[Bitcoin-development] questions about bitcoin-XT code fork & non-consensus hard-fork

James A. Donald jamesd at echeque.com
Sun Jul 5 18:39:00 PDT 2015


On 2015-07-03 09:24, Lodewijk andré de la porte wrote:

> It's pretty annoying to have an even bigger blockchain, don't get me
> wrong on that, but that's just the way Bitcoin works: a blockchain that
> grows with use. There's no reason for it to truly upset you, either.
> Running a full node is already something you don't do for no reason at
> all. I can't really make this argument as well as I like. The point is
> that if you have a reason you would still do it later, and if you don't
> you don't already. Some people noted that the pruning makes it possible
> to run a full node on their phones. Cool! But there's no reason to. In
> fact, you won't because it'd drain your battery. We'll be okay without
> the one silly geek that does it anyway.
>
> So.. these points were already hard to argue against clearly. Then
> there's "we can scale externally".... The trouble is that there's so
> many ways, like pinning (sidechains/mastercoin), exclusively
> inter-institutional settlement, debt based moneys ("the bearer of this
> token is entitled to..."), and all of them could work! In fact, we could
> just abandon Bitcoin alltogether! And that's the core of my
> counterargument: we don't have to cripple Bitcoin, so let's not. Let's
> not make it more complicated than it has to be. If we do scale
> externally, let it be for exceedingly good reasons and at exceedingly
> competitive prices.

Way back in the beginning I said an ever growing block chain would cause 
unacceptable costs and inconvenience, and lo and behold, it is causing 
substantial and ever growing costs and inconvenience.

Of course, restraining the block chain to manageable growth without 
losing other good characteristics is inherently hard, and it was a lot 
easier for me to point at the problem than to fix it.






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