History of bitcoin XT

[Niko]

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." [6] On December 27, 2014 Hearn released version 0.10 of the client, with the BIP 64 changes. [7] It was intended to support queries for his Lighthouse crowdfunding platform project. [Citation needed]

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 eight MB blocks (doubling in size every two years) once 75% of a stretch of 1,000 mined blocks is achieved after the beginning of 2016. [8] The new maximum transaction rate under XT would have been 24 transactions per second. [9]

On August 6, 2015 Andresen's BIP101 proposal was merged into the XT codebase. [10] On August 15, 2015 version 0.11A was released to the public. [11] [12] Bip 101 was reverted [13] and the 2-MB block size bump of Bitcoin Classic was applied instead.

According to bitcoin statistics website coin.dance the software peaked at more than 1,000 nodes in August 2015 before declining to a second peak in January 2016 of around 670 nodes. [14] From March 2016 the program was seen a consistent decline in its user base to less than 30 instances in January 2017. [14

Reception:

The August 2015 release of XT received widespread media coverage. The Guardianwrote that "bitcoin is facing civil war." [1] Reason described that "Bitcoin XT represents a technical and philosophical divergence." [15] 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. "[16] Developer Adam Back was critical of the 75% activation threshold being too low and that some of the changes were insecure. [ 17]

In any event, the XT hard fork stalled. On 11 January 2016, the earliest possible date for the transition to take effect, only approximately 10% 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. 18] The software lacked the support of some of China's largest mining pools. [19] The Bitcoin community response to the software has been attributed to the adherence to gradual change based on consensus. [20]

Bitcoin Cash support:



On August 25, 2017, Bitcoin XT published Release G, which was a Bitcoin Cash client by default. [5] Subsequently, Release H was published, which supported the November 2017 Bitcoin Cash protocol upgrade, followed by Release I, which supported the May 2018 Bitcoin Cash protocol upgrad.