Best explanation of how this will work is on their site:
"By mining with Bitcoin XT you will produce blocks with a new version number. This indicates to the rest of the network that you support larger blocks. When 75% of the blocks are new-version blocks, a decision has been reached to start building larger blocks that will be rejected by Bitcoin Core nodes. At that point a waiting period of two weeks begins to allow news of the new consensus to spread and allow anyone who hasn't upgraded yet to do so. During this time, existing Bitcoin Core nodes will be printing a message notifying the operators about the availability of an upgraded version.<p>If the hard fork occurs and you are still mining with Bitcoin Core, your node will reject the first new block that is larger than one megabyte in size. At that point there is a risk your newly mined coins will not be accepted at major exchanges or merchants."
<a href="https://bitcoinxt.software/" rel="nofollow">https://bitcoinxt.software/</a><p>What I find intriguing about this in the bigger picture is it begins to answer one of questions from the beginning - how do political decisions regarding the blockchain get made when consensus has failed? And this shows a plausible mechanism for using a compatible fork to let users "vote with their feet".<p>I wonder if down the road this sort of thing could evolve/devolve into a sort of real block chain politics, e.g. let users incorporate one or more non-core patches into their nodes, and once a patch reaches some majority percentage it activates and forks the chain, perhaps even with a mechanism to allow other nodes to "accept a fork" (i.e. activate the patch in their node) if it wins but otherwise not proactively "vote" for it.<p>Interesting times.
I thought gavin and most of the established bitcoin devs were in favor of increasing the blocksize.. so why is this "lightning" system no one has heard about suddenly the new plan for bitcoin core? Whose clout is pushing this through? I was aware of argument about the 1MB limit but I thought the voices in favor of increasing it far outweighed those against.
It's been some time since Bitcoin has given me reason to break out popcorn, the next few days should be quite fun to watch. :)<p>I have no particular opinion on which way this should swing, however it's clear that XT represents far more than just a block size change (and the XT web site even makes this explicit): it is another attempt at gaining increased control of the project, which is also mentioned by the linked Medium article as one of reasons Lightning isn't great for Bitcoin either.<p>While Mike and Gavin have long been members of the project, in good standing, and with no obvious reasons to doubt them, it's still worth giving a few moments thought to how the project may be impacted in the coming years should this "change in administration" succeed.
r/bitcoin is being censored right now (quite ironic), so thought maybe you hackers can have a discussion about the upcoming bitcoin fork in regards to the blocksize. Some suggest that bitcoin blocks should remain at 1mb, which currently covers around 200k transactions, a limit that is close to being reached. The vast majority seem to want an increase on this capacity for pretty much obvious reasons. However, some relatively newcomer bitcoin developers argue that increasing it will affect decentralisation, and everyone should use a hubs and spoke system instead. Others argue that as the number of users increases, the number of the blockchain applications increase, the number of nodes and miners increases, thus decentralisation increases. In regards to lightning it is still vapourwear, it requires hot wallets - something which has caused many problems - the hubs are likely to be centralised - and fundamentally users should have a choice. So yeah looks like bitcoin will fork.
The XT developers could probably defend against the "decentralization" argument by implementing IBLT to speed block propagation and ultimate blockchain compression to reduce disk usage before increasing the block size. But that would probably take years and they don't have years, so never mind.
I do not understand bitcoin and the blockchain. Isn't your bitcoin tied up in the mathematics the blockchain? Will those who trade away their money on one blockchain be able to retain it on the other blockchain? Will they synchronize the ledger in some way?
With the Bitcoin price on a steady downward spiral into oblivion, I'd have to say that the XT fork was a really stupid idea. Thanks for scaring all of the investors, you bunch of retards. Smooth move, X-Lax!!!
Seems like the blockchain is forking too...? What happens to everyone's bitcoins in the meantime? Wouldn't this practically destroy the system?
There's also <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066746" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066746</a>, but it's hard to know whether that one is factual. Since the two threads are closely related, this seems like the one to go with. (This is not based on any opinion about the story itself.)