The tide, perhaps, is turning. Following bitcoin’s price crash by $300 after some exchanges stated they will not follow the longest chain in the event of a hardfork, George Kikvadze, Executive Vice Chairman at BitFury, publicly stated:
“Discussions (or even speculation) of PoW change are super irresponsible! And even in the remote 0,01 prc chance it may happen, those responsible, we will spare no resources, get best lawyers and prosecutors to go after you wherever you will be in the world!
Bitcoin has become a multi-billion industry, with great financial investment & society responsibility. We will protect this at all cost!”
Luke-Jr, a Bitcoin Core developer and Blockstream contractor, has previously threatened with a PoW fork. Earlier today, a new account announced a “PoW upgrade initiative,” which lists Luke-Jr as contributing development.
Kikvadze’s statement appears to be a response to that announcement and is made after he publicly stated:
“Good meeting in China. Confident together we shall solve scaling! Sides need to stop attacking each other! And senseless censorship must stop!” He further added: “Always good to spend time with @JihanWu Impressive what they have built. Respect for the drive and hard work! China never ceases to amaze!”
Bitfury has been a strong supporter of Bitcoin Core with one of their employees loudly advocating for segregated witnesses, but recent events may be backfiring, especially after the market showed strong disagreement with exchanges.
If Bitfury shifts towards supporting Bitcoin Unlimited, then the new grassroots client may reach as high as 90% of the hashrate prior to the fork as it would leave only BTCC in support of Bitcoin Core.
In such eventuality, it is probable BTCC would move too, thus achieving as good as complete Nakamoto’s consensus. By that point, all businesses would have upgraded, with real nodes probably getting ready as otherwise they would be forked off.
The grassroots client appears to be gaining momentum once more, reaching 43% over the past 24 hours and above 35% over the longer one week period. Very close to 51%, a significant psychological point as it would then become apparent the majority, as shown by the heavily invested miners, support the new client.
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I don’t think a lawsuit against an open-source project would fly to well or be possible. If you chose to use it or invest in it, so be it at your own risk.
Sueing someone(or in this case a great deal of someone’s) for essentially spending their electricity and computers elsewhere would probably like trying to sue every person who visits a competitor’s website in lieu,or buys a competitor’s product- it makes no sense. It’s not as though people are signing a contract that says “I promise to keep this product profitably for xyz inc,and will never abandon nor propose changes to it” when they choose a fork or even a coin to work with.
He is not talking of prosecution by lawyers only.
The prosecutors he is thinking will not get you in a courthouse.
They will get you in a hospital. After a ProofOfKneeCap.
Good one 🙂
It’s Blockstream that will be sued gthey are the ones with money and they are calling the tune.
Defensive Nuclear Weapon – Armageddon Avoidance – Proof-of-Coinbase -poison pill https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1833046.0
Your comment about grassroots clients appears to me to be inaccurate. https://bitnodes.21.co/nodes/
Perhaps you confused the nodecounter graph “number of blocks mined” with number of Bitcoin nodes running?
Apart from that seems pretty well reported.