Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: Block Size Increase Requirements

From: Mike Hearn <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2015 15:21:39 +0200

>
> Ignorant. You seem do not understand the current situation. We
> suffered from orphans a lot when we started in 2013. It is now your
> turn.

Then please enlighten me. You're unable to download block templates from a
trusted node outside of the country because the bandwidth requirements are
too high? Or due to some other problem?

With respect to "now it's your turn". Let's imagine the hard fork goes
ahead. Let us assume that almost all exchanges, payment processors and
other businesses go with larger blocks, but Chinese miners do not.

Then you will mine coins that will not be recognised on trading platforms
and cannot be sold. Your losses will be much larger than from orphans.

This can happen *even* if Chinese miners who can't/won't scale up are >50%
hashrate. SPV clients would need a forced checkpoint, which would be messy
and undesirable, but it's technically feasible. The smaller side of the
chain would cease to exist from the perspective of people actually trading
coins.

If your internet connectivity situation is really so poor that you cannot
handle one or two megabits out of the country then you're hanging on by
your fingernails anyway: your connection to the main internet could become
completely unusable at any time. If that's really the case, it seems to me
that Chinese Bitcoin is unsustainable and what you really need is a
China-specific alt coin that can run entirely within the Chinese internet.