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Satoshi wrote in 2010: "I don't believe a second, compatible implementation of Bitcoin will ever be a good idea. So much of the design depends on all nodes ge

Satoshi wrote in 2010: "I don't believe a second, compatible implementation of Bitcoin will ever be a good idea. So much of the design depends on all nodes getting exactly identical results in lockstep that a second implementation would be a menace to the network. The MIT license is compatible with all other licenses and commercial uses, so there is no need to rewrite it from a licensing standpoint." https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611 In ETH land, the wise guidance of Satoshi is regularly ignored.

throwaway4good 6y ago
So much for a protocol eh ...
capableweb 6y ago
"In a different blockchain they go by different rules" yeah no shit, of course. Ethereum is not Bitcoin because Ethereum doesn't want to be Bitcoin, otherwise Ethereum wouldn't have existed in the first place. That's like complaining that GCP is not following the advice of AWS "leaders", of course they are not gonna do that, otherwise they would work together, not on two different projects... Also, no matter what Satoshi wrote in 2010, multiple implementations of Bitcoin does exist today, most of them relatively stable: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Clients https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Clients And the integrity of the network is not harmed by multiple clients either, just harms the users of that client, not other clients so not sure what the harm is. Yes, it's difficult, but so is a lot of problems in the cryptocurrency space.
- uncletammy 6y ago
  > Ethereum is not Bitcoin because Ethereum doesn't want to be Bitcoin, otherwise Ethereum wouldn't have existed in the first place This isn't exactly true. Vitalik only created Ethereum because the new core devs ( Blockstream ) were actively limiting what types of things could be done with Bitcoin. They were moving away from programmable money in favor of "digital gold". Source: https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/929805462052229120?lang=en https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/929805462052229120... Here's a more detailed telling of the events by one of the Decred developers: https://old.reddit.com/r/decred/comments/6wxueo/your_best_pitch_for_decred/dmcer4d/ https://old.reddit.com/r/decred/comments/6wxueo/your_best_pi... TLDR: Ethereum actually does want to be Bitcoin but that's only because Bitcoin doesn't really want to be Bitcoin anymore. They've dumbed down their protocol. They've dumbed down their infrastructure. Hell, they've even managed to dumb down their users. Ethereum will make a fine Bitcoin.
  - DINKDINK 6y ago
    Developers have no ability to coerce what software bitcoin users run -- that's the entire point of bitcoin. If a competing developer fails to gain user adoption, it's on them that they haven't convinced users to switch consensus rules. It makes for a convincing inflammatory, but false story, for detractors or grifters though (see the myriad of Bitcoin clones: "Bitcoin" KYC, "Bitcoin" Diamond, "Bitcoin" Cash etc etc)
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  > "In a different blockchain they go by different rules" yeah no shit, of course. That's a terrible summary! It's like saying it's obvious that GM should ignore anything Henry Ford ever said about making cars. There might be good reasons to act differently, but simply being a different organization isn't one.
  - shawnz 6y ago
    I think you have it backwards. It's more like saying that not every single thing Henry Ford ever said actually describes the best possible way of making cars. Henry Ford was capable of getting things wrong. I don't think anyone is claiming that Ethereum should do things differently just to be different. The claim is that actually that Ethereum isn't necessarily worse just because it is different.
- vmception 6y ago
  The market itself has shown resilience through all kinds of previously theoretical problems 51% attacked coins dont “crash to zero” because market participants decided it wants to buy them up and attempt double spending. In other cases the proactive disabling of only some off-ramps just creates greater scarcity, ensuring amplified value to the coin being acquired A lot of what satoshi said can be ignored because the market can simply bear it These are products which can attract value for reasons satoshi and enthusiasts did not predict, just like any economist fails to predict what actual individual humans will do
tzumby 6y ago
I think this depends on how good the specs are. I agree that if we look at other examples of separate implementations, this would support this argument (see Browsers for example). But on the flip-side, ETH 2.0 - the proof of stake work, released very good specs and now we have working implementations in Go, Java, Nim, Rust and more. All working right now since the launch that happened in December 2020
thinkmassive 6y ago
bitcoind is the most used implementation by far, but there are others that work fine, like btcd The more significant difference seems to be Ethereum is far more complicated (a Rube Goldberg machine, as critics like to say) and has trouble coordinating hard forks. A hard fork of Bitcoin is considered a different network, so it’s no longer an issue.
- derefr 6y ago
  The real problem with Ethereum client code, is that almost everyone just starting to work on it — and even some people who've been at it for a while — are under the mistaken belief that Ethereum itself is a 100% formalized system, because the Yellow Paper formalizes the behavior of the EVM. They think that as long as their EVM follows the spec, they can't possibly accidentally calcluate a wrong state and end up out-of-consensus with the network. However, there are (many!) stateful things that happen during Ethereum block-ingestion that occur outside of contract bytecode execution (i.e. not modelled by the EVM abstract-machine.) So even if you implement your EVM "to spec", there's this whole surrounding edifice of block-processing code that has no spec, that everyone's just guessing and "following the leader" on. IMHO Ethereum badly needs a "Yellow Paper 2" that takes a step back and formalizes the whole block validation+execution flow. On top of that, there could be a C FFI spec for implementations of a "block processor" to follow, with type declarations for the ADTs such a library would consume/produce — making them into, essentially, plugin libraries (where any Ethereum node implementation could plug in any Ethereum block processor engine implementation.) Think "web browser" vs. "rendering engine" (where the "scripting engine" — i.e. the EVM — is just one part of the "rendering engine.") If such a formal block-processor plugin interface existed, an Ethereum "node" could then just consist of the storage engine, the consensus engine's policy layer (while needing to rely on standardized consensus machinery existing within the block-processor), the P2P protocols, and the RPC backend. I.e., infrastructure code. Powerfully, this would mean that networks that are essentially forks of Ethereum or which embed an Ethereum node in their network architecture (i.e. everything listed on https://chainid.network/ https://chainid.network/) could all just link in an up-to-date upstream block-processor engine — rather than drifting away from it just because they've necessarily forked the storage+consensus+p2p+rpc code.
dogman144 6y ago
Is there some central aggregation point of ~everything (or in that spirit) that SN wrote, across all the various forums and such? I feel like I finally need to dig in and read all of that.
- rfd4sgmk8u 6y ago
  https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/quotes/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/quotes/
- nivexous 6y ago
  Bitcoin.com has the Satoshi Archive (https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/ https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/) with all his emails and forum posts. Satoshi wanted big blocks, and so BTC largely ignores him or says "We are all satoshi", but there is a ton of wisdom if you go back and read. This was put together by Derek Magill, who is also a good person to follow on Twitter.
  - rfd4sgmk8u 6y ago
    Warning, bitcoin.com is non-authoritative on bitcoin. They went a little mad a few years ago with the big block agenda. They do not speak for bitcoin, and want to push their big block bcash fork. Satoshi proposed 1MB blocks in 2010 as an anti-spam mechanism. He was not against raising it, but it had to be done sensibly. RV and Bitcoin.com forced a non-sensible fork and fell off a cliff.
    - nivexous 6y ago
      "Non-authoritative" ... this is why BTC people just suck to talk to. Everyone DYOR. It is indisputable that Satoshi wanted big blocks. Here are a couple quotes: The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/emails/mike-hearn/1/ https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/emails/mike-hearn/1/ At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/emails/cryptography/2/#selection-29.1296-29.1481 https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/emails/cryptography/... I find it interesting that these are missing in the Nakamoto Institute's quotes on scaling.
shawnz 6y ago
> the wise guidance of Satoshi is regularly ignored. They are basically producing a competing product. Why should they ought to copy the exact formula of their competitors? How can they hope to be better than Bitcoin by doing everything the same way?
- dogman144 6y ago
  I don't think you could call ethereum a competing product, it works fairly differently in a lot of fundamental ways. UDP vs. TCP is more accurate IMO, and those two don't really compete.
- jcrubino 6y ago
  New implementations are generally regarded as good in the space because they help solidify the underlying protocols and add established libraries and routines in a new programming language.
mylons 6y ago
it's interesting how dogmatic this is
uncletammy 6y ago
In BTC, the wise guidance of Satoshi is also regularly ignored. Here are a few examples Satoshi's Guidance: Bitcoin should function as cash Source: https://bitcoin.com/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.com/bitcoin.pdf ( See the title ) Satoshi's Guidance: We shouldn't be limiting transaction capacity to accommodate low performance client hardware Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306 Satoshi's Guidance: The blocksize limit should be removed to maximize network capacity. The limit was only meant to be temporary. Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg15366 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg153... EDIT: formatting
- swensel 6y ago
  Based on this, are you a fan of Bitcoin Cash? I find it interesting how divisive the split in Bitcoin / SegWit / Lightning Network vs Bitcoin Cash has been.
  - uncletammy 6y ago
    I support any and every coin that aims to build Satoshi's version of peer-to-peer electronic cash. Right now, the coins that come closest are Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Dash. Sadly all three have had to make some big concessions that make them look less like the original version. I also find the split interesting. I'm most interested in how effectively public perception was manipulated with regards to the split and the reasons for it. Bitcoin Cash exists solely because of the censorship on r/bitcoin and the bitcointalk forums. When supporters of a high throughput network were silenced, the exodus started. That exodus turned into the fork. You can read more about that here ( https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-history-of-censorship-in-r-bitcoin-c85a290fe43 https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-histor... ) and here ( https://medium.com/@johnblocke/r-bitcoin-censorship-revisited-58d5b1bdcd64 https://medium.com/@johnblocke/r-bitcoin-censorship-revisite... ) With regards to lightning network, it was pulled into the debate as a deflection from the real issue which was that a few high ranking core devs (after forming Blockstream, a company aiming to make money off of BTC's "scaling problems" ) reneged on their agreement to bump the blocksize to 2mb with the passing of segwit. Those devs realized they could hide behind lightning network and make it's supporters think big blockers were attacking them. The truth is, very few people in the big block camps are against lightning network. I know many BCH devs that would welcome and even contribute to a lightning implementation on BCH, which for the record would work substantially better because on-chain fees wouldn't make it cost prohibitive to open/close channels or provide liquidity. The only beef with Lightning that big blockers really have is that they don't see it as an alternative to on-chain scaling. This whole BCH vs Lightning war is just a false flag. Also, while we're all watching the Coinbase IPO with great interest, here's a gem from the golden boy himself that is very much relevant to this discussion: https://blog.coinbase.com/what-happened-at-the-satoshi-roundtable-6c11a10d8cdf https://blog.coinbase.com/what-happened-at-the-satoshi-round...
zucker42 6y ago
Why are you treating Satoshi like an enlightened prophet?
- rfd4sgmk8u 6y ago
  Because he invented the money that we will use for the next 500 years. Some folks think influential people are worth quoting, in the same way we do about people like Adam Smith, The founding fathers of the United States, Dr King, Karl Marx, etc
chrisco255 6y ago
Ethereum is NOT a second, nor compatible implementation of Bitcoin. That would be BCH, LiteCoin, DogeCoin, etc. which are literally forks of BTC. Although those are not exactly compatible either. Ethereum started with its own code base, its own core. It's a completely different concept altogether and its a true 10x innovation on blockchain as a concept. Ethereum has many client implementations built on several different programming languages. The whole reason they have multiple clients is to make the network more resilient for moments like this.
- rfd4sgmk8u 6y ago
  I know. My point is that multiple clients make the network LESS resilient. Moments like this prove it, as the network lost 11% of nodes until it was fixed. Satoshi was correct, multiple implementations are prone to failure, not resilient.
  - DennisP 6y ago
    And yet the network kept running. Back in 2016, a denial-of-service attack took down the most popular node implementation. People quickly switched to the second-most popular implementation, and the network kept running without interruption until the popular client was fixed eight hours later.
keiferski 6y ago
Ethereum is a distributed blockchain focusing on smart contracts. ETH is just the cryptocurrency built to power it. The vision is much, much bigger than a mere currency (Bitcoin), even if the roll-out is proving complex.
fogof 6y ago
A lot of people are disagreeing with you, possibly because of your overly-reverential treatment of Satoshi, but I think ultimately this idea makes more sense than some of the commenters here are giving it credit for. Chrisco writes: > The whole reason they have multiple clients is to make the network more resilient for moments like this. But to me, it seems like this was a minor bug in which more contracts were being added to access lists than needed to be. Ultimately, I think that the network could have functioned normally if either this implementation or the Geth implementation was the only one on the network, without causing problems for anyone. Other sibling comments make reference to the fact that Ethereum is much more complex than Bitcoin. But doesn't this just make it even more suitable for all development energy to be concentrated on a single client, since it's inherently harder to maintain? Certainly there are benefits to having multiple clients, but I think there are drawbacks as well.
- rfd4sgmk8u 6y ago
  :-) Yes. Folks threw rocks at Satoshi back in the day too, because they did not understand.
thebean11 6y ago
I really don't like the "Satoshi wouldn't have liked this" arguments. Have you ever worked with a really smart, visionary guy who changed his opinion on something? Have you changed your opinion? Satoshi is gone, and we can't just assume what his opinions would be today. I think death of the author definitely applies here. It's an open protocol. I respect Satoshi as a visionary and inventor, but he does not have the final say.

throwaway4good 6y ago

So much for a protocol eh ...

capableweb 6y ago

"In a different blockchain they go by different rules" yeah no shit, of course. Ethereum is not Bitcoin because Ethereum doesn't want to be Bitcoin, otherwise Ethereum wouldn't have existed in the first place. That's like complaining that GCP is not following the advice of AWS "leaders", of course they are not gonna do that, otherwise they would work together, not on two different projects... Also, no matter what Satoshi wrote in 2010, multiple implementations of Bitcoin does exist today, most of them relatively stable: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Clients https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Clients And the integrity of the network is not harmed by multiple clients either, just harms the users of that client, not other clients so not sure what the harm is. Yes, it's difficult, but so is a lot of problems in the cryptocurrency space.

uncletammy 6y ago
> Ethereum is not Bitcoin because Ethereum doesn't want to be Bitcoin, otherwise Ethereum wouldn't have existed in the first place This isn't exactly true. Vitalik only created Ethereum because the new core devs ( Blockstream ) were actively limiting what types of things could be done with Bitcoin. They were moving away from programmable money in favor of "digital gold". Source: https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/929805462052229120?lang=en https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/929805462052229120... Here's a more detailed telling of the events by one of the Decred developers: https://old.reddit.com/r/decred/comments/6wxueo/your_best_pitch_for_decred/dmcer4d/ https://old.reddit.com/r/decred/comments/6wxueo/your_best_pi... TLDR: Ethereum actually does want to be Bitcoin but that's only because Bitcoin doesn't really want to be Bitcoin anymore. They've dumbed down their protocol. They've dumbed down their infrastructure. Hell, they've even managed to dumb down their users. Ethereum will make a fine Bitcoin.
- DINKDINK 6y ago
  Developers have no ability to coerce what software bitcoin users run -- that's the entire point of bitcoin. If a competing developer fails to gain user adoption, it's on them that they haven't convinced users to switch consensus rules. It makes for a convincing inflammatory, but false story, for detractors or grifters though (see the myriad of Bitcoin clones: "Bitcoin" KYC, "Bitcoin" Diamond, "Bitcoin" Cash etc etc)
Dylan16807 6y ago
> "In a different blockchain they go by different rules" yeah no shit, of course. That's a terrible summary! It's like saying it's obvious that GM should ignore anything Henry Ford ever said about making cars. There might be good reasons to act differently, but simply being a different organization isn't one.
- shawnz 6y ago
  I think you have it backwards. It's more like saying that not every single thing Henry Ford ever said actually describes the best possible way of making cars. Henry Ford was capable of getting things wrong. I don't think anyone is claiming that Ethereum should do things differently just to be different. The claim is that actually that Ethereum isn't necessarily worse just because it is different.
vmception 6y ago
The market itself has shown resilience through all kinds of previously theoretical problems 51% attacked coins dont “crash to zero” because market participants decided it wants to buy them up and attempt double spending. In other cases the proactive disabling of only some off-ramps just creates greater scarcity, ensuring amplified value to the coin being acquired A lot of what satoshi said can be ignored because the market can simply bear it These are products which can attract value for reasons satoshi and enthusiasts did not predict, just like any economist fails to predict what actual individual humans will do

tzumby 6y ago

I think this depends on how good the specs are. I agree that if we look at other examples of separate implementations, this would support this argument (see Browsers for example). But on the flip-side, ETH 2.0 - the proof of stake work, released very good specs and now we have working implementations in Go, Java, Nim, Rust and more. All working right now since the launch that happened in December 2020

thinkmassive 6y ago

bitcoind is the most used implementation by far, but there are others that work fine, like btcd The more significant difference seems to be Ethereum is far more complicated (a Rube Goldberg machine, as critics like to say) and has trouble coordinating hard forks. A hard fork of Bitcoin is considered a different network, so it’s no longer an issue.

derefr 6y ago
The real problem with Ethereum client code, is that almost everyone just starting to work on it — and even some people who've been at it for a while — are under the mistaken belief that Ethereum itself is a 100% formalized system, because the Yellow Paper formalizes the behavior of the EVM. They think that as long as their EVM follows the spec, they can't possibly accidentally calcluate a wrong state and end up out-of-consensus with the network. However, there are (many!) stateful things that happen during Ethereum block-ingestion that occur outside of contract bytecode execution (i.e. not modelled by the EVM abstract-machine.) So even if you implement your EVM "to spec", there's this whole surrounding edifice of block-processing code that has no spec, that everyone's just guessing and "following the leader" on. IMHO Ethereum badly needs a "Yellow Paper 2" that takes a step back and formalizes the whole block validation+execution flow. On top of that, there could be a C FFI spec for implementations of a "block processor" to follow, with type declarations for the ADTs such a library would consume/produce — making them into, essentially, plugin libraries (where any Ethereum node implementation could plug in any Ethereum block processor engine implementation.) Think "web browser" vs. "rendering engine" (where the "scripting engine" — i.e. the EVM — is just one part of the "rendering engine.") If such a formal block-processor plugin interface existed, an Ethereum "node" could then just consist of the storage engine, the consensus engine's policy layer (while needing to rely on standardized consensus machinery existing within the block-processor), the P2P protocols, and the RPC backend. I.e., infrastructure code. Powerfully, this would mean that networks that are essentially forks of Ethereum or which embed an Ethereum node in their network architecture (i.e. everything listed on https://chainid.network/ https://chainid.network/) could all just link in an up-to-date upstream block-processor engine — rather than drifting away from it just because they've necessarily forked the storage+consensus+p2p+rpc code.

dogman144 6y ago

Is there some central aggregation point of ~everything (or in that spirit) that SN wrote, across all the various forums and such? I feel like I finally need to dig in and read all of that.

rfd4sgmk8u 6y ago
https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/quotes/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/quotes/
nivexous 6y ago
Bitcoin.com has the Satoshi Archive (https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/ https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/) with all his emails and forum posts. Satoshi wanted big blocks, and so BTC largely ignores him or says "We are all satoshi", but there is a ton of wisdom if you go back and read. This was put together by Derek Magill, who is also a good person to follow on Twitter.
- rfd4sgmk8u 6y ago
  Warning, bitcoin.com is non-authoritative on bitcoin. They went a little mad a few years ago with the big block agenda. They do not speak for bitcoin, and want to push their big block bcash fork. Satoshi proposed 1MB blocks in 2010 as an anti-spam mechanism. He was not against raising it, but it had to be done sensibly. RV and Bitcoin.com forced a non-sensible fork and fell off a cliff.
  - nivexous 6y ago
    "Non-authoritative" ... this is why BTC people just suck to talk to. Everyone DYOR. It is indisputable that Satoshi wanted big blocks. Here are a couple quotes: The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/emails/mike-hearn/1/ https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/emails/mike-hearn/1/ At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/emails/cryptography/2/#selection-29.1296-29.1481 https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/emails/cryptography/... I find it interesting that these are missing in the Nakamoto Institute's quotes on scaling.

shawnz 6y ago

> the wise guidance of Satoshi is regularly ignored. They are basically producing a competing product. Why should they ought to copy the exact formula of their competitors? How can they hope to be better than Bitcoin by doing everything the same way?

dogman144 6y ago
I don't think you could call ethereum a competing product, it works fairly differently in a lot of fundamental ways. UDP vs. TCP is more accurate IMO, and those two don't really compete.
jcrubino 6y ago
New implementations are generally regarded as good in the space because they help solidify the underlying protocols and add established libraries and routines in a new programming language.

mylons 6y ago

it's interesting how dogmatic this is

uncletammy 6y ago

In BTC, the wise guidance of Satoshi is also regularly ignored. Here are a few examples Satoshi's Guidance: Bitcoin should function as cash Source: https://bitcoin.com/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.com/bitcoin.pdf ( See the title ) Satoshi's Guidance: We shouldn't be limiting transaction capacity to accommodate low performance client hardware Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306 Satoshi's Guidance: The blocksize limit should be removed to maximize network capacity. The limit was only meant to be temporary. Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg15366 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg153... EDIT: formatting

swensel 6y ago
Based on this, are you a fan of Bitcoin Cash? I find it interesting how divisive the split in Bitcoin / SegWit / Lightning Network vs Bitcoin Cash has been.
- uncletammy 6y ago
  I support any and every coin that aims to build Satoshi's version of peer-to-peer electronic cash. Right now, the coins that come closest are Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Dash. Sadly all three have had to make some big concessions that make them look less like the original version. I also find the split interesting. I'm most interested in how effectively public perception was manipulated with regards to the split and the reasons for it. Bitcoin Cash exists solely because of the censorship on r/bitcoin and the bitcointalk forums. When supporters of a high throughput network were silenced, the exodus started. That exodus turned into the fork. You can read more about that here ( https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-history-of-censorship-in-r-bitcoin-c85a290fe43 https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-histor... ) and here ( https://medium.com/@johnblocke/r-bitcoin-censorship-revisited-58d5b1bdcd64 https://medium.com/@johnblocke/r-bitcoin-censorship-revisite... ) With regards to lightning network, it was pulled into the debate as a deflection from the real issue which was that a few high ranking core devs (after forming Blockstream, a company aiming to make money off of BTC's "scaling problems" ) reneged on their agreement to bump the blocksize to 2mb with the passing of segwit. Those devs realized they could hide behind lightning network and make it's supporters think big blockers were attacking them. The truth is, very few people in the big block camps are against lightning network. I know many BCH devs that would welcome and even contribute to a lightning implementation on BCH, which for the record would work substantially better because on-chain fees wouldn't make it cost prohibitive to open/close channels or provide liquidity. The only beef with Lightning that big blockers really have is that they don't see it as an alternative to on-chain scaling. This whole BCH vs Lightning war is just a false flag. Also, while we're all watching the Coinbase IPO with great interest, here's a gem from the golden boy himself that is very much relevant to this discussion: https://blog.coinbase.com/what-happened-at-the-satoshi-roundtable-6c11a10d8cdf https://blog.coinbase.com/what-happened-at-the-satoshi-round...

zucker42 6y ago

Why are you treating Satoshi like an enlightened prophet?

rfd4sgmk8u 6y ago
Because he invented the money that we will use for the next 500 years. Some folks think influential people are worth quoting, in the same way we do about people like Adam Smith, The founding fathers of the United States, Dr King, Karl Marx, etc

chrisco255 6y ago

Ethereum is NOT a second, nor compatible implementation of Bitcoin. That would be BCH, LiteCoin, DogeCoin, etc. which are literally forks of BTC. Although those are not exactly compatible either. Ethereum started with its own code base, its own core. It's a completely different concept altogether and its a true 10x innovation on blockchain as a concept. Ethereum has many client implementations built on several different programming languages. The whole reason they have multiple clients is to make the network more resilient for moments like this.

rfd4sgmk8u 6y ago
I know. My point is that multiple clients make the network LESS resilient. Moments like this prove it, as the network lost 11% of nodes until it was fixed. Satoshi was correct, multiple implementations are prone to failure, not resilient.
- DennisP 6y ago
  And yet the network kept running. Back in 2016, a denial-of-service attack took down the most popular node implementation. People quickly switched to the second-most popular implementation, and the network kept running without interruption until the popular client was fixed eight hours later.

keiferski 6y ago

Ethereum is a distributed blockchain focusing on smart contracts. ETH is just the cryptocurrency built to power it. The vision is much, much bigger than a mere currency (Bitcoin), even if the roll-out is proving complex.

fogof 6y ago

A lot of people are disagreeing with you, possibly because of your overly-reverential treatment of Satoshi, but I think ultimately this idea makes more sense than some of the commenters here are giving it credit for. Chrisco writes: > The whole reason they have multiple clients is to make the network more resilient for moments like this. But to me, it seems like this was a minor bug in which more contracts were being added to access lists than needed to be. Ultimately, I think that the network could have functioned normally if either this implementation or the Geth implementation was the only one on the network, without causing problems for anyone. Other sibling comments make reference to the fact that Ethereum is much more complex than Bitcoin. But doesn't this just make it even more suitable for all development energy to be concentrated on a single client, since it's inherently harder to maintain? Certainly there are benefits to having multiple clients, but I think there are drawbacks as well.

rfd4sgmk8u 6y ago
:-) Yes. Folks threw rocks at Satoshi back in the day too, because they did not understand.

thebean11 6y ago

I really don't like the "Satoshi wouldn't have liked this" arguments. Have you ever worked with a really smart, visionary guy who changed his opinion on something? Have you changed your opinion? Satoshi is gone, and we can't just assume what his opinions would be today. I think death of the author definitely applies here. It's an open protocol. I respect Satoshi as a visionary and inventor, but he does not have the final say.