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

From: "cipher anthem" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2015 13:19:48 +0200

>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.

You claim that if all merchants, exchanges and users are moving to your chain then it will be the main chain even if it has less computational power.

But the majority of the hashrate can now perform double spends on your chain! They can send bitcoins to exchanges, sell it, extract the money and build a new longer chain to get their bitcoins back. Are companies like Xapo and Coinbase really so stupid that they would go along with this without complete consensus? I dont think so.

If the miners think that Bitcoin is doomed because of this change, then this is what they will do to maximize their profits.

But you could always roll back the blockchain to revert the double spend and have you and Gavin do a checkpoint on every block. Better yet just sign the blocks yourselves and you wont have to worry about that pesky mining!

Or you could change the hashing algortihm... Oh, but wait... so much capital has gone into the mining industry so this aint gonna happen.

The sheep of reddit who worships Gavin and Hearn really need to understand the importance of consensus...

Nothing of this is obviously going to happen, but just the fact that Mike suggests it is painful to watch.