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>These guys are the researchers and engineers with the deepest understanding of decentralization, game theory, and adversarial blockchain design. These guys do

>These guys are the researchers and engineers with the deepest understanding of decentralization, game theory, and adversarial blockchain design. These guys don't have the deepest understanding of any of those things. The minutia of the protocol, and the source code that implements it, is extremely important, but knowledge of it does not impart one with any insights into game theory, the political implications of different decentralisation tradeoffs, and adversarial blockchain design as it pertains to political/economic attacks.

Taek 9y ago
I beg to differ. These guys have spent the whole of their professional careers discussing various tradeoffs, attacks, and sources of attack surface as related to decentralized blockchains. I guess a statement like yours and a counter like mine is difficult to back up with evidence, but if you look for some of the technical debates realted to SegWit, Bitcoin Unlimited, Bitcoin Classic, Emergent Consensus, etc, it's pretty obvious that the bitcoin core developers are well ahead of their opponents even in the realms of economics and politics. Bitcoin has a lot of defenses to manipulative politics in place already, including the fact that it's intentionally very difficult to hardfork the newtork, and including the fact that releases follow a fixed schedule (which makes it much harder to shoehorn in features). The characterization that the core devleopers focus primarily on code and traditional software engineering falls far short of the reality.
- Jabanga 9y ago
  The amount of time they've spent discussing and analyzing these things has nothing to do with their contribution to the source code. There are plenty of people who have spent thousands of hours discussing the various trade offs, attacks and sources of attack surface and have not contributed to the Bitcoin Core client github repository. >The characterization that the core devleopers focus primarily on code and traditional software engineering falls far short of the reality. That wasn't my characterisation. I disputed your characterization of the Core contributors being the most knowledgeable on these game theory aspects of security based on their contribution to the source code.

Taek 9y ago

I beg to differ. These guys have spent the whole of their professional careers discussing various tradeoffs, attacks, and sources of attack surface as related to decentralized blockchains. I guess a statement like yours and a counter like mine is difficult to back up with evidence, but if you look for some of the technical debates realted to SegWit, Bitcoin Unlimited, Bitcoin Classic, Emergent Consensus, etc, it's pretty obvious that the bitcoin core developers are well ahead of their opponents even in the realms of economics and politics. Bitcoin has a lot of defenses to manipulative politics in place already, including the fact that it's intentionally very difficult to hardfork the newtork, and including the fact that releases follow a fixed schedule (which makes it much harder to shoehorn in features). The characterization that the core devleopers focus primarily on code and traditional software engineering falls far short of the reality.

Jabanga 9y ago
The amount of time they've spent discussing and analyzing these things has nothing to do with their contribution to the source code. There are plenty of people who have spent thousands of hours discussing the various trade offs, attacks and sources of attack surface and have not contributed to the Bitcoin Core client github repository. >The characterization that the core devleopers focus primarily on code and traditional software engineering falls far short of the reality. That wasn't my characterisation. I disputed your characterization of the Core contributors being the most knowledgeable on these game theory aspects of security based on their contribution to the source code.