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

[Dr Adam Back]

I would recommend to read the post.  I thought it was fairly
comprehensive and this is extremely bad both in network fork risk
(which not everyone may understand details of as its quite intricate).
Hard-forks should only be done with wide-spread consensus, and are
fairly risky even then, but by doing it in a contentious divisive way
- understand everyone in the technical community is very concerned -
just  unnecessarily magnifies the risk of failure.  The other major
issues being the precedent set and loss of decentralised code
governance described in the post.  A "distributed system" which has
one or two developers, one who has a slight history for proposed a
number of objectionable things in the past (red-lists etc) is not
really distributed.  How do we know other than assumption that they
are not taking money to push preferred features, or under
duress/blackmail etc.  This is the point of the existing code change
approval system to review and cross check against things like that.

If people on *cypherpunks* cant get the points in the post, I think
the world has a problem.  The price of security in a distributed
system like bitcoin is eternal vigilance, but if people dont
understand what constitutes a risk and hence what to be vigilant for,
the meta-system can be unreliable and lose its assurances.  I think we
need to explain some more concepts and probably people will over time
learn things and and an influencer pyramid emerge as happened in
privacy technology.

Adam

On 17 June 2015 at 17:44, Sean Lynch <seanl at literati.org> wrote:
> It seems to me the real problem would be the community making a big deal
> about the fork, not the fork itself. Maybe the fork will take off, in which
> case anyone who has a position in Bitcoin now will have a position in the
> forked currency, or it won't, in which case who cares? Sure, Bitcoin might
> be less valuable for a while while people wait and see how the fork does,
> but anyone who thinks a hard fork is a large risk to Bitcoin compared to all
> the other risks it faces is deluding themselves.
>
> I think we would all be better off if the community said, "Fine, fork if you
> want. May the best fork win," than to sing doom and gloom every time someone
> decides not to follow the community process. Besides, a bunch of different
> people being involved does not a decentralized system make. Not if they all
> have to follow the same process and forks without consensus are not allowed.
> That can actually be worse in many ways than a benevolent dictatorship,
> because it will quickly ossify as the community grows larger and more
> diverse.
>
> If Bitcoin itself had to get community consensus before it was tried, we'd
> have no Bitcoin. I have no problem at all with someone deciding to fork it.
> In fact, I *prefer* it, because I think in the long run it makes my own
> position *more* valuable to have different forks trying different things.
> Anyone who holds Bitcoin before the fork gets the sum of the values of their
> account on each fork. Over the long run, the value on most forks will go to
> zero, but then it's at worst a max function.
>
> Claiming that forks make Bitcoin less valuable sounds to me a lot like
> Bernie Sanders saying we don't need so many choices of deodorant.