6 ms·

A Bitcoin Believer’s Crisis of Faith

96 points by chollida1 11y ago

smaili 11y ago
A bit off topic, but did he literally let a reporter into his house and take a photo of him in his bed - or is that just a stock photo? Either way a bit creepy...
- Hermel 11y ago
  I think this is a couch.
  - darkr 11y ago
    Looks like a big pouffe to me
- seibelj 11y ago
  I can imagine the photographer saying, "We need a hacker shot, look like you stay up all night coding alone in your dark apartment. Excellent"
chollida1 11y ago
I thought this article was interesting because it highlights the problem when there is a lack of strong governance in an open source project. After talking to a bunch of financial firms about bitcoin I've got the sense that the strong consensus is that they don't believe the core bitcoin team "has their act together" in terms of a coherent road map, or possibly more charitably, that the core team isn't at all interested in having the transaction limit increased. This means that that if bitcoin, or other related technologies like the block chain are going to be adopted by companies to run real businesses on then either the companies themselves will own the technology roadmap or some other entity with a fair bit of credibility will have to step in.
- roymurdock 11y ago
  It's fascinating to me that someone paid the Russian hacker to develop such a comprehensive and powerful solution to kill XT. That couldn't have been cheap. But it also wouldn't make sense for a large GPU/ASIC miner to block the move to XT, as it would have favored their hardware over those mining on regular CPUs. So it must have been an ideologically-driven attack? But it defeats the main ideological purpose of the protocol - democratic consensus as nodes decide to accept or reject changes to the client. Weird and paradoxical.
  - droffel 11y ago
    ASICs are basically it these days, GPUs and CPUs are only used by hobbyists at this point. The reduced energy requirements of ASICs over GPUs has made it basically a requirement to use ASICs, as energy costs can't be amortized over the lifetime of the miner (while the fixed cost to buy the miner can).
  - CyberDildonics 11y ago
    The moderator of the now heavily censored (they've blocked many original developers along with the biggest bitcoin companies) reddit/r/bitcoin took donations a long time ago to build a forum and when the value shot through the roof he ignored anyone's pleas to give back the money - valued around $3 million at some point (I think). He is also one of the primary people threatened by an increase in blocksize as it will threaten the company he is involved in - blockstream. So there are some very plausible theories as to who would do something like that.
  - brazzledazzle 11y ago
    My first thought was someone with a financial interest in a company like Blockstream since they seem to have a vested interest in the status quo.
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  The Bitcoin Core team does have a roadmap: https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/capacity-increases-faq https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/capacity-increases-faq
roymurdock 11y ago
> Unlike the Federal Reserve and Wall Street, institutions that are managed by humans, Bitcoin was supposed to rest on the infallible logic of math and computer code. In this system, programmers like Mr. Hearn, who often volunteered their expertise and effort, were viewed as neutral technicians. This is the key. If the neutrality and technical/economic/ethical character of the lead developers is called into question, Bitcoin (just a flavored brand of blockchain) is done. An untrustworthy/biased dev team could adjust the cap, difficulty, etc. for their own gain or that of their sponsors. While this would probably cause the majority of nodes to fork the chain and reject a bad update, it would leave the protocol without strong leadership and call the brand into question. Will be interested to see how this plays out with the dev environment around bitcoin becoming so toxic and ideologically split.
jimrandomh 11y ago
Disagreement over an important technical decision gets politicized and spirals out of control. An anonymous DDoS and death threats against developers fan the flames, and key figures bow out. Who did that? There is a significant contingent of people promoting Bitcoin as a force that will eventually undermine the power of governments. This can hardly have escaped their notice. Perhaps one of them saw a conflict brewing, and decided to opportunistically fan the flames?
- guelo 11y ago
  There's really no need to add unfounded conspiracy theories like yours to the public discussion.
  - jimrandomh 11y ago
    It's a known fact of psychology that people fight less if they believe they have a shared enemy. In this case, there is what looks like enemy action (anonymous DDoSing and death threats) directed at both sides of the block-size conflict, appearing to come from across the aisle but definitely anonymous. Why not speculate on possible third parties that could be responsible? Maybe it'll make them notice they both just want Bitcoin to succeed.
    - ceejayoz 11y ago
      It's also a known fact that it doesn't take insidious government involvement to get a bunch of programmer-ideologues to get political and spiral out of control.
- doctorfoo 11y ago
  Most people in the Bitcoin community have a pretty shrewd idea who is responsible for the DDoSing. But no proof, of course. (Hint: Certain libertarian leaning early adopters who want Bitcoin to remain as a government-proof store of value, viewing any small reduction in decentralisation to be a terrible thing, and not caring about its use as an actual payment network)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Hermel 11y ago
Here is what will happen (my guess): as Bitcoin usage continues to grow, the limited capacity will start to hurt over the coming months, with the planned "segregated witness" proposal not helping much. Also, the block reward will be cut in half this summer to 12.5 Bitcoins per block, driving many miners out of business and reminding the rest that they could earn more with larger blocks. Furthermore, some of the affected companies (e.g. Coinbase) will announce rewards for larger blocks mined (e.g. 1 Bitcoin reward for each block above 1MB for the next 1000 blocks), making the first miners jump to the new protocol (the much feared hard fork), with the others following soon after the most popular exchanges announce that they will not accept "old branch" coins.
HappyTypist 11y ago
To give everyone some background on the block size debate, here is a recap: "Small blockers" propose keeping the block size at 1 MB, essentially 5 real transactions per second. They argue that the bigger blocks are, the less people will be able to run a fully validating node, and the network will less decentralised. They want Bitcoin to be a base layer for bank and network settlement. A 1mb limit means that there is a very low "production quota" for block space. As with every quota, prices will rise - ie Bitcoin network fees will go higher. Currently fees are about 4 cents per transaction. They're anticipating a three orders of magnitude increase. But that's okay, or they say. Banks can pay $400 to move a million. A typical user can't. So they must use something else. Most of the "small blockers" are employees of a VC-funded company named Blockstream. They are building things that bypass the Bitcoin network, occasionally settle, and charge it's own set of fees. Oh yes you don't pay Bitcoin fees. You pay our fees. That's claimed to be a major selling point. Also, bitcoin currently handles "zero confirmations" pretty well. That's because the miners will refuse to mine double spends if it knows about them. These big blockers have removed that functionality. Yes, lightning handles 0 confirms! On the other side, there are "large blockers". These people believe the block size should be raised in accordance to natural evolution of hardware progression. 2MB today, 4MB in 2 years, dynamic adaptive limit, whatever. They think there shouldn't be a artificially ceiling on Bitcoins transaction volume, and people should be able to use the Bitcoin network directly. Fees would be reasonable. Instead of 10 people paying $4, they want 100 people paying $0.40 or 1000 people paying $0.04. Pretty simple. I think you might be wondering why there is a limit in the first place. Back in 2010 someone made huge blocks. So satoshi put in a crude, static anti DoS limit. Back then the average transaction volume was 10 kB, so the limit was set to 100x the average transaction load.
- pbreit 11y ago
  As ingenious as this all is, it seems even more preposterous. I think I'll go spend some money now without thinking about for even a nan-second.
Animats 11y ago
The Bitcoin "core developers" don't matter. It's the big miners who matter. Both of them. What Antpool[1] and F2pool[2] decide is what Bitcoin does. They have 52% of mining capacity. Jihan Wu, CEO of Antpool, and Wang Chun, chief administrator of F2pool, rule Bitcoin. They're the ones in charge. Not the "core developers". And certainly not the Bitcoin Foundation clown car. [1] https://www.antpool.com https://www.antpool.com [2] https://www.f2pool.com https://www.f2pool.com
- roymurdock 11y ago
  It is often asserted (for example, in the Bitcoin white paper [22]) that a cartel can double-spend Bitcoins. In a strict sense, this is true: a cartel can spend a Bitcoin by paying it to a player Alice, receiving goods or services, and then shifting the consensus choice of history to a branch where that coin is instead paid to a different player Bob. However, we argue that double-spending by a cartel has a limited payoff. Bitcoins have value because people are willing to trade them for goods and services. If players were unwilling to accept Bitcoins for trade or unwilling to spend Bitcoins for fear of having their payments nullified, the value of Bitcoins would diminish significantly as players lost confidence in the system. Worse, because players are encouraged to generate a new identity for each transaction and because identities are not linked to any side information, players cannot easily determine whether a proffered payment is coming from the double-spending cartel or an honest user. Thus, a rational player should refuse to accept any payments when there is a significant threat of double-spending. As a cartel must outmine the entire Bitcoin network and thus outspend the entire Bitcoin network for as long as it would remain a cartel, we believe it is very unlikely that a cartel could double-spend enough to recover the cost of the attack. An interesting facet of mining cartels is that they can censor certain transactions. The cartel can choose to ignore any transaction it does not want appended to the log. Further, the cartel can choose to treat any blocks appended by others to the log as forks which it will not attempt to extend. Thus, other players will naturally also abandon these transactions, possibly even consciously if the cartel announces that certain transactions (or transactors) are disfavored. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~kroll/papers/weis13_bitcoin.pdf https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~kroll/papers/weis13_bitcoin.pd...
  - 11y ago
afreak 11y ago
There are three types of people who are into Bitcoin: 1. People who are in it out of sheer curiosity. 2. People who are in it to get rich quick. 3. People who have been scammed into it. The people who are in it out of curiosity are the people I don't take issue with. At its beginnings, I found Bitcoin to be a curious thing because it was a novel and new idea. However, as things progressed and I learnt more about how it all worked, I saw it as a cumbersome idea that wouldn't effectively replace anything and as a result now I'd rather make jokes about it than take anything about it seriously. I've never spent more than $20 CAD on Bitcoin and I have gotten it all back for that matter too. People who get scammed into Bitcoin typically get scammed either one of two ways: they're either being coerced into using it because they've gotten something like malware on their machines (CryptoWall and its variants) or they see it as an investment alternative. The only times I've ever seen non-technical people experience Bitcoin is when I have to tell them that the malware on their computers will only release their unbacked-up data requires a payment using the cryptocurrency to get it all back. And that is really what a non-technical person's experience with Bitcoin is going to be: it's a way to pay thieves. As for the get rich quick people, they tend to fall into the third category or they themselves are scammers. Right now there are two forces dominating the Bitcoin community: the miners and those who are holding out on whatever magical unicorn rainbows makes the coins have value. The miners don't want to see changes to the software because it'll hurt their bottom line and the people holding and exchanging it want to see these changes so they can benefit. So as a result, Bitcoin has entered a war of attrition and is starting to show its problems. Mike Hearn's leaving is definitely a consequence of this problem. Earlier yesterday [1], I made a quip about how it's insulting to suggest that we get those who are "unbanked" as a result of living at no-fixed-address (ie: "homeless") should eventually move on to Bitcoin as an alternative to mainstream financial institutions. It's really for the reasons that Hearn made: would you want to wait a random period of time ranging from maybe a few minutes to a few hours for your transaction to go through? It's already insulting enough that they're living at the bottom of society, so why would we want to get them to use a bottom-tier financial system? Why not instead suggest making it easier for them to participate within mainstream banking schemes? I anticipate based on my last remarks that the responses to this post will consist of feckless anecdotes and pointless accusations that I and others have a "problem" with Bitcoin. I guess to a certain extent the statement of me having a problem is true, but at the end of the day Hearn is right. Bitcoin is a failure and if you invested into it then you're getting what you deserve. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10898408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10898408
namecast 11y ago
Worth reminding people: On August 15th, 2015, Mike Hearn announced Bitcoin XT, and his attempt to fork the blockchain: https://medium.com/faith-and-future/why-is-bitcoin-forking-d647312d22c1#.cdoemw4gh https://medium.com/faith-and-future/why-is-bitcoin-forking-d... On January 14th, 2016, 5 months later, Mike has unilaterally declared Bitcoin to be a failed experiment. In the intervening period, support for XT was at best minimal, and that's being charitable. There is a phrase we use in my neck of the woods when developers behave like this, and "responsible grown up behavior" isn't it.
- brazzledazzle 11y ago
  There's some serious accusations of sabotage in that article. It hardly seems like a hissy-fit in that context.
seliopou 11y ago
tl;dr: "Money" is political. If you don't think it is, well, that's a political statement about "money."
runn1ng 11y ago
This is the actual medium post, where Mike expresses his frustrations and what this article is referencing. It explains things rather well. https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7 https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin...
dang 11y ago
Since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905118 is also on the front page and is the original source, we've demoted the current thread as a dupe. But both are worth reading. (We plan to build something to aggregate related URLs, so this should become less of an issue at some point.)
pbreit 11y ago
If bitcoin is such a disaster, why is the price holding firm or even increasing?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

96 points by chollida1 11y ago

A bit off topic, but did he literally let a reporter into his house and take a photo of him in his bed - or is that just a stock photo? Either way a bit creepy...

Hermel 11y ago
I think this is a couch.
- darkr 11y ago
  Looks like a big pouffe to me
seibelj 11y ago
I can imagine the photographer saying, "We need a hacker shot, look like you stay up all night coding alone in your dark apartment. Excellent"

chollida1 11y ago

I thought this article was interesting because it highlights the problem when there is a lack of strong governance in an open source project. After talking to a bunch of financial firms about bitcoin I've got the sense that the strong consensus is that they don't believe the core bitcoin team "has their act together" in terms of a coherent road map, or possibly more charitably, that the core team isn't at all interested in having the transaction limit increased. This means that that if bitcoin, or other related technologies like the block chain are going to be adopted by companies to run real businesses on then either the companies themselves will own the technology roadmap or some other entity with a fair bit of credibility will have to step in.

roymurdock 11y ago
It's fascinating to me that someone paid the Russian hacker to develop such a comprehensive and powerful solution to kill XT. That couldn't have been cheap. But it also wouldn't make sense for a large GPU/ASIC miner to block the move to XT, as it would have favored their hardware over those mining on regular CPUs. So it must have been an ideologically-driven attack? But it defeats the main ideological purpose of the protocol - democratic consensus as nodes decide to accept or reject changes to the client. Weird and paradoxical.
- droffel 11y ago
  ASICs are basically it these days, GPUs and CPUs are only used by hobbyists at this point. The reduced energy requirements of ASICs over GPUs has made it basically a requirement to use ASICs, as energy costs can't be amortized over the lifetime of the miner (while the fixed cost to buy the miner can).
- CyberDildonics 11y ago
  The moderator of the now heavily censored (they've blocked many original developers along with the biggest bitcoin companies) reddit/r/bitcoin took donations a long time ago to build a forum and when the value shot through the roof he ignored anyone's pleas to give back the money - valued around $3 million at some point (I think). He is also one of the primary people threatened by an increase in blocksize as it will threaten the company he is involved in - blockstream. So there are some very plausible theories as to who would do something like that.
- brazzledazzle 11y ago
  My first thought was someone with a financial interest in a company like Blockstream since they seem to have a vested interest in the status quo.
TD-Linux 11y ago
The Bitcoin Core team does have a roadmap: https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/capacity-increases-faq https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/capacity-increases-faq

roymurdock 11y ago

> Unlike the Federal Reserve and Wall Street, institutions that are managed by humans, Bitcoin was supposed to rest on the infallible logic of math and computer code. In this system, programmers like Mr. Hearn, who often volunteered their expertise and effort, were viewed as neutral technicians. This is the key. If the neutrality and technical/economic/ethical character of the lead developers is called into question, Bitcoin (just a flavored brand of blockchain) is done. An untrustworthy/biased dev team could adjust the cap, difficulty, etc. for their own gain or that of their sponsors. While this would probably cause the majority of nodes to fork the chain and reject a bad update, it would leave the protocol without strong leadership and call the brand into question. Will be interested to see how this plays out with the dev environment around bitcoin becoming so toxic and ideologically split.

jimrandomh 11y ago

Disagreement over an important technical decision gets politicized and spirals out of control. An anonymous DDoS and death threats against developers fan the flames, and key figures bow out. Who did that? There is a significant contingent of people promoting Bitcoin as a force that will eventually undermine the power of governments. This can hardly have escaped their notice. Perhaps one of them saw a conflict brewing, and decided to opportunistically fan the flames?

guelo 11y ago
There's really no need to add unfounded conspiracy theories like yours to the public discussion.
- jimrandomh 11y ago
  It's a known fact of psychology that people fight less if they believe they have a shared enemy. In this case, there is what looks like enemy action (anonymous DDoSing and death threats) directed at both sides of the block-size conflict, appearing to come from across the aisle but definitely anonymous. Why not speculate on possible third parties that could be responsible? Maybe it'll make them notice they both just want Bitcoin to succeed.
  - ceejayoz 11y ago
    It's also a known fact that it doesn't take insidious government involvement to get a bunch of programmer-ideologues to get political and spiral out of control.
doctorfoo 11y ago
Most people in the Bitcoin community have a pretty shrewd idea who is responsible for the DDoSing. But no proof, of course. (Hint: Certain libertarian leaning early adopters who want Bitcoin to remain as a government-proof store of value, viewing any small reduction in decentralisation to be a terrible thing, and not caring about its use as an actual payment network)

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Hermel 11y ago

Here is what will happen (my guess): as Bitcoin usage continues to grow, the limited capacity will start to hurt over the coming months, with the planned "segregated witness" proposal not helping much. Also, the block reward will be cut in half this summer to 12.5 Bitcoins per block, driving many miners out of business and reminding the rest that they could earn more with larger blocks. Furthermore, some of the affected companies (e.g. Coinbase) will announce rewards for larger blocks mined (e.g. 1 Bitcoin reward for each block above 1MB for the next 1000 blocks), making the first miners jump to the new protocol (the much feared hard fork), with the others following soon after the most popular exchanges announce that they will not accept "old branch" coins.

HappyTypist 11y ago

To give everyone some background on the block size debate, here is a recap: "Small blockers" propose keeping the block size at 1 MB, essentially 5 real transactions per second. They argue that the bigger blocks are, the less people will be able to run a fully validating node, and the network will less decentralised. They want Bitcoin to be a base layer for bank and network settlement. A 1mb limit means that there is a very low "production quota" for block space. As with every quota, prices will rise - ie Bitcoin network fees will go higher. Currently fees are about 4 cents per transaction. They're anticipating a three orders of magnitude increase. But that's okay, or they say. Banks can pay $400 to move a million. A typical user can't. So they must use something else. Most of the "small blockers" are employees of a VC-funded company named Blockstream. They are building things that bypass the Bitcoin network, occasionally settle, and charge it's own set of fees. Oh yes you don't pay Bitcoin fees. You pay our fees. That's claimed to be a major selling point. Also, bitcoin currently handles "zero confirmations" pretty well. That's because the miners will refuse to mine double spends if it knows about them. These big blockers have removed that functionality. Yes, lightning handles 0 confirms! On the other side, there are "large blockers". These people believe the block size should be raised in accordance to natural evolution of hardware progression. 2MB today, 4MB in 2 years, dynamic adaptive limit, whatever. They think there shouldn't be a artificially ceiling on Bitcoins transaction volume, and people should be able to use the Bitcoin network directly. Fees would be reasonable. Instead of 10 people paying $4, they want 100 people paying $0.40 or 1000 people paying $0.04. Pretty simple. I think you might be wondering why there is a limit in the first place. Back in 2010 someone made huge blocks. So satoshi put in a crude, static anti DoS limit. Back then the average transaction volume was 10 kB, so the limit was set to 100x the average transaction load.

pbreit 11y ago
As ingenious as this all is, it seems even more preposterous. I think I'll go spend some money now without thinking about for even a nan-second.

Animats 11y ago

The Bitcoin "core developers" don't matter. It's the big miners who matter. Both of them. What Antpool[1] and F2pool[2] decide is what Bitcoin does. They have 52% of mining capacity. Jihan Wu, CEO of Antpool, and Wang Chun, chief administrator of F2pool, rule Bitcoin. They're the ones in charge. Not the "core developers". And certainly not the Bitcoin Foundation clown car. [1] https://www.antpool.com https://www.antpool.com [2] https://www.f2pool.com https://www.f2pool.com

roymurdock 11y ago
It is often asserted (for example, in the Bitcoin white paper [22]) that a cartel can double-spend Bitcoins. In a strict sense, this is true: a cartel can spend a Bitcoin by paying it to a player Alice, receiving goods or services, and then shifting the consensus choice of history to a branch where that coin is instead paid to a different player Bob. However, we argue that double-spending by a cartel has a limited payoff. Bitcoins have value because people are willing to trade them for goods and services. If players were unwilling to accept Bitcoins for trade or unwilling to spend Bitcoins for fear of having their payments nullified, the value of Bitcoins would diminish significantly as players lost confidence in the system. Worse, because players are encouraged to generate a new identity for each transaction and because identities are not linked to any side information, players cannot easily determine whether a proffered payment is coming from the double-spending cartel or an honest user. Thus, a rational player should refuse to accept any payments when there is a significant threat of double-spending. As a cartel must outmine the entire Bitcoin network and thus outspend the entire Bitcoin network for as long as it would remain a cartel, we believe it is very unlikely that a cartel could double-spend enough to recover the cost of the attack. An interesting facet of mining cartels is that they can censor certain transactions. The cartel can choose to ignore any transaction it does not want appended to the log. Further, the cartel can choose to treat any blocks appended by others to the log as forks which it will not attempt to extend. Thus, other players will naturally also abandon these transactions, possibly even consciously if the cartel announces that certain transactions (or transactors) are disfavored. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~kroll/papers/weis13_bitcoin.pdf https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~kroll/papers/weis13_bitcoin.pd...
- 11y ago

afreak 11y ago

There are three types of people who are into Bitcoin: 1. People who are in it out of sheer curiosity. 2. People who are in it to get rich quick. 3. People who have been scammed into it. The people who are in it out of curiosity are the people I don't take issue with. At its beginnings, I found Bitcoin to be a curious thing because it was a novel and new idea. However, as things progressed and I learnt more about how it all worked, I saw it as a cumbersome idea that wouldn't effectively replace anything and as a result now I'd rather make jokes about it than take anything about it seriously. I've never spent more than $20 CAD on Bitcoin and I have gotten it all back for that matter too. People who get scammed into Bitcoin typically get scammed either one of two ways: they're either being coerced into using it because they've gotten something like malware on their machines (CryptoWall and its variants) or they see it as an investment alternative. The only times I've ever seen non-technical people experience Bitcoin is when I have to tell them that the malware on their computers will only release their unbacked-up data requires a payment using the cryptocurrency to get it all back. And that is really what a non-technical person's experience with Bitcoin is going to be: it's a way to pay thieves. As for the get rich quick people, they tend to fall into the third category or they themselves are scammers. Right now there are two forces dominating the Bitcoin community: the miners and those who are holding out on whatever magical unicorn rainbows makes the coins have value. The miners don't want to see changes to the software because it'll hurt their bottom line and the people holding and exchanging it want to see these changes so they can benefit. So as a result, Bitcoin has entered a war of attrition and is starting to show its problems. Mike Hearn's leaving is definitely a consequence of this problem. Earlier yesterday [1], I made a quip about how it's insulting to suggest that we get those who are "unbanked" as a result of living at no-fixed-address (ie: "homeless") should eventually move on to Bitcoin as an alternative to mainstream financial institutions. It's really for the reasons that Hearn made: would you want to wait a random period of time ranging from maybe a few minutes to a few hours for your transaction to go through? It's already insulting enough that they're living at the bottom of society, so why would we want to get them to use a bottom-tier financial system? Why not instead suggest making it easier for them to participate within mainstream banking schemes? I anticipate based on my last remarks that the responses to this post will consist of feckless anecdotes and pointless accusations that I and others have a "problem" with Bitcoin. I guess to a certain extent the statement of me having a problem is true, but at the end of the day Hearn is right. Bitcoin is a failure and if you invested into it then you're getting what you deserve. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10898408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10898408

namecast 11y ago

Worth reminding people: On August 15th, 2015, Mike Hearn announced Bitcoin XT, and his attempt to fork the blockchain: https://medium.com/faith-and-future/why-is-bitcoin-forking-d647312d22c1#.cdoemw4gh https://medium.com/faith-and-future/why-is-bitcoin-forking-d... On January 14th, 2016, 5 months later, Mike has unilaterally declared Bitcoin to be a failed experiment. In the intervening period, support for XT was at best minimal, and that's being charitable. There is a phrase we use in my neck of the woods when developers behave like this, and "responsible grown up behavior" isn't it.

brazzledazzle 11y ago
There's some serious accusations of sabotage in that article. It hardly seems like a hissy-fit in that context.

seliopou 11y ago

tl;dr: "Money" is political. If you don't think it is, well, that's a political statement about "money."

runn1ng 11y ago

This is the actual medium post, where Mike expresses his frustrations and what this article is referencing. It explains things rather well. https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7 https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin...

dang 11y ago

Since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905118 is also on the front page and is the original source, we've demoted the current thread as a dupe. But both are worth reading. (We plan to build something to aggregate related URLs, so this should become less of an issue at some point.)

pbreit 11y ago

If bitcoin is such a disaster, why is the price holding firm or even increasing?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]