8 ms·

What did Bitcoin Core contributors ever do for us?

94 points by sonkol 9y ago

colordrops 9y ago
Some context would help here.
- apeace 9y ago
  For the past two years, the Bitcoin community has been embroiled in a debate about how to scale the network to handle more transactions. The debate has at times become less technical, rhetoric about "centralization" and the values of the community has become introduced, etc. Recently the debates have come to a head, and some have referred to it as a "Civil War"[0]. For technical background, I recommend these two posts by Mike Hearn, who has since left the Bitcoin community [1] [2] Now, what the original article is talking about is the "Core" development team--the people who have commit access on the Bitcoin Github repo. The whole debate has essentially become Core vs. some other factions, mainly miners. You'll see the arguments in [1] and [2]. (Keep in mind, Mike Hearn is strongly on the anti-Core side of the argument. But those articles should give you an idea of what to search for, if you want to hear arguments on the other side.) [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-10/bitcoin-risks-splintering-as-civil-war-enters-critical-month https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-10/bitcoin-r... [1] https://medium.com/@octskyward/on-consensus-and-forks-c6a050c792e7 https://medium.com/@octskyward/on-consensus-and-forks-c6a050... [2] https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7 https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...
  - petertodd 9y ago
    Both of Hearn's articles contain a number of factually incorrect points. For example, his article on forks states that: > In a soft fork, a protocol change is carefully constructed to essentially trick old nodes into believing that something is valid when it actually might not be. The soft-fork protocols used for upgrades are specifically designed to ensure nodes are not tricked into believing something is valid when it might actually not be, as there is a well-defined mechanism - the block header nVersion field - that both co-ordinates soft forks and ensures that nodes that are unaware of the specifics of a given soft-fork know that there are new rules in effect. This is why at present, Bitcoin Core nodes/wallets loudly warn you that unknown rules may be in effect that your node does not understand, because the BIP91 soft-fork just activated that Bitcoin Core does not recognize. (BIP91 is a temporary hack to activate segwit at 80% rather than 95% threshold; in a few weeks it'll no longer be relevant to consensus) Hearn is misleadingly confusing the adversarial case where a majority of miners may try to change the rules without consent of the community in an undetectable fashion, but that's simply a 51% attack. At present, preventing such attacks is an open research question; conflating the 51% attacks and soft-fork upgrades is very misleading. In Hearns "resolution of the bitcoin experiment" Hearn states that: > Bitcoin Core has a brilliant solution to this problem — allow people to mark their payments as changeable after they’ve been sent, up until they appear in the block chain. and > How many people would think bitcoins are worth hundreds of dollars each when you soon won’t be able to use them in actual shops? Here he's referring to zero-confirmation payments and BIP125, Opt-In Replace-By-Fee. First of all, opt-in replace-by-fee is actually derived from Hearns own proposal to re-enable transaction replacement by nSequence. Specifically, Hearn proposed to re-enable an old feature in Bitcoin Core - originally written by Satoshi - that allowed transactions to be replaced if they signalled a higher sequence number. This creates a DoS attack, which I proposed we fix by ensuring that replacements paid a higher fee than the replaced transaction. Opt-in replace-by-fee is a combination of Hearn's proposal and my own: transactions can signal that they are replacable, and if they signal replacability, can be replaced by transactions paying a higher fee. The combination implements Hearn's desired transaction replacability behavior, while fixing the DoS attack. The bigger issue is that zero-confirmation transactions are simply not secure: even without the opt-in replace-by-fee that Hearn criticises Bitcoin Core for implementing, it is very easy to double-spend unconfirmed transactions. Soon after Hearn published that post, I did a study which found that every half the wallets tested could be double-spent trivially with nearly 100% success rates, and the other half with about 25% success rates: https://petertodd.org/2016/are-wallets-ready-for-rbf https://petertodd.org/2016/are-wallets-ready-for-rbf Unfortunately, Hearn is simply being dishonest on both counts here, something that got him wide condemnation in the technical community.
    - hendzen 9y ago
      Peter, You just cherry picked one (minor) point from each article, and then used an argument against those points to claim that both articles are incorrect in full. I think that is a dishonest form of argument. Furthermore, it's worth disclosing your own personal dislike of Mike Hearn - you guys have spent a huge amount of time attacking one another... so I'm inclined to discount any of your statements on him.
      - petertodd 9y ago
        We seem to have a fundamentally different outlook on this. First of all, I'm busy - I'm not going to do a point-by-point takedown of the article if I can avoid it. Secondly, if you can show an author clearly lied about anything - and I think I have clearly shown that - it immediately calls into question the value of the rest of the work. That saves time and effort for the reader, in much the same way that showing a single step in a math proof is wrong is an efficient way of rebutting an entire work. Secondly, in claiming I have a personal dislike of Hearn, you're actually making a clear ad-hominem attack. My personal feelings are irrelevant to whether or not Hearn's arguments are correct. In any case, Hearn is quite a nice guy in person, and fun to hang out with; I used to often chat with him on IRC. It quite frankly saddens me that I'm in a field where I'm not able to do what I'd much rather do - be friends with him - because of professional ethics. This is far from the only time when this has happened - repeatedly I've had to end friendships in the Bitcoin space because friends of mine got involved in scams and other dishonest behavior; in another context where the public wasn't being harmed I could be much more forgiving, but here I can't be.
        SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
        > That saves time and effort for the reader, in much the same way that showing a single step in a math proof is wrong is an efficient way of rebutting an entire work. This isn't actually how mathematics functions as a profession: small technical faults are routinely pointed out without discrediting the bulk of the work and at times, major works are submitted without all the technical details actually being accounted for. Mathematicians are capable of understanding the main thrust of a work without getting bogged down in technicalities, and usually try to "ironman" the work -- seeing the main thrust in the best light possible, rather than the worst. (In contrast to "strawman".) > Secondly, in claiming I have a personal dislike of Hearn, you're actually making a clear ad-hominem attack. My personal feelings are irrelevant to whether or not Hearn's arguments are correct. It actually is relevant, considering that you "refuted" Hearn's arguments through the flimsiest of means -- pointing out a small flaw and saying he's not technically correct -- without every addressing the core part. The heuristic of personal bias is a fine way to assess the genuineness with which you presented a heuristic argument (since you didn't address the core points), and assess if we want to take your heuristic point at face value. It's anything but an ad hominem to provide a reason you might be trying to present a faulty heuristic in response to you presenting a heuristic argument. So... since you were wrong on both points here, we should discount the entirety of your posts on this topic -- at least, by your (poor) logic. (I don't actually have any opinion on the topic, but your reasoning here is bad.)
- Jtsummers 9y ago
  There's a schism occurring within the bitcoin community (it's not new, just coming to a critical point right now). The title is a paraphrase of Monty Python's "What have the Romans ever done for us?" For the rest of the context, check out most of the Bitcoin posts that have made it to HN over the past month. They're almost all about the current issues in the system and community. Edit: typo
- SkyMarshal 9y ago
  A meme has developed among some in Bitcoin - "Fire Core", aka fire the core dev team who have contributed most of the code to the canonical Bitcoin repo (http://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin http://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin) and stewarded Bitcoin for the last few years (https://bitcoincore.org https://bitcoincore.org). The argument is that they've moved too slow on important things like scalability, blocked a simple blocksize increase hard fork that would have added capacity, and that as a result Ethereum is catching up and on the verge of overtaking Bitcoin (http://duckduckgo.com?q=flippening http://duckduckgo.com?q=flippening). The counterargument is that there's no other technically credible team in Bitcoin, despite all the prior attempts to "fire" and replace Core - Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Unlimited, etc. - and that "firing" Core is akin to killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
  - fpgaminer 9y ago
    > The counterargument is that there's no other technically credible team in Bitcoin You forgot the most important counterargument. That they _did_ move extremely fast on scalability. They released a masterpiece of engineering, SegWit, which doubles the blocksize, improves efficiency, enables future efficiency gains, and a laundry list of other improvements ... all while being a softfork. And, IIRC, that was all developed, tested, and released in _very_ short order.
    - qznc 9y ago
      SegWit is in use by LiteCoin for a year already and the first proposal for Bitcoin was at least two years ago.
      - haakon 9y ago
        SegWit activated on Litecoin on May 10 this year.
      - the-dude 9y ago
        Compared to changes of traditional currencies, two years is incredibly fast.
sametmax 9y ago
"What did X ever do for us?" is the standard catch phrase of this guy in any pirate movie wanting to take command of the ship. It's not the words of somebody who wants to help anybody, just somebody wanting the power.
- fovc 9y ago
  It's a Monty Python reference[0], not a power grab. The article lists out all the great things core has done. [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
- thinbeige 9y ago
  Such a good methaphor.
- hokkos 9y ago
  It is clearly satire and a Monty Python reference, how can you be so wrong ?
  - dang 9y ago
    Many (maybe even most) of the misunderstandings on HN have to do with people talking across national or regional lines without being aware of it. I don't know, but it would be natural if that were the case here.
jnordwick 9y ago
Why do people seem to assume that those most capable of implementing the cryptography, networking, or other code are also those most capable of understanding the economics of cryptocurrencies or determining their future? Most of the arguments against the core team revolve around the economics and future of the coin, but the tech team seems to think that somehow their coding experience gives them insight into that. Bitcoin seems like technically great but it fails on many of the economic aspects (e.g. making a currency with a fixed amount basically ensures it can never be used to write long term counteracts in).
- hendzen 9y ago
  Well, Alex Morcos (one of the Bitcoin Core developers), is a founder of Hudson River Trading - a HFT firm responsible for 5% of US equities volume [0]. So... I'd say Bitcoin Core has some economic expertise available if they need it. [0] - https://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/10/15/inside-hudson-river-the-firm-that-does-5-of-all-stock-trading/ https://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/10/15/inside-hudson-riv...
  - jnordwick 9y ago
    I didn't know that. But i also work in HFT (have heard of Hudson River plenty of times) and I'm not sure that really gives any extra expertise. I say BTC lack economic understanding not from some theoretical view but from some of the almost religious decisions that comes from the project (fixed issue, low tx volume, etc). It is almost like they don't want people to use it for anything important. But i will search out Alex's posts more often though.
    - haakon 9y ago
      The fixed, pre-determined inflation rate has been part of Bitcoin since its launch, and is widely regarded as one of the most fundamental, immutable rules of Bitcoin, much like "software freedom" is to Debian. It is not something that is widely cited by the Bitcoin community as a problem, and I'm unaware of any efforts to change it. It has nothing to do with Bitcoin Core.
woah 9y ago
The whole point of open source software is that you can fork a project away from the original developers.
- twblalock 9y ago
  But the point of a currency is to be a stable and widely accepted medium of exchange. Forking undermines both of those goals. If the US dollar forked, or an EU country left the Euro, it would widely be considered a disaster and a failure of politics and governance. Why should bitcoin be held to a different standard?
  - beaner 9y ago
    Just seems like part of an evolutionary process. Very rarely is software released where version 1.0 is perfect. Maybe if government currencies allowed for these things, they would also be better by now. This is part of the reason why bitcoin remains highly speculative. People point this out like it's a bad thing - the only people who have it are just investors, speculating. But this is part of the process that bootstraps bitcoin's value, so that when it does become more practical to use, actual value is being transferred.
    - twblalock 9y ago
      > Just seems like part of an evolutionary process. Very rarely is software released where version 1.0 is perfect. Maybe if government currencies allowed for these things, they would also be better by now. Let's use the US dollar as an example. In what ways do you think it could be improved if people could fork it?
      - slice_of_life 9y ago
        > In what ways do you think it could be improved if people could fork it? What follows a fork is a competing variant. From a consumer's vantage point, this is almost always good. More competition creates such a great incentive structure that usually(but not always) serves the customer well. However, the if you look at it from the vantage point of a stakeholder such as an active developer, speculator or an investor, then a fork seems unquestionably detrimental. You'd want a monopoly in this case. In what may seem to many as a severe case of cognitive dissonance, I'd submit that both of these scenarios are useful and that the only caveat is that they apply at different stages of an endeavor's development i.e. in the early years when a product is nascent, I think competition is actually good. By giving consumers choice, the best product naturally rises to the top. In later years when a product/market is mature, I personally don't mind a monopoly because it grants advantages of scale that would otherwise not be available to a smaller outfit.
wmf 9y ago
This "fire Core" situation reminds me of Uber. You can be killing it 24/7 and still get fired if you cause enough non-technical damage.
- twblalock 9y ago
  Bitcoin is supposed to be a currency, so there are many non-technical aspects of it that need to be properly handled. If the people working on the code take it upon themselves to make the non-technical decisions too, they need to be held responsible for the outcome. This really gets at the heart of my dislike for cryptocurrency -- most proponents believe it's supposed to be decentralized and free from the control of government, but it's actually centralized under the control of a small group of unelected programmers (who seem to misunderstand how human societies, currencies, and contracts actually work), and there is no recourse when they make bad decisions except to fork the blockchain and the code. It's really a step backwards in terms of governance compared to, say, fiat currency with democratic governance. This applies to most cryptocurrencies I've seen, not just bitcoin.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    It's not, though; the developers can write the code, but they can't force people to upgrade.
    - wmf 9y ago
      They can withhold features that people want by refusing to code them, which is what one of the controversies is about.
      - vertex-four 9y ago
        But other people can code them, and people as a whole can choose what software they want to run?
    - twblalock 9y ago
      If some large exchanges upgrade, and some don't, the consequences are similar to those of a code fork. Suddenly the currency becomes split into two different currencies.
stuaxo 9y ago
This is the first I heard of pruning, I had to delete bitcoinqt when it got too big for my laptops SSD over a year ago.

94 points by sonkol 9y ago

colordrops 9y ago

Some context would help here.

apeace 9y ago
For the past two years, the Bitcoin community has been embroiled in a debate about how to scale the network to handle more transactions. The debate has at times become less technical, rhetoric about "centralization" and the values of the community has become introduced, etc. Recently the debates have come to a head, and some have referred to it as a "Civil War"[0]. For technical background, I recommend these two posts by Mike Hearn, who has since left the Bitcoin community [1] [2] Now, what the original article is talking about is the "Core" development team--the people who have commit access on the Bitcoin Github repo. The whole debate has essentially become Core vs. some other factions, mainly miners. You'll see the arguments in [1] and [2]. (Keep in mind, Mike Hearn is strongly on the anti-Core side of the argument. But those articles should give you an idea of what to search for, if you want to hear arguments on the other side.) [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-10/bitcoin-risks-splintering-as-civil-war-enters-critical-month https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-10/bitcoin-r... [1] https://medium.com/@octskyward/on-consensus-and-forks-c6a050c792e7 https://medium.com/@octskyward/on-consensus-and-forks-c6a050... [2] https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7 https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...
- petertodd 9y ago
  Both of Hearn's articles contain a number of factually incorrect points. For example, his article on forks states that: > In a soft fork, a protocol change is carefully constructed to essentially trick old nodes into believing that something is valid when it actually might not be. The soft-fork protocols used for upgrades are specifically designed to ensure nodes are not tricked into believing something is valid when it might actually not be, as there is a well-defined mechanism - the block header nVersion field - that both co-ordinates soft forks and ensures that nodes that are unaware of the specifics of a given soft-fork know that there are new rules in effect. This is why at present, Bitcoin Core nodes/wallets loudly warn you that unknown rules may be in effect that your node does not understand, because the BIP91 soft-fork just activated that Bitcoin Core does not recognize. (BIP91 is a temporary hack to activate segwit at 80% rather than 95% threshold; in a few weeks it'll no longer be relevant to consensus) Hearn is misleadingly confusing the adversarial case where a majority of miners may try to change the rules without consent of the community in an undetectable fashion, but that's simply a 51% attack. At present, preventing such attacks is an open research question; conflating the 51% attacks and soft-fork upgrades is very misleading. In Hearns "resolution of the bitcoin experiment" Hearn states that: > Bitcoin Core has a brilliant solution to this problem — allow people to mark their payments as changeable after they’ve been sent, up until they appear in the block chain. and > How many people would think bitcoins are worth hundreds of dollars each when you soon won’t be able to use them in actual shops? Here he's referring to zero-confirmation payments and BIP125, Opt-In Replace-By-Fee. First of all, opt-in replace-by-fee is actually derived from Hearns own proposal to re-enable transaction replacement by nSequence. Specifically, Hearn proposed to re-enable an old feature in Bitcoin Core - originally written by Satoshi - that allowed transactions to be replaced if they signalled a higher sequence number. This creates a DoS attack, which I proposed we fix by ensuring that replacements paid a higher fee than the replaced transaction. Opt-in replace-by-fee is a combination of Hearn's proposal and my own: transactions can signal that they are replacable, and if they signal replacability, can be replaced by transactions paying a higher fee. The combination implements Hearn's desired transaction replacability behavior, while fixing the DoS attack. The bigger issue is that zero-confirmation transactions are simply not secure: even without the opt-in replace-by-fee that Hearn criticises Bitcoin Core for implementing, it is very easy to double-spend unconfirmed transactions. Soon after Hearn published that post, I did a study which found that every half the wallets tested could be double-spent trivially with nearly 100% success rates, and the other half with about 25% success rates: https://petertodd.org/2016/are-wallets-ready-for-rbf https://petertodd.org/2016/are-wallets-ready-for-rbf Unfortunately, Hearn is simply being dishonest on both counts here, something that got him wide condemnation in the technical community.
  - hendzen 9y ago
    Peter, You just cherry picked one (minor) point from each article, and then used an argument against those points to claim that both articles are incorrect in full. I think that is a dishonest form of argument. Furthermore, it's worth disclosing your own personal dislike of Mike Hearn - you guys have spent a huge amount of time attacking one another... so I'm inclined to discount any of your statements on him.
    - petertodd 9y ago
      We seem to have a fundamentally different outlook on this. First of all, I'm busy - I'm not going to do a point-by-point takedown of the article if I can avoid it. Secondly, if you can show an author clearly lied about anything - and I think I have clearly shown that - it immediately calls into question the value of the rest of the work. That saves time and effort for the reader, in much the same way that showing a single step in a math proof is wrong is an efficient way of rebutting an entire work. Secondly, in claiming I have a personal dislike of Hearn, you're actually making a clear ad-hominem attack. My personal feelings are irrelevant to whether or not Hearn's arguments are correct. In any case, Hearn is quite a nice guy in person, and fun to hang out with; I used to often chat with him on IRC. It quite frankly saddens me that I'm in a field where I'm not able to do what I'd much rather do - be friends with him - because of professional ethics. This is far from the only time when this has happened - repeatedly I've had to end friendships in the Bitcoin space because friends of mine got involved in scams and other dishonest behavior; in another context where the public wasn't being harmed I could be much more forgiving, but here I can't be.
      - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
        > That saves time and effort for the reader, in much the same way that showing a single step in a math proof is wrong is an efficient way of rebutting an entire work. This isn't actually how mathematics functions as a profession: small technical faults are routinely pointed out without discrediting the bulk of the work and at times, major works are submitted without all the technical details actually being accounted for. Mathematicians are capable of understanding the main thrust of a work without getting bogged down in technicalities, and usually try to "ironman" the work -- seeing the main thrust in the best light possible, rather than the worst. (In contrast to "strawman".) > Secondly, in claiming I have a personal dislike of Hearn, you're actually making a clear ad-hominem attack. My personal feelings are irrelevant to whether or not Hearn's arguments are correct. It actually is relevant, considering that you "refuted" Hearn's arguments through the flimsiest of means -- pointing out a small flaw and saying he's not technically correct -- without every addressing the core part. The heuristic of personal bias is a fine way to assess the genuineness with which you presented a heuristic argument (since you didn't address the core points), and assess if we want to take your heuristic point at face value. It's anything but an ad hominem to provide a reason you might be trying to present a faulty heuristic in response to you presenting a heuristic argument. So... since you were wrong on both points here, we should discount the entirety of your posts on this topic -- at least, by your (poor) logic. (I don't actually have any opinion on the topic, but your reasoning here is bad.)
Jtsummers 9y ago
There's a schism occurring within the bitcoin community (it's not new, just coming to a critical point right now). The title is a paraphrase of Monty Python's "What have the Romans ever done for us?" For the rest of the context, check out most of the Bitcoin posts that have made it to HN over the past month. They're almost all about the current issues in the system and community. Edit: typo
SkyMarshal 9y ago
A meme has developed among some in Bitcoin - "Fire Core", aka fire the core dev team who have contributed most of the code to the canonical Bitcoin repo (http://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin http://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin) and stewarded Bitcoin for the last few years (https://bitcoincore.org https://bitcoincore.org). The argument is that they've moved too slow on important things like scalability, blocked a simple blocksize increase hard fork that would have added capacity, and that as a result Ethereum is catching up and on the verge of overtaking Bitcoin (http://duckduckgo.com?q=flippening http://duckduckgo.com?q=flippening). The counterargument is that there's no other technically credible team in Bitcoin, despite all the prior attempts to "fire" and replace Core - Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Unlimited, etc. - and that "firing" Core is akin to killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
- fpgaminer 9y ago
  > The counterargument is that there's no other technically credible team in Bitcoin You forgot the most important counterargument. That they _did_ move extremely fast on scalability. They released a masterpiece of engineering, SegWit, which doubles the blocksize, improves efficiency, enables future efficiency gains, and a laundry list of other improvements ... all while being a softfork. And, IIRC, that was all developed, tested, and released in _very_ short order.
  - qznc 9y ago
    SegWit is in use by LiteCoin for a year already and the first proposal for Bitcoin was at least two years ago.
    - haakon 9y ago
      SegWit activated on Litecoin on May 10 this year.
    - the-dude 9y ago
      Compared to changes of traditional currencies, two years is incredibly fast.

sametmax 9y ago

"What did X ever do for us?" is the standard catch phrase of this guy in any pirate movie wanting to take command of the ship. It's not the words of somebody who wants to help anybody, just somebody wanting the power.

fovc 9y ago
It's a Monty Python reference[0], not a power grab. The article lists out all the great things core has done. [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
thinbeige 9y ago
Such a good methaphor.
hokkos 9y ago
It is clearly satire and a Monty Python reference, how can you be so wrong ?
- dang 9y ago
  Many (maybe even most) of the misunderstandings on HN have to do with people talking across national or regional lines without being aware of it. I don't know, but it would be natural if that were the case here.

jnordwick 9y ago

Why do people seem to assume that those most capable of implementing the cryptography, networking, or other code are also those most capable of understanding the economics of cryptocurrencies or determining their future? Most of the arguments against the core team revolve around the economics and future of the coin, but the tech team seems to think that somehow their coding experience gives them insight into that. Bitcoin seems like technically great but it fails on many of the economic aspects (e.g. making a currency with a fixed amount basically ensures it can never be used to write long term counteracts in).

hendzen 9y ago
Well, Alex Morcos (one of the Bitcoin Core developers), is a founder of Hudson River Trading - a HFT firm responsible for 5% of US equities volume [0]. So... I'd say Bitcoin Core has some economic expertise available if they need it. [0] - https://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/10/15/inside-hudson-river-the-firm-that-does-5-of-all-stock-trading/ https://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/10/15/inside-hudson-riv...
- jnordwick 9y ago
  I didn't know that. But i also work in HFT (have heard of Hudson River plenty of times) and I'm not sure that really gives any extra expertise. I say BTC lack economic understanding not from some theoretical view but from some of the almost religious decisions that comes from the project (fixed issue, low tx volume, etc). It is almost like they don't want people to use it for anything important. But i will search out Alex's posts more often though.
  - haakon 9y ago
    The fixed, pre-determined inflation rate has been part of Bitcoin since its launch, and is widely regarded as one of the most fundamental, immutable rules of Bitcoin, much like "software freedom" is to Debian. It is not something that is widely cited by the Bitcoin community as a problem, and I'm unaware of any efforts to change it. It has nothing to do with Bitcoin Core.

woah 9y ago

The whole point of open source software is that you can fork a project away from the original developers.

twblalock 9y ago
But the point of a currency is to be a stable and widely accepted medium of exchange. Forking undermines both of those goals. If the US dollar forked, or an EU country left the Euro, it would widely be considered a disaster and a failure of politics and governance. Why should bitcoin be held to a different standard?
- beaner 9y ago
  Just seems like part of an evolutionary process. Very rarely is software released where version 1.0 is perfect. Maybe if government currencies allowed for these things, they would also be better by now. This is part of the reason why bitcoin remains highly speculative. People point this out like it's a bad thing - the only people who have it are just investors, speculating. But this is part of the process that bootstraps bitcoin's value, so that when it does become more practical to use, actual value is being transferred.
  - twblalock 9y ago
    > Just seems like part of an evolutionary process. Very rarely is software released where version 1.0 is perfect. Maybe if government currencies allowed for these things, they would also be better by now. Let's use the US dollar as an example. In what ways do you think it could be improved if people could fork it?
    - slice_of_life 9y ago
      > In what ways do you think it could be improved if people could fork it? What follows a fork is a competing variant. From a consumer's vantage point, this is almost always good. More competition creates such a great incentive structure that usually(but not always) serves the customer well. However, the if you look at it from the vantage point of a stakeholder such as an active developer, speculator or an investor, then a fork seems unquestionably detrimental. You'd want a monopoly in this case. In what may seem to many as a severe case of cognitive dissonance, I'd submit that both of these scenarios are useful and that the only caveat is that they apply at different stages of an endeavor's development i.e. in the early years when a product is nascent, I think competition is actually good. By giving consumers choice, the best product naturally rises to the top. In later years when a product/market is mature, I personally don't mind a monopoly because it grants advantages of scale that would otherwise not be available to a smaller outfit.

wmf 9y ago

This "fire Core" situation reminds me of Uber. You can be killing it 24/7 and still get fired if you cause enough non-technical damage.

twblalock 9y ago
Bitcoin is supposed to be a currency, so there are many non-technical aspects of it that need to be properly handled. If the people working on the code take it upon themselves to make the non-technical decisions too, they need to be held responsible for the outcome. This really gets at the heart of my dislike for cryptocurrency -- most proponents believe it's supposed to be decentralized and free from the control of government, but it's actually centralized under the control of a small group of unelected programmers (who seem to misunderstand how human societies, currencies, and contracts actually work), and there is no recourse when they make bad decisions except to fork the blockchain and the code. It's really a step backwards in terms of governance compared to, say, fiat currency with democratic governance. This applies to most cryptocurrencies I've seen, not just bitcoin.
- icebraining 9y ago
  It's not, though; the developers can write the code, but they can't force people to upgrade.
  - wmf 9y ago
    They can withhold features that people want by refusing to code them, which is what one of the controversies is about.
    - vertex-four 9y ago
      But other people can code them, and people as a whole can choose what software they want to run?
  - twblalock 9y ago
    If some large exchanges upgrade, and some don't, the consequences are similar to those of a code fork. Suddenly the currency becomes split into two different currencies.

stuaxo 9y ago

This is the first I heard of pruning, I had to delete bitcoinqt when it got too big for my laptops SSD over a year ago.