Why is an unlimited fork the best way out for Bitcoin?

Many discussions about how to recover the cryptocurrency industry have been activated, involving what conditions should exist before Bitcoin hard forks to change the network capacity. Various activation schemes have been widely circulated: 95% of the majority of blocks, 75% of the majority of blocks, or even simply achieving 51% of the blocks to fork, etc. Many Core developers insist that the fork should not be activated unless there is "overwhelming consensus", unless perhaps because there are too many things to push at a critical moment.

However, we have recently seen that changes in the course of world history, which are far greater and more valuable than Bitcoin, often occur without majority support. The vote reinforces my existing belief that the risks in the cryptocurrency industry are not so great that action cannot be taken. It is time to "boldly" execute a simple unrestricted Bitcoin fork. The purpose of this post is to explain why the results of taking unilateral action are mostly positive, no matter how things develop.

The idea of ​​the Unlimited fork is simple: start with the Bitcoin Unlimited codebase and modify the minimum amount of code needed (just a few lines) to enable Unlimited's large block processing after a certain height - no matter how many nodes vote for this action. This modified client will be released, with a list of fees, payable to Cryptopia, Yobit, and other exchanges that should list the token. The availability of the new client will be widely advertised. The date of the fork will arrive, and there will be two Bitcoin networks. The market will then decide which fork becomes the main chain.

This proposal is significantly more aggressive than most of the others. Considering the /r/btcfork subreddit, it is not intended to have any lengthy development period to add new features. This way there won't be a lot of meetings or discussions to attract miners. It will just be a software release and the market will decide what happens. If there is a demand for larger blocks, I'm sure other businesses will agree that enough value will move to this one branch with unlimited blocksize and miners will follow. Changing market conditions will incentivize people to upgrade as soon as possible.

The common argument against this move is that it is too risky. This move is shared by many, and before evaluating the results, let me state what I believe are the three main goals of this move. First, we want to provide cryptocurrency to as many people in the world as possible. Second, we want businesses to invest in the cryptocurrency industry and ensure that capacity is applied to their business models. Third, we want to clear out the negative people in the industry who engage in toxic discussions and try to prevent the development of the first two goals, and these negative people need to be eliminated if these goals are to be achieved. With these goals in mind, let's look at the possible results that may come from this bold move:

Result 1: The new chain succeeds and replaces the Core chain

In the first outcome, after the network split, users will rush to adopt the new chain. This could happen quickly, as it is clear that a large portion of Bitcoin users are tired of Core's actions, but there are no available alternatives. Remember, miners follow profits, so once the fork is announced, we will immediately see multiple mining pools switching between the two forks. The hashrate of the forks will follow the price ratio between the two.

Through a point of no return, as happened with ETC, the price of one chain could surpass the other. Once this happens, any existing Bitcoin client can be easily upgraded with only a few line changes. The ease of upgrade is intended to make this result easier to achieve than many people expected. Although protocol changes, such as activating SegWit, are major drains on resources. For most services, switching branches is a relatively simple task, requiring only the installation of a different daemon for Bitcoin Core users.

The result at this point is that after a period of chaos and uncertainty, the Bitcoin industry ends up with a stronger network, and efforts can once again be directed toward productive matters, rather than endless work around the limitations of Core. Not only that, this result will continue to strongly negate Core leadership and bring in more ethical and honest people in charge.

Result 2: The chaos and uncertainty caused by the long-lasting fork war eventually led to Ethereum taking over

Another possible outcome is a long period of chaos and uncertainty. At this point, the forked blockchain is activated, but criminals can start periodic DDoS attacks on nodes online and offline. I disagree that miners would actually be willing to waste money attacking the new chain, but replay attacks could lead to theft and loss of funds. It is also possible that the views of both parties are so entrenched that they are unwilling to stop using their own blockchain anyway.

This situation still leads to positive results. Although there will be short-term uncertainty and damage to business interests, after a period of time, we may see more and more merchants accepting other currencies. Since Ethereum is one of the most popular currencies, it has the greatest potential to replace Bitcoin. Ethereum has no block limit and is led by ethical developers.

So even in the case of an unlimited hard fork that destroys the Bitcoin currency through infighting and attacks, we will still have a positive outcome. Businesses will be left with certainty about the future, there will be no capacity limits. And theymos and those unethical and conflict-of-interest Core developers can continue to manage the defunct Bitcoin network while honest people like Vitalik Buterin lead the industry forward.

Result 3: Fork fails immediately

The third outcome is that the attempted fork fails. Perhaps because of a technical problem that halts research on the network. Perhaps because criminals successfully DDoS-attacked a node and knocked it offline. Or perhaps because support from an exchange’s infrastructure failed.

Although this result is not ideal, it brings little harm. Since the Bitcoin network is a small network, even if it is destroyed, the casualties of enterprises and users will be low. People will analyze the reasons for the failure and are likely to try the fork again after dealing with the problems.

However, the most positive impact of this outcome is to convince miners that a different path is needed. If the failure of the proof was caused by an oversight that the unlimited fork itself was uncertain, then the resulting publicity will lead to more miners activating existing signaling mechanisms in order to make the switch.

If this failure could lower the price of Bitcoin, then miners will be incentivized to pay special attention to user groups. We saw this in January when Mike Hearn's article led to a sell-off that caused the price to drop by 20%, and mining companies issued panicked press releases in response. The price of Bitcoin has dropped, and I still think that complacency caused by high prices is the biggest obstacle to scaling. The drop in price will not affect the business model of those of us who really want to use Bitcoin, such as regular people who want to buy things online and businesses that want to build cool new technology.

In summary, the biggest risk to the future of cryptocurrency is inaction. An unlimited fork poses the least risk because it is easy to execute and therefore does not require a large number of developers to attempt it. There is no need to spend months perfecting the code to include additional features. The purpose of an unlimited fork is to set up a replacement that causes miners to lose control of Bitcoin and let market forces decide what path to take. Either the fork succeeds; another digital currency, such as Ethereum, takes over permanently; or the fork fails, causing the price of Bitcoin to drop and grab the attention of miners. No matter how many protocols there are before the fork occurs, there will be two digital currencies, so there is no reason to wait. We saw with Ethereum that the market decisively resolved this issue within a few months.

The most common objection to this proposal I find is from speculators who are more concerned about the value of their personal assets than the massive success of cryptocurrencies. For many of these people, the success of cryptocurrencies is the end of the road to wealth, not a goal in itself. They recognize that taking unilateral action could significantly reduce or even destroy the value of Bitcoin, which is not what they want. I believe that allowing businesses to provide value to people around the world is the outcome that most people want to achieve.

If I wasn’t running a company, I’d probably be doing this right now. However, there are a lot of developers releasing new cryptocurrencies who have the knowledge to make the necessary changes. Because everyone except the Chinese miners are talking, it’s time for people to step up and take action so that the market can make the choice.