The pool prevents spending the same funds twice. As soon as one transaction spends it, any later transaction, even a second later, will be invalid. If there are too many transactions to fit into blocks, the memory pool would grow without bound, and eventually exceed the memory capacity of the node. Block data (older transactions) are typically stored on hard drives, which are much much larger capacity.
More transactions per second might eventually exceed the ability of a node to verify them as they arrive, or network bandwidth for the node, but the 8 MB block size has been tested and found not to do that yet. If bitcoin gets a lot more popular, and the blocks get much bigger, eventually nodes would need to be server-grade machines, rather than home hardware, but that's a long way off. A Raspberry Pi can handle current traffic.
Now imagine if the blockchain were to increase by 60MB per hour (10MB blocks)...
I don't see bitcoin as a day to day transaction system. I agree that some people imply it can play that role but really it can't. And tbh I don't want it to. I can buy my coffee with ordinary currency, this is not the functionary gap bitcoin came to fill.
I want it to be a long term storage of value. Yes I know volatility is a problem but assuming this goes away.
I don't mind if I have to pay a few dollars even worth of fees for a transaction if it allows me to move say 1000 dollars worth anywhere I want with no limitations. This is something I might want to do a few times a year the most.
Is it for the rich then? Well perhaps. I guess if you are considering moving a few $1000s worth you are not starving and you can afford a reasonable fee. Bitcoin can be a valuable service. It doesn't have to be free, just not centrally reguliated.
The 7 transactions /sec apparently was too optimistic. Whatever it really is might truly not be enough even for the use case I am describing. I am not opposed to increasing the block size if there is no sensible alternative, but it must be a consensus move, not like it was done now
What I find interesting is that if only about 7 transactions per second are possible, Bitcoin is by design invalid for the very purposes people are aggressively trying to adopt it. You can never pay with bitcoin on a convenience store and you can never use it to exchange trivial things, as even the slightest hint of acceptance for this kind of business would immediately saturate the network - small towns process much more transactions per second than this, let alone the whole world.
Yes. Some people have this notion that Bitcoin will form a backing currency like XDR in the USD system, and that a system of scripcoins or trusted brokers will handle day to day transactions in a distributed fashion.
Also, if I read that right, doesn't that process imply that the blockchain increases in size by 6 MB every hour? Won't it mean that the size of the chain will be completely unwieldy in the future?
Yes. I guess much like running a bank is a specialist unwieldy enterprise today.
Let me see if I've got this right.
If the new blocksize so unpopular it can't get 75% by January, the status quo remains. Seems pretty reasonable.
If the new blocksize is somewhat popular -- it gets 75% by January but just barely -- up to 25% of the bitcoin network is suddenly locked out of the main blockchain, and disaster results. Until the laggards switch over, anyway. Not so reasonable.
Is the imminent problem so severe that the delay from requiring a larger percentage -- say, 90% -- and a later date -- say, July 2016 -- is worse than having up to 25% of the bitcoin network off the main blockchain?
Too late to answer that question, I suppose. Switching the XT software to this new requirement (XT2?) would mean there would be three contenders. Yikes!
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.