Gavin Andresen, Chief Scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation and Lead Developer of Bitcoin until 2014, held an extensive Q&A session with the Chinese bitcoin community yesterday.
Answering a range of questions from a diverse array of topics, the session focused on the most pressing issue in bitcoin, transaction capacity. Acknowledging the Beijing meeting between miners and industry in a number of answers, Andresen’s response to what seems to be the biggest worry, the co-existence of two-chains, was:
“BIP109 does not hard fork at 75%, it hard forks 28 days after 75% has been reached– so when the hard fork happens, there should be almost zero hash power on the minority chain. So there will not be a minority chain.
If I am wrong and blocks are created on the minority chain, people plan to get enough hash power to replace those blocks with empty blocks, so it is impossible to make any transactions on the minority chain.”
It is not clear how the mechanism of creating zero blocks would work. However, if such replacement is indeed possible, then one of the biggest worry in regards to a hardfork, suggestions that money can be double spent in extremely unlikely situations, seems to have been addressed at the Beijing meeting. Bitcoin Exchanges to Fund a Competitor?
In more striking revelations, which perhaps may hint at what happened in Beijing , Andresen states:
“I am much less worried about mining centralization than most of the other developers, because Satoshi designed Bitcoin so miners make the most profit when they do what is best for Bitcoin. I have also seen how quickly mining pools come and go; people were worried that the DeepBit mining pool would become too big, then it was GHash.io…
And if a centralized mining pool does become too big and does something bad, the […]
