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

From: Ken Friece <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2015 18:01:58 -0400

What are you so afraid of, Eric? If Mike's fork is successful, consensus is
reached around larger blocks. If it is rejected, the status quo will remain
for now. Network consensus, NOT CORE DEVELOPER CONSENSUS, is the only thing
that matters, and those that go against network consensus will be severely
punished with complete loss of income.

I'm not sure who appointed the core devs some sort of Bitcoin Gods that can
hold up any change that they happen to disagree with. It seems like the
core devs are scared to death that the bitcoin network may change without
their blessing, so they go on and on about how terrible hard forks are.
Hard forks are the only way to keep core devs in check.

Despite significant past technical bitcoin achievements, two of the most
vocal opponents to a reasonable blocksize increase work for a company
(Blockstream) that stands to profit directly from artificially limiting the
blocksize. The whole situation reeks. Because of such a blatant conflict of
interest, the ethical thing to do would be for them to either resign from
Blockstream or immediately withdraw themselves from the blocksize debate.
This is the type of stuff that I hoped would end with Bitcoin, but alas, I
guess human nature never changes.

Personally, I think miners should give Bitcoin XT a serious look. Miners
need to realize that they are in direct competition with the lightning
network and sidechains for fees. Miners, ask yourselves if you think you'll
earn more fees with 1 MB blocks and more off-chain transactions or with 8
MB blocks and more on-chain transactions...

The longer this debate drags on, the more I agree with BIP 100 and Jeff
Garzik because the core devs are already being influenced by outside forces
and should not have complete control of the blocksize. It's also
interesting to note that most of the mining hashpower is already voting for
8MB blocks BIP100 style.

On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 5:32 PM, Eric Lombrozo via bitcoin-dev <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> You deeply disappoint me, Mike.
>
> Not only do you misrepresent many cogent, well thought out positions from
> a great number of people who have published and posted a number of articles
> detailing an explaining in-depth technical concerns…you also seem to fancy
> yourself more capable of reading into the intentions of someone who
> disappeared from the scene years ago, before we even were fully aware of
> many things we now know that bring the original “plan” into question.
>
> I ask of you, as a civilized human being, to stop doing this divisive
> crap. Despite your protestations to the contrary, YOU are the one who is
> proposing a radical departure from the direction of the project. Also, as
> several of us have clearly stated before, equating the fork of an open
> source project with a fork of a cryptoledger is completely bogus - there’s
> a lot of other people’s money at stake. This isn’t a democracy - consensus
> is all or nothing. The fact that a good number of the people most
> intimately familiar with the inner workings of Satoshi’s invention do not
> believe doing this is a good idea should give you pause.
>
> Please stop using Bitcoin as your own political football…for the sake of
> Bitcoin…and for your own sake. Despite your obvious technical abilities
> (and I sincerely do believe you have them) you are discrediting yourself
> and hurting your own reputation.
>
>
> - Eric
>
> On Aug 15, 2015, at 10:02 AM, Mike Hearn via bitcoin-dev <
> [email-masked]> 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.
>
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