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."

Comments

Anyone posting here know anything about bitcoin?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The simple Economics of it all:

[bspus]

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

Re:LOL

[ultranova]

Any bitcoiner worth his salt will tell you that any problem will be taken care of by the market!

No, but this problem will. If BT-XT gets enough traction to switch over, every other client will add support too, since the alternative is being incompatible with 3/4 majority of the network. The same goes for any other solution or change anyone might come up with.

And that's pretty obvious, too. It's what happens with every network protocol change for every P2P network. What makes this one interesting is the emotional responses it draws out. Just what are those directed against? The usually quoted reason, "pyramid scheme", can't be the real one both because Bitcoin is not a pyramid scheme and because actual bona fida intentional scams - like Mars One - don't draw nearly this amount of outrage. Do people simply love PayPal so much they can't bear the thought of them losing business, or do they fear some economic meme - for example "deflation is bad" - being proven false?

Economics holds the place of religion in our society, but has gone unchallenged since the Soviet block fell, so it's fascinating to see what issues and conflicts get dragged into light as the dawning Information Age hatches a new round of revolutions.