Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] BIP proposal: Increase block size limit to 2 megabytes

From: Steven Pine <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 7 Feb 2016 16:33:13 -0500

Is it me or did Gavin ignore Yifu's direct questions? In case you missed it
Gavin --

~
"We can look at the adoption of the last major Bitcoin core release to
guess how long it might take people to upgrade. 0.11.0 was released on 12
July, 2015. Twenty eight days later, about 38% of full nodes were running
that release. Three months later, about 50% of the network was running that
release, and six months later about 66% of the network was running some
flavor of 0.11."

On what grounds do you think it is reasonable to assume that this update
will roll out 6x faster than previous data suggested, as oppose to your own
observation of 66% adoption in 6 month. or do you believe 38% node
upgrade-coverage (in 28 days ) on the network for a hard fork is good
enough?

There are no harm in choosing a longer grace period but picking one short
as 28 days you risk on alienating the nodes who do not upgrade with the
aggressive upgrade timeline you proposed.
~~

When Gavin writes "Responding to "28 days is not long enough" :

I keep seeing this claim made with no evidence to back it up.  As I said, I
surveyed several of the biggest infrastructure providers and the btcd lead
developer and they all agree "28 days is plenty of time."

For individuals... why would it take somebody longer than 28 days to either
download and restart their bitcoind, or to patch and then re-run (the patch
can be a one-line change MAX_BLOCK_SIZE from 1000000 to 2000000)?"

~~

Isn't Yifu's comment, evidence, the very best sort of evidence, it isn't
propositional a priori logic, but empirical evidence that. As for why
people take longer, who knows, we simply know from passed experience that
it in fact does take longer.

It's extremely frustrating to read Gavin's comments, it's hard to believe
he is engaging in earnest discussion.

On Sun, Feb 7, 2016 at 4:01 PM, Luke Dashjr via bitcoin-dev <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> On Sunday, February 07, 2016 2:16:02 PM Gavin Andresen wrote:
> > On Sat, Feb 6, 2016 at 3:46 PM, Luke Dashjr via bitcoin-dev <
> > [email-masked]> wrote:
> > > On Saturday, February 06, 2016 5:25:21 PM Tom Zander via bitcoin-dev
> wrote:
> > > > If you have a node that is "old" your node will stop getting new
> > > > blocks. The node will essentially just say "x-hours behind" with "x"
> > > > getting larger every hour. Funds don't get confirmed. etc.
> > >
> > > Until someone decides to attack you. Then you'll get 6, 10, maybe more
> > > blocks confirming a large 10000 BTC payment. If you're just a normal
> end
> > > user (or perhaps an automated system), you'll figure that payment is
> good
> > > and irreversibly hand over the title to the house.
> >
> > There will be approximately zero percentage of hash power left on the
> > weaker branch of the fork, based on past soft-fork adoption by miners
> (they
> > upgrade VERY quickly from 75% to over 95%).
>
> I'm assuming there are literally ZERO miners left on the weaker branch.
> The attacker in this scenario simply rents hashing for a few days in
> advance
> to build his fake chain, then broadcasts the blocks to the unsuspecting
> merchant at ~10 block intervals so it looks like everything is working
> normal
> again. There are lots of mining rental services out there, and miners quite
> often do not care to avoid selling hashrate to the highest bidder
> regardless
> of what they're mining. 10 blocks worth costs a little more than 250 BTC -
> soon, that will be 125 BTC.
>
> Luke
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-- 
Steven Pine
(510) 517-7075