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by erikpukinskis 3812 days ago
It can. It will if it has to. This is yet another person who is upset that only a minority believes their fears that we are on the brink of catastrophe.

If the block size becomes a problem, it will change. It is not yet a problem. If the transition is painful, people will be more open to this kind of warning in the future. If it's painless this will all have been moot.
2 comments
brownbat 3812 days ago
> It is not yet a problem.

That's a controversial premise that the article repeatedly addresses.

You may not be convinced, but there is a lot of stuff cited in there on that exact point.[1] Those links lead to other resources fleshing this out pretty quickly.[2, 3]

I found this bit persuasive:

> "Some customers contacted Chris earlier today asking why our bitcoin payouts didn’t execute ... The issue is that it’s now officially impossible to depend upon the bitcoin network anymore to know when or if your payment will be transacted, because the congestion is so bad that even minor spikes in volume create dramatic changes in network conditions. To whom is it acceptable that one could wait either 60 minutes or 14 hours, chosen at random? It’s ludicrous that people are actually writing posts on reddit claiming that there is no crisis. People were criticizing my post yesterday on the grounds that I somehow overstated the seriousness of the situation. Do these people actually use the bitcoin network to send money everyday?"[original article, citing [4]]

I'm an outsider here, and don't have a stake in this. So maybe people who have followed this debate more closely can recognize that as a total fabrication, but to me it sounded like a plausible business concern.

[1] http://gavinandresen.ninja/why-increasing-the-max-block-size...

[2] http://gavinandresen.ninja/the-myth-of-not-full-blocks

[3] http://hashingit.com/analysis/44-bitcoin-traffic-bulletin-re...

[4] http://forums.prohashing.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=679

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ikeboy 3812 days ago
Complaining about that, and at the same time complaining about the (opt-in) new feature to allow transactions to be changed before inclusion in the block chain, seems hypocritical.
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MBCook 3811 days ago
Could you explain how that's hypocritical? I don't see it.

I actually think it seems like pretty good evidence. They're adding a (according to the author) questionable feature with notable possible downsides while ignoring a long standing problem with the simple solution because it (allegedly) furthers their goals to have the problem continue to exist.

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ikeboy 3811 days ago
>notable possible downsides

It's opt in, anyone that wants to accept zero conf can just insist that all transactions don't opt in.

>a long standing problem with the simple solution

Hard forking bitcoin is not simple. It's never been done before on purpose, and many people are extremely hesitant to mess around with a billion dollar system.

Why is it hypocritical? He complains that some transactions took too long to go through. With RBF, those transactions could simply be resent with a higher fee. But if you're against RBF, then you need the original transaction to go through, and you'll have to wait if it had a low fee.

Basically, the problem is caused by his own opposition to RBF, as far as I see.

(Disclaimer: I've been spending less time around the bitcoin community recently, so my information might be out of date. The patch that was committed is definitely opt-in, but I can't guarantee all the mechanics work how I'm describing them.)

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MBCook 3811 days ago
Ok, so it's hypocritical on the 'transactions take too long' issue. Thanks for explaining.
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ikeboy 3810 days ago
I just saw https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/41aocn/httpsbitcoi... and https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3urm8o/optin_rbf_i...

I think this paints Hearn's attack in a significantly worse light as I had previously thought.

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discodave 3812 days ago
> It is not yet a problem.

The original Medium post disagrees with this premise.

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chii 3811 days ago
Whilst i have no stake in the claim (other than my .001 btc), and have not spent any, i m getting conflicting conclusions from different posts/sources. Since I do not follow any of the people, it's hard to know what is reliable or not.

This might simply mean that bitcoin is too immature and isn't quite ready for the mainstream.

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