Re: [bitcoin-dev] The need for larger blocks

From: "Jorge Timón" <jtimon@jtimon•cc>
To: "Wladimir J. van der Laan" <laanwj@gmail•com>
Cc: bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] The need for larger blocks
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2015 12:13:49 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CABm2gDr3orTHMN1q8vGmy3NpXWPy5i=zHhGneDGUk=ney3-e+Q@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20150627074259.GA25420@amethyst.visucore.com>

On Sat, Jun 27, 2015 at 9:43 AM, Wladimir J. van der Laan
<laanwj@gmail•com> wrote:
> By expecting a few developers to make controversial decisions you are breaking the expectations, as well as making life dangerous for those developers. I'll jump ship before being forced to merge an even remotely controversial hardfork.

Obviously those who claim that you or "committers" or "developers" are
in control of the consensus rules are far from understanding this
life-threatening part. If you, Gavin or anyone becomes "the president
of bitcoin" he will likely get killed, or kidnapped, or get his family
kidnapped, or tortured...

> The stressful conditions of last weeks have thus made me hostile toward the idea of hardforks. At least to hardforks that make politically loaded changes.

I fully agree with what you've said but there's an argument I
sympathize with: "hardforks must be possible". Otherwise it seems that
the system is "eventually obsolete by design".
Provided they're also uncontroversial, they don't need to be that
different (in terms of deployment) from softforks. Since they risks
are bigger you just need to give more time for users and alternative
software to upgrade.
I would really like deploying an uncontroversial hardfork to prove
nobody wants them to be impossible, as explained in:
http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-June/008936.html

I hear people claiming that "hardforks must be possible" here and
there, see this example:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3awomg/how_the_bitcoin_experiment_might_fail/csgonlm

> Wladimir
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