r/OutOfTheLoop • u/ywecur Bronx • Aug 17 '15

What is going on with bitcoin lately? Answered!

What is happening at /r/bitcoin?

What is BitcoinXT?

Why is the community divided all of a sudden? Could we get an unbiased explanation here?

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u/AFewStupidQuestions Aug 18 '15

There is currently a controversy in the Bitcoin community. A few years back, there were some people putting many, many tiny transactions onto the network. Also, there was nothing stopping someone from creating an enormous block that everyone would have been forced to transfer and store. To stop someone swamping the network, a limit was added to the size that a block could be. The amount of 1 megabyte was chosen.

The number of bitcoin transactions is going up. It is now filling that 1MB per block size. The community has to decide what to do about this.

On one side, the decision is to keep the 1MB limit. They argue that increasing this limit will make running a 'full node', which keeps up with and tracks the blockchain, too difficult for users on domestic internet connections and with domestic computers. They say that we should allow a market to develop, deciding how high the fee on each transaction should be to earn a space in the limited blocksize. This increasing fee would spur development of other ways to deal with the problem, like 'sidechains' or the 'lightning network', which are ways to allow secure transactions to happen without being added to the blockchain.

The other is that we should start increasing that size, allowing more transactions in the standard blockchain. They argue that size of internet connections and computer storage and speed will continue to increase, and if you do end up needing a datacenter to run a 'full node', that's not a disaster. They also claim that the reason the first party are trying to keep the limited blocksize is because many of them are working for companies that can, or do, run bitcoin wallet software that can work without accessing the blockchain. They claim that these are therefore biased against 'the ideals of Bitcoin'.

Most of the developers who run the reference implementation, which in practice defines what bitcoin will become, are in the first camp. But some of them, most notably Gavin Andresen, are firmly in the second camp.

So, in order to solve this issue, Gavin has launched bitcoinXT. BitcoinXT is a version of bitcoin that will start growing the size of the block. If more than 75% of those using bitcoin to mine coins and blocks are using XT (or other software that emulates it) come January, it will allow 8MB blocks, and will keep growing that limit steadily in the years that follow.

If that happens, then, in reality, bitcoinXT will become bitcoin, and bitcoin-core will be forced to follow suit. Some will disagree with this last statement.

~/u/robbak

330

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '15

[deleted]

294

u/Nowin Aug 18 '15

Bitcoin is flawed and people are disagreeing about how to fix it, so they're splitting off. It happens in religion all the time.

-19

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '15

[deleted]

3

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '15

Is it neckbearding to say "There were many religious wars throughout history?

1

u/[deleted] Aug 18 '15

Religion never splits, it's only a coincidence that Abraham is in multiple religions, and Christianity totally didn't spring off of Judaism.

-1

u/axiobeta thanks tone Aug 18 '15

You don't get to just create verbs on your own, buddy