Author: insecurity at national.shitposting.agency 2015-05-29 14:00:54
Published on: 2015-05-29T14:00:54+00:00
In a controversial email from 2015, Gavin Andresen expressed his frustration with the lack of consensus among developers regarding the implementation of bigger blocks for Bitcoin. He proposed that if an agreement wasn't reached soon, he would ask for help reviewing and submitting patches to Mike's Bitcoin-Xt project that would increase block size, which would grow over time. Andresen suggested lobbying merchant services, exchanges, and other bitcoind-using infrastructure companies to run Bitcoin-Xt instead of Bitcoin Core, stating that they are running it. The early deployment would just serve as early testing, and all of the software already deployed would be ready for bigger blocks. If there was still no consensus among developers but the "bigger blocks now" movement is successful, Andresen would seek help getting big miners to do the same, using the soft-fork block version voting mechanism to get a majority and then a super-majority willing to produce bigger blocks. The purpose of that process is to prove to any doubters that they'd better start supporting bigger blocks or they'll be left behind. Because if consensus couldn't be reached, the ultimate authority for determining consensus was what code the majority of merchants, exchanges, and miners were running.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T20:10:57.444659+00:00