12 ms·

Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

115 points by sethbannon 11y ago

BinaryIdiot 11y ago
So this is #3 of the Satoshi Roundtable notes and opinions that have made it to HN, as far as I can tell (I was initially confused and thought this was a re-submission of Brian Armstrong's notes https://medium.com/@barmstrong/what-happened-at-the-satoshi-roundtable-6c11a10d8cdf https://medium.com/@barmstrong/what-happened-at-the-satoshi-...). As someone who has dabbled into the bitcoin and block chain area but never seriously, all of these reports and the constant reporting of the serious issues facing bitcoin with little to no consensus about what's going to be done to scale it just scares me away from touching it. Maybe I'm just not understanding the issue in its entirety but many of the opinions just keep talking about how uncooperative everyone is, how wrong or right one group is versus another and no solutions are really being worked on that expect to be accepted. Blockchain is cool tech but bitcoin itself seems like a horribly immature place to ever put real money into.
- w1ntermute 11y ago
  It seems very likely that building anything on top of Bitcoin will be seen in retrospect as a mistake, because the platform is controlled by a group of unpredictable individuals. You can't even predict the most likely outcome and plan accordingly.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    Bitcoin does seem to lack effective leadership. This dates back to Satoshi leaving: he handed over the reins to people who didn't want them.
- bhaak 11y ago
  Your impression is spot on. Nevertheless there are still lots of people who have lots of money in it and that's part of the problem why there is so much controversy and why some people don't want to move away from their position. If you are interested in blockchain technology you don't have to go to bitcoin. There are lots of other cryptocurrencies where you could learn about it. Ethereum is currently the new kid on the block. Ethereum is often described as "Bitcoin 2.0". Better technology, better leadership, no toxic community, IMHO it looks like how bitcoin should look like (at least for now, who knows what it will be like in a year). Because of that lots of money has been going to Ethereum altely, even long time hodlers of bitcoin have sold bitcoin to get some ether.
  - vertex-four 11y ago
    Ethereum has the same potential scaling issues as Bitcoin and has not yet defined a plan for scaling infinitely, aside from pushing for the development of technologies which move some forms of communication off the blockchain entirely. At the point where Ethereum gets to where Bitcoin is now, it's entirely possible its community could have exactly the same issue.
    - bhaak 11y ago
      "Scaling infinitely" is a pretty steep requirement. I wouldn't go there yet, either implementation of the blockchain technology is useful long before the insane transactions per seconds which VISA is handling. But yes, Ethereum has similar constraints as Bitcoin. Vitalik did some scalability blog posts on https://blog.ethereum.org/ https://blog.ethereum.org/ but it's entirely possible that any blockchain technology just won't scale as we would like it to (that is, as good as a centralized approach). OTOH, if there is a good technological solution, currently I have much more confidence that it gets implemented in Ethereum than in Bitcoin. The current infighting, bickering and actual threats and actions (e.g. DDOS at dissenting miners) is slowly but steadily destroying the Bitcoin community.
- rsi_oww 11y ago
  There is near complete consensus, see: https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-consensus-266d475a61ff https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-con... Nearly every developer, along with the vast majority of miners, have agreed to this. The group that did not agree (Coinbase, 2 developers, and some small miners) is extremely good at social media and has done a great job of spreading a false story of "serious scaling problems" and "developers can't reach consensus". It's simply not true. They want to take over the bitcoin network with a fork, which will follow different rules, called "Bitcoin Classic". This is their second attempt at a takeover, the last was the failed "Bitcoin XT" fork. There is no sane reason to fork the network short of trying to take control of the protocol. Here is the roadmap that the main Bitcoin ("core") team has put together and is working on: https://bitcoincore.org/en/2015/12/23/capacity-increases-faq/ https://bitcoincore.org/en/2015/12/23/capacity-increases-faq...
  - jhildings 11y ago
    But still, the thing is that regardless of who is right there is a bias in the most comments, including yours. This is the conflict that is bad it itself
  - Vespasian 11y ago
    Your reply is demonstrating the parents issues with the discussion perfectly. Anyone not closely following the situtation(such as myself) just sees a enormously heated up discussion (I was reminded of [1]). Every party involved is accusing the others of spreading lies,misrepresenting the situation and trying to take control over the blockchain/bitcoin/protocol. Based on that, I have difficulties understanding and evaluating the potential technical and political challenges. Bitcoin (and similar crypto currencies) seem to be a huge risk at the moment: Everything might collapse tomorrow (or not). The market could be split into incompatible segments(or not). One entity could become strong enough to take control of the network and enact unfavourable policies(or not). Right now,I do not see why somenone would decide to start investing (time and money) into bitcoin while there are generally accepted, scaled up and working solutions for the underlying problem of getting money from A to B (Banks Credit cards, etc). These work fine for most people/companies and their cost and risks can be estimated fairly well in advance. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
LAMike 11y ago
The lack of product managers and an abundance of engineers is both the weakness/strength of the protocol. They have maybe 12 months of runway before everyone loses faith and sells, and by everyone, I mean me.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  > They have maybe 12 months of runway before everyone loses faith and sells, and by everyone, I mean me. They're taking so long to even decide on a solution that I'm not convinced it's going to happen without fracturing. In fact, because of how this known problem has been creeping up with piss poor direction with solving the problem, I do not believe bitcoin is mature enough to put any serious money in it. Gamble, play with it but why would anyone put any serious money into it especially now?
  - BinaryResult 11y ago
    One reason may be that the rate of issuance of new coins is going to be cut in half in 4 months.
- paavokoya 11y ago
  >They have maybe 12 months of runway before everyone loses faith and sells Yeah, and I'm gonna stop using the internet because the http protocol isn't exactly how I want it. Grow up.
  - bdcravens 11y ago
    Http has "won" because it meets needs other alternative protocols didn't. After 25 years, it's beyond incumbent. (Yet it is still evolving) Bitcoin isn't there yet; there's still several ways it could fail.
  - arianvanp 11y ago
    Yes i did. And moved to HTTPS instead. Not having fate our doubting the backing technology is a very legitimate reason to move your money eslewhere
Vozze 11y ago
There is a revolution going on in Bitcoin land. Very similar to how dictatorship gets overthrown in the real world. In the real world, dictators fight with censorship and violent force. In Bitcoin land these are social media censorship and DDoS attacks. The main Bitcoin forum on Reddit is censored heavy handed. No criticism allowed, mentions of alternative software or forums get deleted right away. People who run alternative implementations of Bitcoin get DDoSed so heavy, that sometimes whole districts of cities get cut off from the internet. But this is the internet. people manage to jump over the fence pretty fast... http://imgur.com/xNjN0kH http://imgur.com/xNjN0kH ...and find ways to get together and discuss their opinions without censorship: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/48zggz/a_behind_the_scenes_look_at_how_bitcoin_core/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/48zggz/a_behind... https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/
- studentrob 11y ago
  Interesting. You're even getting down voted here without explanation. EDIT: Well you used to be grey and at the bottom. Now you're up top.
  - Taek 11y ago
    There has been an enormous and coordinated effort to disrupt the Bitcoin community, and many of the actions have been far from subtle. /r/bitcoin has been subject to spam attacks, sockpuppets, brigade voting, and a huge number of manipulations. The moderator team tried to control it, honest people became victim to heavy handed moderation, and a lot of damage was done. The grandparent comment really does not seem genuine. Maybe I am disillusioned, but bitcoin's news aggregate presence feels like it's being very distorted.
    - threeseed 11y ago
      The moderators of /r/bitcoin should explain why they automatically change the sort mode of specific threads to "Controversial" which effectively reverses the rank order. And why they have custom CSS which affects what comments appear hidden or not. No other subreddit that I am aware of engages in this form of comment manipulation. I am not even a Bitcoin user but this sort of behaviour was extremely unusual.
jcoffland 11y ago
Opinion is moving against the Core devs who currently control the code that nearly everyone is using to run the Bitcoin system. What the Bitcoin community is learning is that you cannot have a decentralized monetary system controlled by a centralized group of programmers with out running in to conflicts of interest. Decisions about the direction of Bitcoin's future should not be made by a few coders, and the people pulling their strings, behind closed doors. Bitcoin needs competing teams of developers. Miners and node operators need to use a variety of softwares in order to support an ecosystem of dev teams. These softwares must interoperate with one another but do not have to operate in exactly the same way. Consensus will come about when a sufficient number of dev teams decide to implement a certain feature and miners chose to run their code. The methods for voting for new features via the Bitvoin network are already established. As new features are implemented they should be developed by multiple teams in parallel so that there is less risk of catastrophic failure due to everyone running the same software with the same set of bugs. This concept runs contrary to how nearly every other software system we know works. Thus the current growing pains. Ultimately crypto-currency will win out in some form. But please don't invest in it now. You'll only dilute the profits of those willing to take on early stage risks.
optforfon 11y ago
Can anyone point me to good resources to understanding the technical side of Bitcoin? I tried to read the white paper but it glossed over technical details (for instance, what does "signing" actually entail?). Everything else is either very hand-wavey and high level or assumes you already know how it works. I'm interesting in understanding the spec and potentially expanding on it or being able to understand the ongoing issues with Bitcoin
- weavie 11y ago
  I found Mastering "Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies" by Andreas M. Antonopoulos to be a good introduction.
- bhaak 11y ago
  The beauty in what Satoshi did was that he took several existing technologies (p2p, hashcash, public key cryptography, etc.), combined them and added only a slight twist (how the consenus is achieved). In his white paper he only describes the twist, so you won't get a complete overview on how bitcoin works (even if you know how the stuff he's building on works). This link has been posted to HN before and gives a pretty good overview on how bitcoin works: http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-actually-works/ http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-a... So you won't get
- kyrre 11y ago
  This course is pretty good: https://www.coursera.org/course/bitcointech https://www.coursera.org/course/bitcointech
- ivan_ah 11y ago
  Here are some links that have technical details and a bit of context about cryptocurrencies: A blog post: http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bitcoin.html http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bi... A paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/261 https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/261 A book: https://d28rh4a8wq0iu5.cloudfront.net/bitcointech/readings/princeton_bitcoin_book.pdf https://d28rh4a8wq0iu5.cloudfront.net/bitcointech/readings/p... Choose your adventure ;)
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aedron 11y ago
Why should there be One True Bitcoin implementation? What should be worked on is creating an official protocol specification, which would allow competing implementations, that miners could freely choose from. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
- rsi_oww 11y ago
  Everyone needs to follow the One True Ledger, or you can't know if Bob really sent you $100 of Bitcoins that will be accepted by Joe. There are already competing implementations like btcd written in Go. That's not the issue. This post is from a developer who is part of a small group in the bitcoin world, who want to change the rules of the protocol. Anyone that did not follow those rule changes would see a different ledger. That's not something that should be done in bitcoin - changes this big should be very hard to pull off, and require consensus of all parties. Most are strongly against these changes because it does not really do much, makes the network more centralized, and mainly because there are much better options to reach the same goal (that are being worked on right now).
  - hitekker 11y ago
    "One True Ledger" Oh boy.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  That would make sense, but sadly hasn't happened. Bitcoin has become defined by Satoshi's original C++ implementation.
  - eterm 11y ago
    It's not even the original that has the 1MB limit. That was added later as a temporary measure. Satoshi said that it could be increased and heavily implied it would be increased long before it acted as a limit to transaction amounts. But I expect someone will be along shortly to "correct" my understanding. As a neutral (I own no bitcoin), the whole thing is very dogmatic, very messy and looks like it's about control not about the limit at all. In fact many core devs were previously arguing for increasing the limit until it became clear that that position wasn't compatible with their position in core. Outsiders see core as having been corrupted by the wishes of blockstream VC money. Pro-core see all outsiders as a conspiracy trying to wrestle control away. In short, it's a complete mess.
ianai 11y ago
As someone who's studied economics at the grad level, bitcoin has never made sense to me.
- rsi_oww 11y ago
  I don't understand why people buy baseball cards, either. But if I could send those baseball cards over the internet nearly as easily as an email, I could see it becoming a small niche currency (small as in millions of people).
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riprowan 11y ago
A simple and clear understanding of which group is trying to distort Bitcoin from its mission can be had by simply reading this informative white paper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf I would encourage everyone following this discussion to start by reading the foundation document, and then comparing the design and goals of the system envisioned by its creators and adopted by early-adopters, with the vision being propounded by "Bitcoin Core" versus its opposition teams. I would furthermore ask everyone who has read the paper, to decide for themselves what it means for Bitcoin that "consensus" can be "reached" by putting all the key players in one room and signing a document.
zaphar 11y ago
95% miner voting is a problem for some miners, who don’t want to have veto power over such an important change. The chances of extortion either against them (“vote the way I want or I will DDoS you off the Internet”) or by them (“If you want me to vote a certain way, pay up”) are just too great. One of the interesting parts of Bitcoin is how it offloads, to a certain extent, the consensus guarantees into the economic and political realm. The flip side of this however is that it opens up the network to exactly these sort of considerations to a greater extent than other distributed consensus algorithms.
- maaku 11y ago
  What? That is exactly what it does not do! Bitcoin takes the politics and money out of consensus -- once you are running a full node you are validating the rules and the ruleset is unchanging. Being above politics is entirely the point.
  - bhaak 11y ago
    The ruleset is certainly not unchangeable. If enough miners and full nodes install a different bitcoin implementation, having combined more than 51% of the hash rate of the network, the ruleset of the new majority is valid. That's how bitcoin reaches consensus and that's how Classic would activate (going for 75% and a grace period of a month, because otherwise you'd probably get chaos and the possibility of 2 distinct bitcoin networks).
    - maaku 11y ago
      > If enough miners and full nodes install a different bitcoin implementation, having combined more than 51% of the hash rate of the network, the ruleset of the new majority is valid. No, that is a misunderstanding of how bitcoin works. If the miners activate a new ruleset, and if that change is not so very carefully constructed as to make the old rules a special case of the new rules (a soft-fork), then those miners fork themselves off the network no one automatically follows. The amount of hashpower on the fork has zero relevance to the validity of the blocks they are mining, from the perspective of an un-upgraded node.
andy_ppp 11y ago
So far as I can tell as a complete outsider... Bitcoin developers and the bitcoin community (i.e. people trying to make bitcoin much larger) are not finding shared solutions for the future of the network. It's impossible to know (from the outside) who is right, but both sides are very very sure that they are in the right! Time to fork it and move on I think.
- fosco 11y ago
  and have two things half as great? No, similar to Abe lincoln bringing the entire union together splitting the country into a 'north' and 'south' would have disabled the progress that was made in the 100 years after. trying to make everyone happy is not possible and in my opinion is one of the first steps towards failure.
thrillgore 11y ago
Who'd had thought your unregulated currency would eventually fail.

115 points by sethbannon 11y ago

So this is #3 of the Satoshi Roundtable notes and opinions that have made it to HN, as far as I can tell (I was initially confused and thought this was a re-submission of Brian Armstrong's notes https://medium.com/@barmstrong/what-happened-at-the-satoshi-roundtable-6c11a10d8cdf https://medium.com/@barmstrong/what-happened-at-the-satoshi-...). As someone who has dabbled into the bitcoin and block chain area but never seriously, all of these reports and the constant reporting of the serious issues facing bitcoin with little to no consensus about what's going to be done to scale it just scares me away from touching it. Maybe I'm just not understanding the issue in its entirety but many of the opinions just keep talking about how uncooperative everyone is, how wrong or right one group is versus another and no solutions are really being worked on that expect to be accepted. Blockchain is cool tech but bitcoin itself seems like a horribly immature place to ever put real money into.

w1ntermute 11y ago
It seems very likely that building anything on top of Bitcoin will be seen in retrospect as a mistake, because the platform is controlled by a group of unpredictable individuals. You can't even predict the most likely outcome and plan accordingly.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  Bitcoin does seem to lack effective leadership. This dates back to Satoshi leaving: he handed over the reins to people who didn't want them.
bhaak 11y ago
Your impression is spot on. Nevertheless there are still lots of people who have lots of money in it and that's part of the problem why there is so much controversy and why some people don't want to move away from their position. If you are interested in blockchain technology you don't have to go to bitcoin. There are lots of other cryptocurrencies where you could learn about it. Ethereum is currently the new kid on the block. Ethereum is often described as "Bitcoin 2.0". Better technology, better leadership, no toxic community, IMHO it looks like how bitcoin should look like (at least for now, who knows what it will be like in a year). Because of that lots of money has been going to Ethereum altely, even long time hodlers of bitcoin have sold bitcoin to get some ether.
- vertex-four 11y ago
  Ethereum has the same potential scaling issues as Bitcoin and has not yet defined a plan for scaling infinitely, aside from pushing for the development of technologies which move some forms of communication off the blockchain entirely. At the point where Ethereum gets to where Bitcoin is now, it's entirely possible its community could have exactly the same issue.
  - bhaak 11y ago
    "Scaling infinitely" is a pretty steep requirement. I wouldn't go there yet, either implementation of the blockchain technology is useful long before the insane transactions per seconds which VISA is handling. But yes, Ethereum has similar constraints as Bitcoin. Vitalik did some scalability blog posts on https://blog.ethereum.org/ https://blog.ethereum.org/ but it's entirely possible that any blockchain technology just won't scale as we would like it to (that is, as good as a centralized approach). OTOH, if there is a good technological solution, currently I have much more confidence that it gets implemented in Ethereum than in Bitcoin. The current infighting, bickering and actual threats and actions (e.g. DDOS at dissenting miners) is slowly but steadily destroying the Bitcoin community.
rsi_oww 11y ago
There is near complete consensus, see: https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-consensus-266d475a61ff https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-con... Nearly every developer, along with the vast majority of miners, have agreed to this. The group that did not agree (Coinbase, 2 developers, and some small miners) is extremely good at social media and has done a great job of spreading a false story of "serious scaling problems" and "developers can't reach consensus". It's simply not true. They want to take over the bitcoin network with a fork, which will follow different rules, called "Bitcoin Classic". This is their second attempt at a takeover, the last was the failed "Bitcoin XT" fork. There is no sane reason to fork the network short of trying to take control of the protocol. Here is the roadmap that the main Bitcoin ("core") team has put together and is working on: https://bitcoincore.org/en/2015/12/23/capacity-increases-faq/ https://bitcoincore.org/en/2015/12/23/capacity-increases-faq...
- jhildings 11y ago
  But still, the thing is that regardless of who is right there is a bias in the most comments, including yours. This is the conflict that is bad it itself
- Vespasian 11y ago
  Your reply is demonstrating the parents issues with the discussion perfectly. Anyone not closely following the situtation(such as myself) just sees a enormously heated up discussion (I was reminded of [1]). Every party involved is accusing the others of spreading lies,misrepresenting the situation and trying to take control over the blockchain/bitcoin/protocol. Based on that, I have difficulties understanding and evaluating the potential technical and political challenges. Bitcoin (and similar crypto currencies) seem to be a huge risk at the moment: Everything might collapse tomorrow (or not). The market could be split into incompatible segments(or not). One entity could become strong enough to take control of the network and enact unfavourable policies(or not). Right now,I do not see why somenone would decide to start investing (time and money) into bitcoin while there are generally accepted, scaled up and working solutions for the underlying problem of getting money from A to B (Banks Credit cards, etc). These work fine for most people/companies and their cost and risks can be estimated fairly well in advance. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

LAMike 11y ago

The lack of product managers and an abundance of engineers is both the weakness/strength of the protocol. They have maybe 12 months of runway before everyone loses faith and sells, and by everyone, I mean me.

BinaryIdiot 11y ago
> They have maybe 12 months of runway before everyone loses faith and sells, and by everyone, I mean me. They're taking so long to even decide on a solution that I'm not convinced it's going to happen without fracturing. In fact, because of how this known problem has been creeping up with piss poor direction with solving the problem, I do not believe bitcoin is mature enough to put any serious money in it. Gamble, play with it but why would anyone put any serious money into it especially now?
- BinaryResult 11y ago
  One reason may be that the rate of issuance of new coins is going to be cut in half in 4 months.
paavokoya 11y ago
>They have maybe 12 months of runway before everyone loses faith and sells Yeah, and I'm gonna stop using the internet because the http protocol isn't exactly how I want it. Grow up.
- bdcravens 11y ago
  Http has "won" because it meets needs other alternative protocols didn't. After 25 years, it's beyond incumbent. (Yet it is still evolving) Bitcoin isn't there yet; there's still several ways it could fail.
- arianvanp 11y ago
  Yes i did. And moved to HTTPS instead. Not having fate our doubting the backing technology is a very legitimate reason to move your money eslewhere

Vozze 11y ago

There is a revolution going on in Bitcoin land. Very similar to how dictatorship gets overthrown in the real world. In the real world, dictators fight with censorship and violent force. In Bitcoin land these are social media censorship and DDoS attacks. The main Bitcoin forum on Reddit is censored heavy handed. No criticism allowed, mentions of alternative software or forums get deleted right away. People who run alternative implementations of Bitcoin get DDoSed so heavy, that sometimes whole districts of cities get cut off from the internet. But this is the internet. people manage to jump over the fence pretty fast... http://imgur.com/xNjN0kH http://imgur.com/xNjN0kH ...and find ways to get together and discuss their opinions without censorship: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/48zggz/a_behind_the_scenes_look_at_how_bitcoin_core/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/48zggz/a_behind... https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/

studentrob 11y ago
Interesting. You're even getting down voted here without explanation. EDIT: Well you used to be grey and at the bottom. Now you're up top.
- Taek 11y ago
  There has been an enormous and coordinated effort to disrupt the Bitcoin community, and many of the actions have been far from subtle. /r/bitcoin has been subject to spam attacks, sockpuppets, brigade voting, and a huge number of manipulations. The moderator team tried to control it, honest people became victim to heavy handed moderation, and a lot of damage was done. The grandparent comment really does not seem genuine. Maybe I am disillusioned, but bitcoin's news aggregate presence feels like it's being very distorted.
  - threeseed 11y ago
    The moderators of /r/bitcoin should explain why they automatically change the sort mode of specific threads to "Controversial" which effectively reverses the rank order. And why they have custom CSS which affects what comments appear hidden or not. No other subreddit that I am aware of engages in this form of comment manipulation. I am not even a Bitcoin user but this sort of behaviour was extremely unusual.

jcoffland 11y ago

Opinion is moving against the Core devs who currently control the code that nearly everyone is using to run the Bitcoin system. What the Bitcoin community is learning is that you cannot have a decentralized monetary system controlled by a centralized group of programmers with out running in to conflicts of interest. Decisions about the direction of Bitcoin's future should not be made by a few coders, and the people pulling their strings, behind closed doors. Bitcoin needs competing teams of developers. Miners and node operators need to use a variety of softwares in order to support an ecosystem of dev teams. These softwares must interoperate with one another but do not have to operate in exactly the same way. Consensus will come about when a sufficient number of dev teams decide to implement a certain feature and miners chose to run their code. The methods for voting for new features via the Bitvoin network are already established. As new features are implemented they should be developed by multiple teams in parallel so that there is less risk of catastrophic failure due to everyone running the same software with the same set of bugs. This concept runs contrary to how nearly every other software system we know works. Thus the current growing pains. Ultimately crypto-currency will win out in some form. But please don't invest in it now. You'll only dilute the profits of those willing to take on early stage risks.

optforfon 11y ago

Can anyone point me to good resources to understanding the technical side of Bitcoin? I tried to read the white paper but it glossed over technical details (for instance, what does "signing" actually entail?). Everything else is either very hand-wavey and high level or assumes you already know how it works. I'm interesting in understanding the spec and potentially expanding on it or being able to understand the ongoing issues with Bitcoin

weavie 11y ago
I found Mastering "Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies" by Andreas M. Antonopoulos to be a good introduction.
bhaak 11y ago
The beauty in what Satoshi did was that he took several existing technologies (p2p, hashcash, public key cryptography, etc.), combined them and added only a slight twist (how the consenus is achieved). In his white paper he only describes the twist, so you won't get a complete overview on how bitcoin works (even if you know how the stuff he's building on works). This link has been posted to HN before and gives a pretty good overview on how bitcoin works: http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-actually-works/ http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-a... So you won't get
kyrre 11y ago
This course is pretty good: https://www.coursera.org/course/bitcointech https://www.coursera.org/course/bitcointech
ivan_ah 11y ago
Here are some links that have technical details and a bit of context about cryptocurrencies: A blog post: http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bitcoin.html http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bi... A paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/261 https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/261 A book: https://d28rh4a8wq0iu5.cloudfront.net/bitcointech/readings/princeton_bitcoin_book.pdf https://d28rh4a8wq0iu5.cloudfront.net/bitcointech/readings/p... Choose your adventure ;)

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

aedron 11y ago

Why should there be One True Bitcoin implementation? What should be worked on is creating an official protocol specification, which would allow competing implementations, that miners could freely choose from. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

rsi_oww 11y ago
Everyone needs to follow the One True Ledger, or you can't know if Bob really sent you $100 of Bitcoins that will be accepted by Joe. There are already competing implementations like btcd written in Go. That's not the issue. This post is from a developer who is part of a small group in the bitcoin world, who want to change the rules of the protocol. Anyone that did not follow those rule changes would see a different ledger. That's not something that should be done in bitcoin - changes this big should be very hard to pull off, and require consensus of all parties. Most are strongly against these changes because it does not really do much, makes the network more centralized, and mainly because there are much better options to reach the same goal (that are being worked on right now).
- hitekker 11y ago
  "One True Ledger" Oh boy.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
That would make sense, but sadly hasn't happened. Bitcoin has become defined by Satoshi's original C++ implementation.
- eterm 11y ago
  It's not even the original that has the 1MB limit. That was added later as a temporary measure. Satoshi said that it could be increased and heavily implied it would be increased long before it acted as a limit to transaction amounts. But I expect someone will be along shortly to "correct" my understanding. As a neutral (I own no bitcoin), the whole thing is very dogmatic, very messy and looks like it's about control not about the limit at all. In fact many core devs were previously arguing for increasing the limit until it became clear that that position wasn't compatible with their position in core. Outsiders see core as having been corrupted by the wishes of blockstream VC money. Pro-core see all outsiders as a conspiracy trying to wrestle control away. In short, it's a complete mess.

ianai 11y ago

As someone who's studied economics at the grad level, bitcoin has never made sense to me.

rsi_oww 11y ago
I don't understand why people buy baseball cards, either. But if I could send those baseball cards over the internet nearly as easily as an email, I could see it becoming a small niche currency (small as in millions of people).

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

riprowan 11y ago

A simple and clear understanding of which group is trying to distort Bitcoin from its mission can be had by simply reading this informative white paper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf I would encourage everyone following this discussion to start by reading the foundation document, and then comparing the design and goals of the system envisioned by its creators and adopted by early-adopters, with the vision being propounded by "Bitcoin Core" versus its opposition teams. I would furthermore ask everyone who has read the paper, to decide for themselves what it means for Bitcoin that "consensus" can be "reached" by putting all the key players in one room and signing a document.

zaphar 11y ago

95% miner voting is a problem for some miners, who don’t want to have veto power over such an important change. The chances of extortion either against them (“vote the way I want or I will DDoS you off the Internet”) or by them (“If you want me to vote a certain way, pay up”) are just too great. One of the interesting parts of Bitcoin is how it offloads, to a certain extent, the consensus guarantees into the economic and political realm. The flip side of this however is that it opens up the network to exactly these sort of considerations to a greater extent than other distributed consensus algorithms.

maaku 11y ago
What? That is exactly what it does not do! Bitcoin takes the politics and money out of consensus -- once you are running a full node you are validating the rules and the ruleset is unchanging. Being above politics is entirely the point.
- bhaak 11y ago
  The ruleset is certainly not unchangeable. If enough miners and full nodes install a different bitcoin implementation, having combined more than 51% of the hash rate of the network, the ruleset of the new majority is valid. That's how bitcoin reaches consensus and that's how Classic would activate (going for 75% and a grace period of a month, because otherwise you'd probably get chaos and the possibility of 2 distinct bitcoin networks).
  - maaku 11y ago
    > If enough miners and full nodes install a different bitcoin implementation, having combined more than 51% of the hash rate of the network, the ruleset of the new majority is valid. No, that is a misunderstanding of how bitcoin works. If the miners activate a new ruleset, and if that change is not so very carefully constructed as to make the old rules a special case of the new rules (a soft-fork), then those miners fork themselves off the network no one automatically follows. The amount of hashpower on the fork has zero relevance to the validity of the blocks they are mining, from the perspective of an un-upgraded node.

andy_ppp 11y ago

So far as I can tell as a complete outsider... Bitcoin developers and the bitcoin community (i.e. people trying to make bitcoin much larger) are not finding shared solutions for the future of the network. It's impossible to know (from the outside) who is right, but both sides are very very sure that they are in the right! Time to fork it and move on I think.

fosco 11y ago
and have two things half as great? No, similar to Abe lincoln bringing the entire union together splitting the country into a 'north' and 'south' would have disabled the progress that was made in the 100 years after. trying to make everyone happy is not possible and in my opinion is one of the first steps towards failure.

thrillgore 11y ago

Who'd had thought your unregulated currency would eventually fail.