[Lazare]

The way XT seems to have failed yet Classic seems to be suceeding seems odd to me.

Is all it took really just to have a developer fly out to China and talk to a hanful of people? Seems like there's a lot more politics going on behind the scenes.

In any case, fixing the blocksize limit will be good, but I think the real value in Classic is breaking the perceived monopoly Core has and moving to a healthier political setup. Many people were absolutely unwilling to even talk about XT (or as you mention, allow others to talk about XT) because "OMG it's not Core!". That argument will be a lot less viable if everyone's moved to Classic.

[mike_hearn]

No. It took a sharp fall in the BTC price.

This narrative that Gavin and I were unwilling to compromise is deeply unfortunate. BIP 101 originally started with a 20mb limit+growth. That was based on some calculations Gavin did. At that point the Chinese miners started saying they couldn't accept 20 because of the firewall, but eight would be OK. They put announcements of their support for eight megabyte blocks in their coinbases, etc.

Why eight? Because it's a Chinese homonym for "prosper" or "wealth":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_in_Chinese_culture#Eig...

It crops up in the Chinese Bitcoin community all the time. So this choice obviously wasn't based on any kind of scientific analysis. Having Bitcoin protocol constants be decided by rhymes would obviously have been an embarrassment, but nonetheless, we compromised and did it.

After Core rejected the now-modified BIP 101, Gavin and I released XT together. At this point the miners changed their tune. They announced they would never run anything except Core, period, end of story. This "requirement" had not been specified before. From both speaking to them personally (I have had various phone calls with miners around the world, including miners in China) and their public statments, they made it clear that their loyalty to Core was absolute and no matter what changes we made to XT, they would never run it. Thus compromising further was pointless.

Why is Classic different? It wasn't, just one or two days ago. After I released my article, I was CCd on a private thread where KnC Miner published an "open letter" and suggested switching to Classic. The other miners shot him down immediately saying they wanted the change to come from Core. Then the price started sliding, and they started reversing their positions. Suddenly, Classic was acceptable whereas just hours before it had not been.

[aws_ls]

>No. It took a sharp fall in the BTC price

And the trigger for that was your medium article the other day. :-)

And since, block size/scalability was the key point in your post. Would you be willing to re-join Bitcoin, since what you wanted would be achieved? Even if its Classic and not via XT.

Perhaps, my question may come across as naive. But looking at it from outside (reading /Bitcoin & /btc & etc), it would definitely clear a lot of air, and be good for Bitcoin.

[ank_the_elder]

I find your writings very clear and refreshing to read. Regardless of what happens with BTC, thanks for your efforts!

[jcoffland]

XT angered people because it was seen as an attempted coup. That was back when the Core devs were viewed as untouchable gods by most of the Bitcoin community. People are now willing to accept Classic because the core devs have been acting like babies. They've destroyed their reputation with the community by refusing any compromise, attacking Classic with Trojan pull requests and making a lot of outlandish statements in public forums. This hasn't sat well with the people who are heavily invested in Bitcoin. If XT were introduced now it might have gained more traction.

At this point the community seems to be mostly decided that they want to break the Core dev's monopoly and Classic provides a lowest common denominator way to do this. I just hope the Classic devs make better choices.

[Lazare]

Ah, now that makes sense. ...well, as much as anything in the Bitcoin world makes sense, which isn't much. :)

[repomies691]

How is this your concern any more? You promised to leave bitcoin scene because it has failed, why don't you focus on R3Coin instead.

[Anonobread]

> In any case, fixing the blocksize limit will be good

This presumes the blocksize limit is being fixed, which is an incorrect assumption. Originally, the proponents of Classic wanted to boost block size limits to 20MB effective January 2016 [1], and used bombastic and divisive language, inventing their own crisis even, to get people to take them seriously.

Interestingly, those same people are now contending for just 2MB, which is only 0.4MB higher than that proposed by Core.

Performance test data shows 32MB is the absolute maximum block size you can handle on a modern desktop PC today [2]. And by this I mean you could validate no more than one block per 10 minutes, hence realistically you actually couldn't run a full node on a desktop at 32MB. You'd need a clustered full node just to keep up, which is unprecedented in Bitcoin.

To make matters worse, 32MB blocks gets Bitcoin to 300 tps which is less than 1% of VISA's current capacity.

[1]: http://gavinandresen.ninja/does-more-transactions-necessaril...

[2]: https://blog.conformal.com/btcsim-simulating-the-rise-of-bit...

[simoncion]

> Interestingly, those same people are now contending for just 2MB...

Hearn mentions the backstory behind this in a comment here [0], posted a little while after you posted your comment. After reading his comment, does the shift from 20MB max blocks to something smaller become less "interesting" and more understandable? If not, why not?

Edit: Additionally, do you have anything to say about this comment? [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921219

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921209

[Lazare]

Well, any improvement to blocksize will be good, and will hopefully break the logjam preventing changes.

If we wait for a perfect fix to all problems, current and projected, we'll be waiting forever.

[duckingtest]

>Performance test data shows 32MB is the absolute maximum block size you can handle on a modern desktop PC today [2].

No, it's maximum size you can handle using a single-threaded poorly-optimized cpu software.

>Additionally, a profile of the CPU usage of this node, using golang’s great profile capabilities, shows that the CPU usage is dominated by the ECDSA signature verifications

OpenCL on gpu can easily process 50 MILLION bitcoin addresses per second (ecdsa + sha). [0] Note that OpenCL is available even on smartphones. For a very rough estimate, Adreno 530 on Snapdragon 820 has 500GFlops, 10% of 780 ti which can do 50M/s, so it should do about 5M/s. So a $400 smartphone should be more than enough to process 32MB blocks - provided the gpu is used.

[0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Vanitygen

[RealityVoid]

This... does not sound good at all. Frankly, I wasn't expecting that scaling the block size would be so taxing on normal nodes.

[EthanHeilman]

>The way XT seems to have failed yet Classic seems to be suceeding seems odd to me.

XT was much more aggressive. Not only would it have initially increased the blocksize to 8MB, but then it fixed a schedule of doubling the blocksize every 2 years[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_XT#Determining_the_new...