Thank you Eric for saying what needs to be said.
multiple proposals being evaluated here.
Bitcoin-XT is both a hard-fork and a soft-fork. It's a hard-fork
core SPV nodes that did not opt-in. It exposes those SPV nodes to
network-split.
have to be aborted.
Post by Eric Lombrozo via bitcoin-devNxtChg,
In the entire history of Bitcoin we’ve never attempted anything
even closely resembling a hard fork like what’s being proposed
here.
Many of us have wanted to push our own hard-forking changes to
the protocol…and have been frustrated because of the inability to
do so.
This inability is not due to any malice on anyone’s part…it is a
feature of Satoshi’s protocol. For better or worse, it is *very
hard* to change the rules…and this is exactly what imbues Bitcoin
with one of its most powerful attributes: very well-defined
settlement guarantees that cannot be suddenly altered nor
reversed by anyone.
We’ve managed to have a few soft forks in the past…and for the
most part these changes have been pretty uncontroversial…or at
least, they have not had nearly the level of political
divisiveness that this block size issue is having. And even then,
we’ve encountered a number of problems with these deployments
that have at times required goodwill cooperation between
developers and mining pool operators to fix.
Again, we have NEVER attempted anything even remotely like what’s
being proposed - we’ve never done any sort of hard fork before
like this. If even fairly uncontroversial soft forks have caused
problems, can you imagine the kinds of potential problems that a
hard fork over some highly polarizing issue might raise? Do you
really think people are going to want to cooperate?!?
I can understand that some people would like bigger blocks. Other
people might want feature X, others feature Y…and we can argue
the merits of this or that to death…but the fact remains that we
have NEVER attempted any hard forking change…not even with a
simple, totally uncontroversial no-brainer improvement that would
not risk any sort of ill-will that could hamper remedies were it
not to go as smoothly as we like. *THIS* is the fundamental
problem - the whole bigger block thing is a minor issue by
comparison…it could be any controversial change, really.
Would you want to send your test pilots on their first flight…the
first time an aircraft is ever flown…directly into combat without
having tested the plane? This is what attempting a hard fork
mechanism that’s NEVER been done before in such a politically
divisive environment basically amounts to…but it’s even worse.
We’re basically risking the entire air force (not just one plane)
over an argument regarding how many seats a plane should have
that we’ve never flown before.
We’re talking billlions of dollars’ worth of other people’s money
that is on the line here. Don’t we owe it to them to at least
test out the system on a far less controversial, far less
divisive change first to make sure we can even deploy it without
things breaking? I don’t even care about the merits regarding
bigger blocks vs. smaller blocks at this point, to be quite
honest - that’s such a petty thing compared to what I’m talking
about here. If we attempt a novel hard-forking mechanism that’s
NEVER been attempted before (and which as many have pointed out
is potentially fraught with serious problems) on such a
politically divisive, polarizing issue, the result is each side
will refuse to cooperate with the other out of spite…and can
easily lead to a war, tanking the value of everyone’s assets on
both chains. All so we can process 8 times the number of
transactions we currently do? Even if it were 100 times, we
wouldn’t even come close to touching big payment processors like
Visa. It’s hard to imagine a protocol improvement that’s worth
the risk.
I urge you to at least try to see the bigger picture here…and to
understand that nobody is trying to stop anyone from doing
anything out of some desire for maintaining control - NONE of us
are able to deploy hard forks right now without facing these
problems. And different people obviously have different
priorities and preferences as to which of these changes would be
best to do first. This whole XT thing is essentially giving *one*
proposal special treatment above those that others have proposed.
Many of us have only held back from doing this out of our belief
that goodwill amongst network participants is more important than
trying to push some pet feature some of us want.
Please stop this negativity - we ALL want the best for Bitcoin
and are doing our best, given what we understand and know, to do
what’s right.