Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Bitcoin XT 0.11A

From: s7r <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2015 21:38:22 +0300

Fair enough, this is what open source is all about. Good things
sometimes come out of controversial actions. I briefly read the
manifesto, saw the migration plan, it is not that greedy and in theory
it is possible to migrate safely with no (big) incidents.

What seams a little bit unfair is that only miners get to vote and
decide, and the users will have nothing to say about it. Not even
individual miners will vote, since it will be mostly only mining pools
(individual small miners will accept whatever their mining pool runs
on). There are more users than miners obviously, the miners just mine
transactions for the users, it is the users who keep the btc/usd price.

I use bitcoin heavily (not from time to time) but I don't mine - can I
vote? The way I see it I cannot, and I am not saying it is a bad thing,
but I missed the argument explaining why users don't matter and only
miners do.

The btc/usd rate is based on supply and demand, only users take part in
this. If 20% of the miners (hashing power) go away, the network will
still operate normally (lower nethash and probably difficulty) and the
btc/usd price will be the same, but if 20% of the users go away the
btc/usd price will drop -> mining will be less profitable -> miners
could be forced to quit. In other words, the users have more control
over the miners. Why ignore?

On 8/15/2015 8:02 PM, Mike Hearn via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> As promised, we have released Bitcoin XT 0.11A which includes the bigger
> blocks patch set. You can get it from
> 
>      https://bitcoinxt.software/
> 
> I feel sad that it's come to this, but there is no other way. The
> Bitcoin Core project has drifted so far from the principles myself and
> many others feel are important, that a fork is the only way to fix things.
> 
> Forking is a natural thing in the open source community, Bitcoin is not
> the first and won't be the last project to go through this. Often in
> forks, people say there was insufficient communication. So to ensure
> everything is crystal clear I've written a blog post and a kind of
> "manifesto" to describe why this is happening and how XT plans to be
> different from Core (assuming adoption, of course).
> 
> The article is here:
> 
>     https://medium.com/@octskyward/why-is-bitcoin-forking-d647312d22c1
> 
> It makes no attempt to be neutral: this explains things from our point
> of view.
> 
> The manifesto is on the website.
> 
> I say to all developers on this list: if you also feel that Core is no
> longer serving the interests of Bitcoin users, come join us. We don't bite.
> 
>