[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.