Bitcoin XT

Bitcoin XT logo

Bitcoin XT is a fork of the bitcoin Core reference client. In mid-2015, the concept achieved significant attention within the bitcoin community in 2015 amid a contentious debate among core developers over increasing the blocksize cap.^{[1] [2]}

The proposal did not gain the necessary support to go into effect on the Bitcoin network by early 2016, the earliest possible switchover date.

History

On June 10, 2014 Mike Hearn published a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP 64), calling for the addition of "a small P2P protocol extension that performs UTXO lookups given a set of outpoints."^[3]

On December 27, 2014 Hearn released version 0.10 of the client, with the BIP 64 changes.^[4] It was intended to support queries for his Lighthouse crowdfunding platform project.

On June 22, 2015, Gavin Andresen published BIP 101 calling for an increase in the maximum block size. The changes would activate a fork allowing 8 MB blocks (with doublings every two years) once 75% of a stretch of 1000 mined blocks is achieved after the beginning of 2016.^[5]

On August 6, 2015 Andresen's BIP101 proposal was merged into the XT codebase.^[6]

On August 15, 2015 version 0.11A was released to the public.^[7][8]

Bip 101 was reverted^[9] and the 2-MB blocksize bump of Bitcoin Classic was applied instead.

Reception

The August 2015 release of XT received widespread media coverage. The Guardian wrote that "bitcoin is facing civil war".^[1] Reason wrote that "Bitcoin XT represents a technical and philosophical divergence."^[10] Wired wrote that "Bitcoin XT exposes the extremely social — extremely democratic — underpinnings of the open source idea, an approach that makes open source so much more powerful than technology controlled by any one person or organization."^[11]

In the event, the XT hard fork stalled. On 11 January 2016, the earliest possible date for the transition to take effect, only approximately ten percent of Bitcoin miners were using the XT protocol to sign blocks, whereas 75% would have been required to make the new protocol the de facto standard.^[12]

External links

• Bitcoin XT on GitHub

References

^{[13] [14] [15] [16][17] [18][19] [20]}