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

From: Jorge Timón <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2015 12:09:52 +0200

On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 1:02 AM, Cameron Garnham via bitcoin-dev
<[email-masked]> wrote:
> I think that it is important to note that Bitcoin XT faces a natural
> uphill battle.
>
> Since it is possible to setup atomic inter-fork coin trades. I do not
> see how Bitcoin XT could possibly win if Satoshi decides to sell 10000
> XTBTC for BTC everyday for the first 100 days after the fork.
>
> In many ways Satoshi gets to decide the winning fork just by his huge
> economic investment in Bitcoin.
>
>
> Here is some simple game-theory for non-consensus forks:
>
> 1. Spoil the ballot. Have Bitcoin Core propagate the Bitcoin XT version
> string.
>
> 2. Encourage all miners to false vote for the Bitcoin XT fork.
>
> - Now people have no-idea what % of the economy Bitcoin XT holds. -
> Making it impossible for people to put economic faith behind Bitcoin XT.
>
> 3. Setup good Atomic Swap markets.
> [...]
> The price for XTBTC coins will plummet, Satoshi progressively dumping
> his 1M stash over a year or it so will make sure that it doesn't recover
> either.

Some XTBTC advocates may sell all their BTC for XTBTC and viceversa.
But I'm afraid that what most currency speculators (thus most Bitcoin
holders) will do is just sell both all their BTC and XTBTC for fiat,
and wait for things to settle before deciding whether to re-enter or
not.
This could result in both currencies' prices going down to 1 usd cent,
nobody knows.

> I cannot see how Bitcoin XT is but-not in a extremely weak position from
> game theory.

Unfortunately it also puts Bitcoin core in an extremely weaker
position than it was before the Schism hardfork.
Even if XT fails in making blocks bigger, it may destroy Bitcoin.
That's probably not the goal of Bitcoin XT, but I don't think Andresen
and Hearn fully undesrtand the risks of a Schism hardfork (not to
mention their "followers" in the interwebs).

Since we want to discard the assumption that Hearn and Andresen want
to make Bitcoin centralized or destroy it, it's reasonable to conclude
that have serious misunderstandings on how the global consensus works.
This is consistent with some of their strong positions on Bitcoin Core
policy defaults (like maintaining the first seen spending-conflict
replacement policy [the dumbest possible one after "last seen"]
forever).

On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 2:33 PM, Eric Lombrozo via bitcoin-dev
<[email-masked]> wrote:
> Or can’t you create a transaction that’s still within the op count and sig ops limits but is larger than 1MB?

Yes, it seems the simplest way to permanently separate your BTC from
your XTBTC is to move them all in transactions bigger than 1MB. You
may need too many outputs to increase the size (thus also hurting the
utxo size in Bitcoin XT), but that's just a side effect.