Gavin and Toomim Present: "Classic" – Another Hard Fork Risk

Brought to you by the guys whose support of the XTCoin fork brought many laughs comes the Bitcoin "Classic" hard fork attempt. This time the USG agents are working to socially engineer miner support by trying a different branding strategy seeing how the marketing doomed their last one. This latest hard fork would only start with a 2 megabyte maximum blocksize before introducing regular linear increases, down from Gavin Andressen's earlier demands of 20 and later 8 megabytes. It appears Gavin is ready to do anything to push through a contentious hard fork to create an altcoin including dumping Mike Hearn in favor of the Toomims.1

In one of the earliest mentions of this new forking "Classic" client, which happened two days ago, J Toomim offered a vision of democracy incompatible with Satoshi's insistence on hard mathematical consensus:

The central principles of Bitcoin Classic are twofold:

  1. Make decisions democratically2 with user and miner input.
  2. Keep true to Satoshi's vision3 of Bitcoin. Scale on-chain capacity to exceed demand4 as long as it's safe.5

Point 1 will be implemented via technology like http://bitcoinclassic.consider.it.
Point 2 will be implemented via blocksize increases and the hard work needed to make them safe. We will be starting with a hard fork option that starts at 2 MB.
We will be basing our work primarily off of Core's master branch. Right now we've got a quick prototype based on BitPay's 0.11.2-big-blocks version, but we've only invested about 15% of our hours into that branch.
The hard fork will be based on Gavin's BIP101 code in order to include consensus detection and some limits on block verification cost (e.g. bytes hashed). Currently, we're using a 2 MB in 2016, 4 MB in 2018 approach,6 with linear interpolation, 7 but we're open to more specific input from miners and users. — Archived

The seminal piece on the economic hell waiting for adopters, including miners, of altcoins hard forked from Bitcoin was published only a year and two days ago. So far caution has prevailed among miners, even when doomed ventures like BitPay and Coinbase enthusiastically endorsed pulling the trigger on catastrophic hard forks. This latest hard fork effort claims to have the support of Bitmain's Antpool which suggests at least some Chinese mining resistance is falling to the fiat/USG social engineering assault on Bitcoin.

It is too early to tell if a substantial miner defection from Bitcoin to this "Classic" altcoin is likely, but it is interesting that this effort managed to gain the support of at least one major Chinese mining pool in spite of having a still more obnoxious platform than the XTCoin effort did. The time to HODL on to your balls and ride the altcoin fork lulz may finally be approaching.


  1. The Toomims are characters who emerged from the NSAether just in time to declare their support for XTCoin as it was initially being unveilled while claiming a mere 100 TH/s mining farm.  

  2. This explicitly runs counter to Satoshi's vision and his demands of hard consensus.  

  3. Satoshi's vision included a number of assumptions that haven't held in the hard lab of reality. The big one is the assumption that full nodes and miners would be one and the same. The divorce of mining and node functions means that hard forking change becomes even harder.  

  4. Notice that the push for this is coming well before the mining subsidy drops to a level that makes transaction fees an important portion of mining income. Remember BTC Guild, Deepbit, or Ghash.io? Big figures in Bitcoin mining tend to have a short lifespan before they fall into irrelevance.  

  5. The core of the Bitcoin economy that isn't focused on Bitcoin as a way to get more fiat insists it isn't.  

  6. Oh, so it really is just a more conservative XT.  

  7. Any assumption this kind of growth is possible neglects the reality that actual new "faster" hardware being produced by Intel and other USG partners is only becoming less and less suitable for Bitcoin applications as time goes on. Any proposal leaning on Moore's law for future "Bitcoin Scaling" is misguided on this point. Dumping MS Windows for Linux is no remedy to openly hostile computing hardware.  

5 thoughts on “Gavin and Toomim Present: "Classic" – Another Hard Fork Risk

  1. Someone looks reaaally butt hurt about the upcoming fork. lol

  2. The (archived "consider.it") is an excellent proof-by-anecdote of democracy's unsoundness for policy determination.

  3. "we've only invested about 15% of our hours into that branch" wtf does that mean?

    This "Classic" thing is the worst and most dishonest marketing I've seen. Not only the name is a sham, but democracy is not something that bitcoiners will want.

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