that was a great read. thanx.

i had suspected as much.  not being a coder but watching dozens of coders here and on reddit criticize bitterly not only Bitcoin's code but other code as well, i always got the feeling that it is just a given that everyone criticizes everyone elses code either out of envy or just trying to appear smarter than everyone else.  it's not like anyone can really tell or hold them accountable.  Peter Todd fell right into that trap yesterday on LTB with that stupid remark that Satoshi made a mistake.  just who the hell is Peter Todd?  answer: just an armchair critic who hasn't done anything significant with his life.  Satoshi was the best thing that ever happened to him; he provided himself as a target that can't defend himself from the likes of Peter.

both versions are on github.  Hearn's claims there is only 2 functional differences.

how hard would it to run a diff?  shouldn't be.  have you?

wish there was a thanks button on BCT

Interesting. I decided to read all Greg's recent posts and found one which makes his position much clearer.


He doesn't really want to engage in the mechanics of a block size increase right now, because his opinion is that the limit can be safely maxed out. I wish he had said this a couple of years ago in BCT because then the pros-and-cons of letting the limit be hit could have been hammered out before the question of how to change the limit needed addressing (which is the case now). Maybe he didn't say this two years ago because it wasn't his position then?

Compromise is very difficult when one side does not recognize that an urgent problem, or even just that a problem, exists.

He is looking at it from a very technical level. Advantages of hitting the limit is speeding the development of some software components, work in adversity etc, the downside is non-technical: a PR disaster, collapsing price, loss of VC enthusiasm, academics noting that a decentralized community cannot be trusted to manage a global currency. IMHO, these downsides far outweigh the technical, software benefits. It is simply playing with fire.

He also forgets that not all mining pools obeyed the soft-limits in 2013. A few didn't. e.g. when the soft-limit was 250KB Eligius was mining 500, when the soft-limit was 500 Eligius mined 750. There was always some level of extra capacity which does not exist at 1MB.

He repeatedly says that he is worried about centralization, loss of nodes. Well, the fact is the fastest way to kill^*off the most nodes at once is to quickly deploy a hard-fork. A hard-fork needs as much time as possible to be as smooth as possible, maintaining the network intact.

^*Nodes left on an old fork are not guaranteed to upgrade, some will just switch off.

Exactly. There's this weird mismatch in that he should be saying this *first* whenever the debate comes up. I didn't see him even comment on Mike Hearn's "Crash Landing" post, which is nevertheless the one everyone remembers and has in the back of their mind and directly opposes this position.

It's almost like he somehow wants to remain in his pessimistic curmudgeonly state, like he has a vested interest in it (not financial, but emotional/social). He has a way of not addressing the most key issues while looking like he is and looking like he's being the reasonable one. Now that I've read the Press Center thing I can see some parallels.

One classic Gmax thing is to make every statement interpretable in a safe way. For example, today's reddit post where someone was accusing Peter Todd of being biased against an increase because of his affiliation with Viacoin. I don't think there is much merit to the accusation (though that doesn't excuse Todd's sensationalism), but in Greg's reply he said, "Welcome to Reddit, 'Viacoin66'!"

He will say something that looks safe and unantagonizing (just the standard Reddit welcome), but his real purpose is to point out that the account was bran new and imply that it was obviously created to troll Viacoin/Todd. He's probably right about that, but nevertheless it's an example of what I mean where he'll say whatever serves any sort of low-blow purpose in a debate as long as it can be interpreted as not being that. I guess with his security testing mindset he has become Mr. Plausible Deniability.

OK, it's true that a lot of people do things similar to this in debate, but he has it down to an art. It has the effect of making him look blameless unless you know all the context and read between the lines. Again, I suspect this is part of core dev culture, where there is a lot of pressure not to appear inflammatory. Remember Gavin talking about "poisonous people" ruining projects (though he was talking about Luke)?

All good points. And yes, Greg's posts are full of clever sub-texts.

He did reply in the dev & tech on Mike's article, but only to hand-wave it away:
https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/1054181.msg11318788#msg11318788

It remains curious to me that such a strongly written article was largely ignored by the dev & tech contributors, who sometimes debate the minutiae of an obscure software topic. There was no attempt to determine whether Mike is broadly right or not, and maybe Greg's reply "put-off" other people echoing the concerns.

Those quotes are nice to see in one place. Some evidence of flexibility overall.

Yes, Luke was tagged "poisonous". He runs Eligius which I mentioned earlier, never played ball when the soft-limits were being tested, though Greg omits this fact, and any criticism of Luke for it.

The problem is that there are two very different things in play here:

• How humans think the Bitcoin protocol behaves
• What Bitcoin Core actually does

There is no case where a divergence between these two things is good. It means that despite years of effort Bitcoin Core is in some ways still a black box capable of surprising behaviour instead of predictable behaviour.

We have no guarantee that Bitcoin Core is self-consistent (like it wasn't in March 2013). Due to the way that code was written, it's likely that we never will have such a guarantee.

The only way out of this mess is to deprecate Bitcoin Core in favour of more-specifiable implementations as rapidly as possible.

If Bitcoin Core (and derivatives) were a minority of the nodes in the network, then the next time one of Bitcoin Core's surprises manifested it would be a problem that a minority of the network would need to fix instead of newly-discovered behaviour that the entire network would need to implement.

That work has already been done by the authors of btcd (btcsuite).

They do have some truly exceptional developers, particularly davec.

That he receives snubbing, derision, and personal attack for his efforts is a major example of how toxic and dysfunctional the Bitcoin development culture has become.

Some cypherpunks would do well to engage in soul searching regarding the question of so many of their flagship efforts (PGP) have been market failures.

Knowledge of cryptography doesn't automatically translate into understanding business, economics, engineering, or interface design.

The bug wasn't nearly so deterministic. Whether or not a particular block would trigger the bug depended on the runtime history of a particular node (when they started downloading blocks, how many orphans they had observed, etc) meaning that binary-identical versions of Bitcoin Core running on machines with identical hardware could exhibit divergent behaviour based on them connecting to different peers at different times.

Would have been a good idea to do from the beginning. I'm not sure if the existing code can be cleaned up well enough to make a meaningful difference.

he posts the same BS over on Reddit.

It's not that black and white, I think everyone has learned more since the bad idea of "green" listing and being able to use money to track child porn.

Those stupid ideas are not death sentences, they are warning signals they are examples of why we need to constantly pay attention to maintain Bitcoin.

Gavin and Mike have moved on it seems and so long as I'm not the benevolent dictator Mike H would like I'm happy to see debate and the majority direct Bitcoin.

My understand is flexible and I won't hesitate to drop XT if it's moving in the direction of adding tracking features and educate the majority.