Forking bitcoin xt is
Bitcoin XT was created due to a series of fundamental disagreements between Bitcoin core developers. The disagreements revolve around questions like "Should the block chain grow to match user demand? The biggest and most intractable disagreement is about the block size: The Bitcoin Core project has made no move towards increasing the limit, in order to incentivise the creation and use of alternative, non-block chain based financial systems such as the so-called Lightning network.
This is an irreconcilable difference of vision that has proven impossible to surmount. Additionally, the Bitcoin Core developers have made statements that imply they no longer care about unconfirmed transactions or lightweight peer to peer wallets, although both are relied upon by many users. Without the Bitcoin Cash fork these features would not have remained viable. The final area of disagreement is around how decisions are made.
Bitcoin Core has no process for resolving disagreements amongst its developers or defining who those developers actually are. After a long series of attempts to find compromise in , it became clear that there was no way to resolve these differences except via a fork. You can read a longer article on the topic called "Why is Bitcoin forking? The max block size limit is a rule that every node checks.
It was put in as a temporary measure by Satoshi and always intended to be removed, which implies a hard fork as older nodes will reject blocks created by newer nodes. The alternative most heavily promoted is the "Lightning network" by Blockstream, which is an entirely different system: Lightning posits a set of relationships between quasi-institutional entities that settle up between each other on the block chain from time to time. It is unimplemented and many design elements are not yet defined.
In short, the only alternative seriously proposed involves abandoning Bitcoin as we know it today and attempting to convince users to move to a largely undesigned and potentially worse alternative. It's what Satoshi wanted and the idea of a global system used by ordinary people is what motivated many of us to join him.
XT provides people with information they need , even if using it requires them to make risk based decisions. We believe unconfirmed transactions are important. Many merchants want or need to accept payments within seconds rather than minutes or hours. XT accepts this fact and does what it can to minimize the risk, then help sellers judge what remains. It is committed to the first seen rule. We will not adopt changes that make unconfirmed transactions riskier.
Lightweight wallets are important. Most users cannot or will not run a fully verifying node. Most of the world population does not even own a computer: These users must sacrifice some security in order to participate, so XT supports whatever technical tradeoffs wallet developers wish to explore. Decision making is quick and clear.
Decisions are made according to a leadership hierarchy. The XT software encodes decisions that follow the above principles: We do not consider writing principled software to be centralizing and do not refuse to select reasonable defaults. The Bitcoin XT community is friendly, pragmatic, cares about app developers and considers the user experience in everything we do.
We value professionalism in technical approach and communication. Block size hard fork Many years ago, a capacity limit was introduced into Bitcoin by Satoshi. You can read analysis and explanations for why we think raising the block size limit is important here: A series of essays by Gavin Andresen Why the block size limit must be raised and why the proposed alternative schemes will not work , by Mike Hearn.
Miners By mining with Bitcoin XT you are empowered to vote on a new maximum block size limit. Users and merchants By running Bitcoin XT you take no risks: Discussion of new patches Questions around usage or how best to configure XT for mining Development ideas please at least try to implement your idea before asking others to do so!