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."

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Re:Idiots

[sexconker]

Yeah, there's no problem to be "fixed".
Certain people (speculators and people running exchanges) want to increase the block size in order to cram more transactions in a single block.
They want this to increase trade speed in order to capitalize in momentary ups and downs.

They're the high frequency traders of the bitcoin world. They offer nothing to the markets or to the currency itself. Normal users who buy and sell goods and services for bitcoin aren't affected by the 1 MB limit at all. Bitcoin was designed for this and this is exactly how it is supposed to play out (along with transaction fees to incentivize mining blocks with your transactions in them). The leeches are kicking and screaming about it.

You can fork bitcoin all day every day, but when no one decides to use your network's version of the currency, your network's version of the currency is worthless. These two clowns will quickly see that play out with their Bitcoin XT bullshit. Everyone else is laughing at them, including the largest mining groups in China.

Re:1MB ought to be enough for anybody?

[delt0r]

Bit coin has quite a bit of that [hard coded limits] in the original protocol to be honest. Like no ability to do anything faster, no able to handle even a small percentage of what paypal/visa/mastercard handles per second. It was an experiment that worked too well and now they are stuck with something that wasn't quite fully thought through.