4 ms·

this is open source software - you act as if the seat can't be earned with enough commits.

smitherfield 11y ago
That's the thing; the core maintainers won't allow anyone new in. At least nobody who disagrees with their pretty much objectively harmful inaction on raising the transaction limit, a stance they've adopted out of extreme stubbornness combined with glaring financial conflicts of interest.
- derefr 11y ago
  I think the parent meant "unseated" as in LibreOffice unseating OpenOffice: the proper way to attempt a coup of a FOSS project is to fork it and outcompete it.
  - riffraff 11y ago
    but that has already happened, TFA is advocating moving to LibreOffice (BitcoinClassic).
    - 0x006A 11y ago
      BitcoinClassic has to do what LibreOffice has done first. Write more code, have more active developers, fix more bugs - be the better community for new developers etc. So far none of this happened.
      - CookieMon 11y ago
        Yeah, but that's a chicken and egg problem because unless/until BitcoinClassic outcompetes the other one, none of your code will ever get executed, so any developer wanting to scratch an itch must contribute to the existing bitcoin rather than BitcoinClassic. The dynamics don't work the same way as a traditonal FOSS fork. Perhaps getting mindshare first is the way.
      - bhaak 11y ago
        That has been tried before with XT and it failed. Bitcoin Classic is the attempt to change the reference implementation from the Core code to their code, by only changing as little as possible (that is, raising the 1 MB blocksize to 2 MB). The current problem is not being more open to other developers but to get a different reference implementation installed on full nodes and miners.
  - smitherfield 11y ago
    I know; and obviously Bitcoin Core aren't going to fire themselves. I'm just addressing the why they should be unseated, not the how. (It's worth noting that Bitcoin Core supporters have been DDOSing people running the various attempts at a "LibreOffice" that've been tried).
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
      - mhluongo 11y ago
        That's not the sort of DDoS going on here. Classic nodes are getting DOS'd in a way that Core is also vulnerable to. Classic hasn't activated yet. If Classic were already accepting 2MB blocks, the chain would have already forked.
    - nullc 11y ago
      DDOSing nodes does nothing to support Bitcoin Core. Bitcoin nodes get DDOSed from time to time-- e.g. people incorrectly believe they're the node for some service they think they can extort. Sometimes users on bufferbloat afflicted connections mistake other users fetching the chain from them as a DOS attack. That said, since these claims that people are DDOSing "Bitcoin classic" were first made, I've had someone running a classic node-- in the hope of identifying the attacker-- which has received no attacks. I don't believe the claimed attacks are widespread if they're even happening at all.
  - apatters 11y ago
    But Bitcoin isn't just a FOSS project -- it aspires to be a currency, even a financial system of sorts. Currencies have a network effect; the more widespread their adoption, the greater their gravity, making a popular currency difficult to supplant. I'm skeptical that the FOSS philosophy is the correct philosophy for anything which becomes harder to replace as it becomes more established.
    - derefr 11y ago
      It seems to me that the problem with Bitcoin is that its "consensus rules" (the flowchart to follow to decide a block of transactions as either being valid or invalid) aren't instantiated anywhere, but rather are just buried within the particular implementation details of BitcoinCore. In an ideal world, you'd split these up: 1. there'd be a currency steering committee (with some structure whose ideal form is above my pay-grade) that produces a machine-readable validity ruleset (sort of like a DTD or XML Schema); 2. and then there'd be a proliferation of competing clients that all know how to parse those rulesets, and use them to validate blocks; but which otherwise go about their business of being Bitcoin clients in entirely separate ways. With such a split, issues with the management of "BitcoinCore the FOSS reference client implementation" wouldn't overlap with issues with "Bitcoin, the ruleset that, in being instantiated in a majority of nodes, gives them a consensus chain." Instead, the first would just be a regular code project, no longer at-all critical; and the second would be something more like the project of defining a new version of e.g. the ePub standard, or of drafting an RFC.
      - gohrt 11y ago
        The challenge is that the rules are only legitimized by the clients choosing to follow them. You can't launch new rules until at least 50% of clients by weight are following those rules. There is no way for the ruleset to somehow disable or ignore a misbehaving client, you need consensus.
        derefr 11y ago
        Right, this would just make the difference explicit: given a good spec for defining the rulesets, a client would be able to just give a drop-down for which ruleset to follow (or allow you to point the client at your own by URL, etc.)
- kang 11y ago
  Please provide an example of person with loads of recent commits (past year or so) who wasn't allowed in.
  - smitherfield 11y ago
    I mean they don't add new people to the core, decision-making team (relevant to this controversy: those who decide the block size i.e. transaction limit). Now, many open source projects don't add new people to the core, decision-making team, but few open source projects are run by people who are acting in direct opposition to the [financial] interests of their userbase.
    - asdfaoeu 11y ago
      Sure, but they aren't being paid by their users so why should they follow their interests? Ideally the users should be paying for development they control but that of course would never happen because of the Tragedy of the Commons and such.
      - Nutomic 11y ago
        They should follow the user's interest because if they don't users will just leave Bitcoin for another cryptocurrency. Who wants to use a crypto that has 0.50$ fees, and takes hours to confirm a transaction?
        aianus 11y ago
        > Who wants to use a crypto that has 0.50$ fees, and takes hours to confirm a transaction? Just pointing out that that would still be an order of magnitude better than my current non-bitcoin options for forex/remittance ($100s, days).
  - daodedickinson 11y ago
    But if you really think that changes need to be made that the quintumvirate don't want to make... your commits aren't going to be approved.
- narrator 11y ago
  Authority in Bitcoin comes from hashing power not by credentials or anything else. Go and convince the Chinese mining pools to adopt someone's fork. These are the guys spending >$50k a month on electricity and millions of dollars in mining gear. You can also go start collecting Dogecoin or Ethereum or start your own crypto currency. Nobel Prize winner F.A Hayek in his book "The Denationalization of Money" suggested that in the future there should be multiple competing currencies anyway, not one uber currency to rule them all.
  - Nutomic 11y ago
    That's exactly what we're doing. Here's a chart for Bitcoin Classic blocks mined: https://coin.dance/blocks/classic https://coin.dance/blocks/classic
    - chx 11y ago
      What an uninformed amateur sees from this page is ... utter chaos in Total Miner Support by Proposal. BIP 100 leads but the BIP repo linked doesn't contain such a BIP, the link is broken. 8MB doesn't even have a link. The four of them together managed to convince 27% to change to something and 3.8% for classic is the last.
- maaku 11y ago
  What the heck are you talking about? The bitcoin core repo accepts contributions from any and all. There are new developers showing up all the time.
- 746F7475 11y ago
  This just makes me go: "well, duh". If I would come in on your current project and make changes you didn't agree with, would you "let me in"? If things are really so bad and Bitcoin is FOSS, why don't you (or whoever cares about rising the limit most) just fork the project and create Bitcoin 2.0. If this is truly best thing for the currency then everyone is bound to jump the ship and use your new currency.
  - Natanael_L 11y ago
    The forks XT and Classic are both trying to do that. XT was actively fought with things like DDoS attacks and lies and other foul play. Classic goes for a more moderate (IMHO too cowardly) increase, and is at least not being fought in the same way.

That's the thing; the core maintainers won't allow anyone new in. At least nobody who disagrees with their pretty much objectively harmful inaction on raising the transaction limit, a stance they've adopted out of extreme stubbornness combined with glaring financial conflicts of interest.

derefr 11y ago
I think the parent meant "unseated" as in LibreOffice unseating OpenOffice: the proper way to attempt a coup of a FOSS project is to fork it and outcompete it.
- riffraff 11y ago
  but that has already happened, TFA is advocating moving to LibreOffice (BitcoinClassic).
  - 0x006A 11y ago
    BitcoinClassic has to do what LibreOffice has done first. Write more code, have more active developers, fix more bugs - be the better community for new developers etc. So far none of this happened.
    - CookieMon 11y ago
      Yeah, but that's a chicken and egg problem because unless/until BitcoinClassic outcompetes the other one, none of your code will ever get executed, so any developer wanting to scratch an itch must contribute to the existing bitcoin rather than BitcoinClassic. The dynamics don't work the same way as a traditonal FOSS fork. Perhaps getting mindshare first is the way.
    - bhaak 11y ago
      That has been tried before with XT and it failed. Bitcoin Classic is the attempt to change the reference implementation from the Core code to their code, by only changing as little as possible (that is, raising the 1 MB blocksize to 2 MB). The current problem is not being more open to other developers but to get a different reference implementation installed on full nodes and miners.
- smitherfield 11y ago
  I know; and obviously Bitcoin Core aren't going to fire themselves. I'm just addressing the why they should be unseated, not the how. (It's worth noting that Bitcoin Core supporters have been DDOSing people running the various attempts at a "LibreOffice" that've been tried).
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
    - mhluongo 11y ago
      That's not the sort of DDoS going on here. Classic nodes are getting DOS'd in a way that Core is also vulnerable to. Classic hasn't activated yet. If Classic were already accepting 2MB blocks, the chain would have already forked.
  - nullc 11y ago
    DDOSing nodes does nothing to support Bitcoin Core. Bitcoin nodes get DDOSed from time to time-- e.g. people incorrectly believe they're the node for some service they think they can extort. Sometimes users on bufferbloat afflicted connections mistake other users fetching the chain from them as a DOS attack. That said, since these claims that people are DDOSing "Bitcoin classic" were first made, I've had someone running a classic node-- in the hope of identifying the attacker-- which has received no attacks. I don't believe the claimed attacks are widespread if they're even happening at all.
- apatters 11y ago
  But Bitcoin isn't just a FOSS project -- it aspires to be a currency, even a financial system of sorts. Currencies have a network effect; the more widespread their adoption, the greater their gravity, making a popular currency difficult to supplant. I'm skeptical that the FOSS philosophy is the correct philosophy for anything which becomes harder to replace as it becomes more established.
  - derefr 11y ago
    It seems to me that the problem with Bitcoin is that its "consensus rules" (the flowchart to follow to decide a block of transactions as either being valid or invalid) aren't instantiated anywhere, but rather are just buried within the particular implementation details of BitcoinCore. In an ideal world, you'd split these up: 1. there'd be a currency steering committee (with some structure whose ideal form is above my pay-grade) that produces a machine-readable validity ruleset (sort of like a DTD or XML Schema); 2. and then there'd be a proliferation of competing clients that all know how to parse those rulesets, and use them to validate blocks; but which otherwise go about their business of being Bitcoin clients in entirely separate ways. With such a split, issues with the management of "BitcoinCore the FOSS reference client implementation" wouldn't overlap with issues with "Bitcoin, the ruleset that, in being instantiated in a majority of nodes, gives them a consensus chain." Instead, the first would just be a regular code project, no longer at-all critical; and the second would be something more like the project of defining a new version of e.g. the ePub standard, or of drafting an RFC.
    - gohrt 11y ago
      The challenge is that the rules are only legitimized by the clients choosing to follow them. You can't launch new rules until at least 50% of clients by weight are following those rules. There is no way for the ruleset to somehow disable or ignore a misbehaving client, you need consensus.
      - derefr 11y ago
        Right, this would just make the difference explicit: given a good spec for defining the rulesets, a client would be able to just give a drop-down for which ruleset to follow (or allow you to point the client at your own by URL, etc.)
kang 11y ago
Please provide an example of person with loads of recent commits (past year or so) who wasn't allowed in.
- smitherfield 11y ago
  I mean they don't add new people to the core, decision-making team (relevant to this controversy: those who decide the block size i.e. transaction limit). Now, many open source projects don't add new people to the core, decision-making team, but few open source projects are run by people who are acting in direct opposition to the [financial] interests of their userbase.
  - asdfaoeu 11y ago
    Sure, but they aren't being paid by their users so why should they follow their interests? Ideally the users should be paying for development they control but that of course would never happen because of the Tragedy of the Commons and such.
    - Nutomic 11y ago
      They should follow the user's interest because if they don't users will just leave Bitcoin for another cryptocurrency. Who wants to use a crypto that has 0.50$ fees, and takes hours to confirm a transaction?
      - aianus 11y ago
        > Who wants to use a crypto that has 0.50$ fees, and takes hours to confirm a transaction? Just pointing out that that would still be an order of magnitude better than my current non-bitcoin options for forex/remittance ($100s, days).
- daodedickinson 11y ago
  But if you really think that changes need to be made that the quintumvirate don't want to make... your commits aren't going to be approved.
narrator 11y ago
Authority in Bitcoin comes from hashing power not by credentials or anything else. Go and convince the Chinese mining pools to adopt someone's fork. These are the guys spending >$50k a month on electricity and millions of dollars in mining gear. You can also go start collecting Dogecoin or Ethereum or start your own crypto currency. Nobel Prize winner F.A Hayek in his book "The Denationalization of Money" suggested that in the future there should be multiple competing currencies anyway, not one uber currency to rule them all.
- Nutomic 11y ago
  That's exactly what we're doing. Here's a chart for Bitcoin Classic blocks mined: https://coin.dance/blocks/classic https://coin.dance/blocks/classic
  - chx 11y ago
    What an uninformed amateur sees from this page is ... utter chaos in Total Miner Support by Proposal. BIP 100 leads but the BIP repo linked doesn't contain such a BIP, the link is broken. 8MB doesn't even have a link. The four of them together managed to convince 27% to change to something and 3.8% for classic is the last.
maaku 11y ago
What the heck are you talking about? The bitcoin core repo accepts contributions from any and all. There are new developers showing up all the time.
746F7475 11y ago
This just makes me go: "well, duh". If I would come in on your current project and make changes you didn't agree with, would you "let me in"? If things are really so bad and Bitcoin is FOSS, why don't you (or whoever cares about rising the limit most) just fork the project and create Bitcoin 2.0. If this is truly best thing for the currency then everyone is bound to jump the ship and use your new currency.
- Natanael_L 11y ago
  The forks XT and Classic are both trying to do that. XT was actively fought with things like DDoS attacks and lies and other foul play. Classic goes for a more moderate (IMHO too cowardly) increase, and is at least not being fought in the same way.