What about this argument below from Stefan Thomas:


Quoted from here:
https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/60433.msg714522#msg714522

There are many interesting and stimulating posts in this thread, and Gavin's OP was very well written; I would have liked to respond to several but I don't want to spam/dilute this thread. So I'll limit my response to this one. First, a disclaimer: I do not mine at Deepbit; I never have. I have nothing against Deepbit or Tycho, it is merely my personal choice.

Tycho, your point is absolutely valid. Asking for a 'vote' of the general mining populous on BIP16/17 is pointless. Yes, it is democratic. But in this case democracy wouldn't be wise. Most people are not in a position to know, or understand, or don't want to understand, or are incapable of understanding, the fundamental differences between the two proposals. Why one is 'better' than the other.

Essentially most of us are sheeple that will vote based on what other sheeple are doing and FUD.

I am not a dev, but I also don't consider myself a sheeple. I am able to realize that my vote is meaningless; I simply don't understand the technical aspects of the bitcoin protocol, nor do I understand the technical ramifications of each of the competing proposals. Perhaps one day I will feel confident enough to voice my (educated) opinion. But that day is not coming up any time soon.

I would think that most miners are in the same boat as me. They, like me, shouldn't be voting. IMHO the only people qualified to vote are the devs. People who truly understand the protocol, how it works, how it can break, how it can be exploited. Only the devs are in a position to truly see the advantages/disadvantages/risks of each of the 2 proposals.

This is why I say that the only people qualified to 'vote' are devs (rather, more accurately, people who have a deep understanding of the existing bitcoin protocol and underlying codebase). I trust that enough of them are unbiased, with no hidden agenda, and are truly motivated by a pure desire to better the bitcoin network. All that is required of them is to be courageous enough, mature enough, to discuss, present, review, and reach concensus amongst themselves.

We are all part of the same network, the same community. We are not competitors here; there are no 'bad guys' and 'good guys'. It is healthy to have different opinions, but it is also important to be able to see when that is being taken too far. If the majority of devs are pushing for one implementation, and a minority are pushing for another, the minority needs to concede and allow development to move forward. Otherwise nothing will get done. And this harms all of us.

You can not have a proper vote where if you do nothing a vote is counted one way, and do something (hard) the vote is counted the other.  You are going to get a # like 2% out of that. 

A proper vote would be people put in a code if they are against it, and a code if they are for it.  Can you imagine if the only way we passed a law was if we needed YES votes totaling half of the population and made it so that the vast majority of voters would not have the technical skills to vote?

Since we're trying to keep this non-technical (I'm not sure that's a good idea, so click the links if you can handle the details!), I'm going to try to come up with a more accurate analogy:

• BIP 12 (OP_EVAL) is inventing a touchscreen for your home security system. You can basically do whatever you want with to authenticate.
• BIP 16 is inventing a camera+touchscreen, but due to patents/closed-source or whatever you can only get it from one security company, and can't use any other security system in combination with it. Everything must be done through the touchscreen.
• BIP 17 (CHV) is inventing a lock mechanism that can be opened by not just the old flat keys, but also by various combinations of any of these old keys or pretty much anything imaginable, without an abstraction layer like the touchscreens.
  

Slush indicated to me that he isn't interested in researching the options, and will just go with whatever Gavin tells him to do.

This was mere speculation in private, IIRC when asked why Gavin is rushing things. I have no evidence, and haven't even looked at TruCoin's website to see if this might possibly be the case.

This applies to Gavin as well. "I'll just go with what Gavin says" is a bigger problem than "I'm mining on Deepbit" right now: DeepBit at least cut down on advertising due to concerns of the centralization, but Gavin seems to be encouraging the "just trust me" attitude.

No, BIP17/CHV does not execute data from the stack as BIP 12 and 16 do.

One problem IMO, is that Gavin has merged BIP 16 into git master, and set it up to force everyone using it to vote for it. To not vote you have to patch your client. I submitted a fix to make this optional 2 weeks ago and while he did say he'd accept it with a minor change a week ago (which I made immediately), it still isn't merged.

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For the record, I agree with the many people who think we should give this more time. However, my interest is only in avoiding the deep protocol change that BIP 16 makes, so I am fine with compromising on getting BIP 17 deployed sooner.

Also note that while BIP 16 might arguably be slightly simpler/deterministic in the specific implementation used in Bitcoin-Qt, BIP 17 is almost certainly generally simpler to implement, and in practice much simpler in terms of backports to bugfix-only bitcoind and Bitcoin-Qt clients.

I agree that asking which BIP to enable from the miners is stupid, a very large majority of them don't have a clue. But my point in all of this has been that most pool operators do not have a clue either which means that it's good to raise the awareness of all miners over this issue.

As far as the "just trust Gavin" issue is concerned, I for one don't think about it that way. This is exactly the reason why I want more transparency from the dev team. The dev team should be the one handling this. Vote amongst yourselves and come up with a compromise. A small minority must compromise if we want to make Bitcoin more than it is now.

So in conclusion I will list these following scenarios and if it's a problem:

A) Gavin says do what I say even though a good number of devs are against it and people still trust Gavin -> this is a problem
B) Gavin says do what I say and a large majority of devs agree with him -> this isn't a problem unless the minority is too stubborn to compromise

Based on what I've read in the forums, we are clearly at scenario B. Not a problem unless minority refuses to compromise. Clearly there is no compromise, yet. Whatever the scenario is, we need more transparency. Developers need to suck it up now, eat their pride and start coming up with answers among themselves.

technomage
this majority/minority of devs makes no sense for this issue
If even 1 of 10 devs thinks a certain solution is insecure/bad for the system - it should not be implemented
This is not deciding what color shoes you should buy. this decision will have implications on the future
you must learn the technical side of both arguments to understand what it is all about.
btw, I think both solutions are not good enough. And no i dont have a better idea.
but if i had to choose now i would go with bip17 - due to elegancy

i think both implementations have their problems and this is why gav opposed to bip17 and luke opposes bip16...
So why not listen to both of them?

The main problem is that it's an irrevocable change to the block chain if something goes poorly.

as far as i can see it is true for both BIPs