Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[freetrader]

@freetrader and I have been talking about things on slack. Ironically, he has logs of that day and they strongly support what I'm saying. With his permission I'll post the same excerpts as I posted on the slack.

@theZerg : Rather than publishing selected excerpts from that meeting to paint a particular picture, I will publish the full log of the meeting which I published in the release_admin Slack channel today for other developers to review. You clearly wish to conduct the further examination of the details on this public forum, so I will include also our further conversation on this topic, in full, to save both of us some time in re-stating points already made. And after all, your view was that on this subject there can be no expectation of privacy.

Full log of 6 June 2017 developer meeting:
https://gist.github.com/ftrader/d390270da87055538b06989c4c4e7c20

Full log of further conversation on this matter between us, 5-6 April 2018 in same channel
https://gist.github.com/ftrader/74ee4584b56732a5d15678fba7a8c3d2

For those tempted to read only the second part, it contains selective quoting from the meeting which omits the reservations of other developers present to the proposed plan, and only quotes the single other developer who expressed support for it.

The meeting log also does not reflect the events that transpired sometime afterward, where thezerg clarified with me via DM what the status was at the end of the meeting. (since you might have noticed my hesitation to accept the proposed plan - I never expressed my satisfaction with it during the meeting). That brief follow-up conversation doesn't warrant a separate gist:

thezerg 4:47 PM
so are you going to accept daily merge responsibility for this project or not?

freetrader 4:48 PM
on my own repo ?
I thought I already said so

thezerg 4:48 PM
ok great
I will remove the buip055 branch from BU

During the 6 June meeting I set up a HF branch on my personal repository on which to accept PRs.

After the above conversation, I wrote up a document to describe the proposed workflow and submitted it as the first PR on the same day. I also sent the PR link to other devs to get feedback. I recall it might have received informal acceptance (via Slack remarks) but It got a formal approval nod by a BU dev a week later (13 Jun) and I merged it into my 'buip-hf' branch on Jun 18.

On the same day as the meeting (6 Jun), deadalnix also submitted a PR for the replay protection to my repo. This was marked as "Can be modified is the spec ends up being different than what's proposed" and showed up with a failing test on Travis, so it was evidently a work in progress. A BU developer commented about the precise test which failed, but no other BU devs left any review comments on this one. It was clearly not in a ready state for merging.

@theZerg submitted what was the first and only PR submitted by another BU developer to my repository on 27 Jun. The initial title was 'WIP BUIP055' - WIP standing for 'work in progress'. It contained further fork related code. I examined it when it was submitted, but did not enter review comments into Github as the PR was marked by the author as WIP and was clearly in an unfinished state. Deadalnix reviewed it on the initial submission day as well, and made some review comments which were addressed. Later some more commits were added by others and pushed to the PR, and the title was changed to 'BUIP055' on 11 July. Shortly thereafter (14 July) another BU developer (sickpig) reviewed it, leaving review comments addressed to the author(s) of code sections in the PR. These review comments were not addressed at all by the BU developer. Long story short - this PR had not completed its review and was not ready for merging yet. Further commits were pushed to this PR until 21 July, but the review comments were not resolved.

Sometime after 14 July but before 18 July - I cannot reconstruct this exactly - thezerg decided to move BUIP55 development back to BU's main repository 'dev' branch in order to expedite the release.

I submitted a PR for difficulty adjustment on 18 July - a consensus change that came very late in the development - to BU's repo, where it was reviewed and finalized (merged) on 21 July.

On 24 July I received the following DM from thezerg on Slack which I shall enter into the record here.

thezerg 6:51 PM
So what happened? You never evaluated or commented on any of the BU PRs, never made any PRs of your own, etc.

I responded:

freetrader 6:54 PM
The deal was that other BU devs would review them, and none of them were in adequate post-review shape for me to construct PRs back to BU's repo.
Before that happened, you decided to take development back to BU dev .
Where I made a PR .
I kept my end.
FYI: I did evaluate your main PR made to my repo, in early stage.
It was clearly WIP - although I don't remember if it was marked as WIP.

Clearly there was a mismatch of expectations starting at the initial meeting. But no dissatisfaction was registered by thezerg prior to taking back the development to BU's repo.

The record shows that I did submit PRs, review PRs (although at a stage too early to make constructive comments). I could not merge the two PRs in my own repo as they were blocked in review.

I don't see how I could have sped up the development process for BU's release given the constraints at the time. In hindsight I should have not accepted this proposed method of working at the outset. But sometimes you can't predict how things will turn out.

 

[go1111111]

"The effect is negative."

Not "gamma is negative."

Seriously. What the hell. Did he even ever claim "negative gamma?" I can't find it.

Even if you claim Craig misspoke in the video that Deadalnix just posted, he is still wrong even under the interpretation that you're pushing.

See

 

[albin]

No it is because the chances of one trial working do not depend on what have been tried or not before.

That's exactly the same thing as what I said. The context surrounding what I was asking was whether there was more than just the basic statistical properties of performing a hash, not some weird pedantic word games about how to phrase whether trials are statistically independent.

 

[theZerg]

For those of you who care and don't want to dig through a large log of minutes, here are the key excerpts. Yes, there were other comments from other devs, etc, but requesting clarification, not substantively changing the plan. I clearly explained at the end that I needed to do it this way because freetrader wanted to remain anonymous. It would be completely irresponsible of me to give an anonymous user commit access to software that controls people's money.

Yes, I did not explicitly ask freetrader to do all the work, and I did not confer a title -- in my professional experience you get the title after you successfully assume the responsibility. I expected a motivated individual, like I saw during his "let's fork bitcoin" campaign and the Bitcoin Cash specification process.

But freetrader instead made no attempt to encourage other devs to write PRs or fix existing PRs, and chose to do his own implemention work in a competing client, Bitcoin ABC, whose existence was unknown to me (and nearly everyone else AFAIK). His PR into BU was offered AFTER the ABC release...

The professional thing to do would have been to disclose this conflict of interest. Clearly I would not have delegated this task if I had known that the lead would be working on another client.

```
thezerg 3:49 PM
@freetrader, do you want to run a branch in your own repo with PRs and then issue a PR to BU when its ready?

freetrader 3:50 PM
how would that work?

thezerg 3:51 PM
make a branch in your repo, people submit PRs to it. you merge them. then when its ready issue a PR that merges that branch into BU

freetrader 3:52 PM
is there an upside to this roundabout way instead of developing BUIP055 on the BU repo ?

thezerg 3:55 PM
the purpose is delegation

ptschip 3:57 PM
agree, i think it's a good idea, not ideal, but gets rid of a merging bottleneck and @theZerg can get focus on other things (edited)

thezerg 3:58 PM
@freetrader, you wrote a careful spec, do you want to shepard the process of implementation through?

freetrader 3:59 PM
The 'shepherding' requires a lot of decisions which are required from project lead.

freetrader 4:00 PM
@theZerg : as I wrote above, I'm willing to maintain a branch on my repo and feed PRs to BU
as long as this is a process others want to follow.


thezerg 5:28 PM
WRT BUIP055, I would like freetrader to create a working branch in his repo and review and pull in PRs in the normal fashion with my and other people's input
when BUIP055 is 90-100 percent done we merge to BU dev
we will not need such an exhaustive review at taht point since stuff has already been reviewed going into @freetrader's branch
yes this is not daily CI

freetrader 5:29 PM
This branch will run on Travis.

thezerg 5:29 PM
but daily CI means that I spend all day every day merging your stuff
this is a problem
additionally, much of this work will and should be isolated

freetrader 5:30 PM
why don't you delegate merge responsibility on BU ?

thezerg 5:31 PM
step by step @freetrader
esp since you value your anonymity, I can give a final merge a quick once over to ensure that some backdoor hasn't been injected
```

Final note: Why have I waited so long to mention this? I wanted the ABC client and Bitcoin Cash to be on strong ground during its genesis, not be surrounded by this controversy. And everyone who really needed to know (the BU devs) were present, for everyone else its just paparazzi. However, at this point ABC is strong, and its important to clarify the situation so that everyone can understand that BU both initiated and has always driven the Bitcoin Cash fork forward (with our ABC and XT partners).

 

[Peter R]

@go1111111

I think many people want to believe that CSW is Satoshi because he came out in support of on-chain scaling and instant transactions. And they want to believe this so badly that when he says something wrong, these people jump through all sorts of hoops to find some interpretation where maybe, just maybe, he wasn't wrong and was instead just misunderstood.

And this saddens me because it's similar to the behaviour we were escaping from with Core. Remember the "Book of Core" where certain things were not to be questioned, but instead accepted on blind faith (e.g., on-chain alone is not feasible, the Core repo is the "official" repo, and 0-conf TXs are not secure)? Or how challenging Maxwell would get you banned from the dev list?

Actually, maybe we've gone backwards because now there is this imbecile who spouts nonsense on Twitter, writes papers of pure technobabble, and gives talks where he gets even the most basic of facts completely wrong, and then an army of fans (or his PR team or whatever) rush out to create some convoluted explanation where the mistakes was not actually mistakes but instead proof that he's a misunderstood genius. And some people eat it up.

But with all the technical people calling out CSW as a fraud the last two weeks, I think he's mostly done. But it will take some time for that reality to set in.

 

[freetrader]

@theZerg : this is precisely why I remarked on the slack that in your excerpts, you removed others' significant comments, and even significant comments of mine.

I find that outrageous. Why do you remove my comments in bold?

freetrader 3:50 PM how would that work?
have the buip055 be a dirty branch, and then mangle that back into PRs for 'dev' directly ?
I think we need a branch for BUIP055 that is cleanly maintained.

[...]

freetrader 3:55 PM
if others want me to do it by maintaining such a branch on my repo, I would do it.
I just don't understand the rationale behind it.

[...]

freetrader 4:00 PM @theZerg : as I wrote above, I'm willing to maintain a branch on my repo and feed PRs to BU as long as this is a process others want to follow.
I consider it not optimal.

You ignored the multiple voices who expressed reservations against this plan, including my own. No other BU developer except Peter Tschipper expressed anything resembling enthusiasm for it, and Peter Tschipper ended up not submitting any pull requests to my BUIP55 branch.

I never sought commit access on BU's repo - you left out my response to your 'step by step' insinuation on my "why don't you delegate merge responsibility on BU?" question (see your extract above):

freetrader 5:32 PM
it's not an aswer to a "why" question, and my question was not application, in case you mistook.
My opinion is that there are capable non-anonymous persons around who would like to help you.


In fact, those capable non-anonymous persons volunteered in the same meeting to maintain this branch on the BU repo, and pointed out that their commits/merge privilege could be delegated to a single integration branch.

sickpig 5:34 PM
@theZerg this is your call. But I can't see the diff to delegate someone to curate a branch and only one branch on the repo with the solution you propose. There's a diff, the work flow is more complicated.
but as I say is is your call.
I'm ok with your decision, just want to express my view on that. (edited)

As I said before, except deadalnix and yourself, none of the other BU developers submitted a PR.

freetrader 5:33 PM
Well, I'll do my best to help you on this
Others will let us know if it's working or not.

I guess they didn't let you know it's not working. Or maybe they did, and you just ignored it once again.

Despite your claims to having delegated this responsibility, you were still the release manager for BUcash release, the only person able to integrate commits on BU repo.

You probably still haven't taken any steps to alleviate BU's PR merging workload by delegating that responsibility to some other trusted committers. Developers have pointed out that option to you many times.

But freetrader instead made no attempt to encourage other devs to write PRs or fix existing PRs, and chose to do his own implemention work in a competing client, Bitcoin ABC, whose existence was unknown to me (and nearly everyone else AFAIK).

The professional thing to do would have been to disclose this conflict of interest. Clearly I would not have delegated this task if I had known that the lead would be working on another client.

The existence of my collaboration with deadalnix on the ABC forking client was known to you on June 6. (yes the day of the "merge delegation" meeting).
In fact, you made a terribly unprofessional and inappropriate comment about this to me in DM on that day, which I will not reproduce here.

Other developers should take note that the BU Developer views working on other clients as a conflict of interest.

 

[Zarathustra]

@Zarathustra in point of fact palladium does NOT increase platinum supply, it reduces platinum demand. An important detail. You are otherwise correct WRT influence on price.

Yes, all alts inflate cryptocurrency, and it reduces the demand (and the value) for each of those currencies.

 

[Zarathustra]

@go1111111

I think many people want to believe that CSW is Satoshi because he came out in support of on-chain scaling and instant transactions. And they want to believe this so badly that when he says something wrong, these people jump through all sorts of hoops to find some interpretation where maybe, just maybe, he wasn't wrong and was instead just misunderstood.

I think many BCH supporters defend CSW because so many BCH 'supporters' slander him in an unholy alliance with the North Coreans.

And this saddens me because it's similar to the behaviour we were escaping from with Core. Remember the "Book of Core" where certain things were not to be questioned, but instead accepted on blind faith (e.g., on-chain alone is not feasible, the Core repo is the "official" repo, and 0-conf TXs are not secure)? Or how challenging Maxwell would get you banned from the dev list?

Nobody gets banned on the BCH forums. But Buterin among others call for a ban of CSW from conferences. That reminds me of the situation with Core.

Actually, maybe we've gone backwards because now there is this imbecile who spouts nonsense on Twitter, writes papers of pure technobabble, and gives talks where he gets even the most basic of facts completely wrong, and then an army of fans (or his PR team or whatever) rush out to create some convoluted explanation where the mistakes was not actually mistakes but instead proof that he's a misunderstood genius.

Our beloved @Zangelbert Bingledack?

And some people eat it up.

Many! Stupid voters.

But with all the technical people calling out CSW as a fraud the last two weeks, I think he's mostly done. But it will take some time for that reality to set in.

That would be a great job by that unholy alliance. Ostracized the person who organized more support and funding of great BCH projects than all his enemies together.

Do I believe that CSW is part or even the main part of Satoshi? I don't know! To me it's just as possible that the polymath CSW lead the team Satoshi as the non-physicist Elon Musk leads the team Tesla. We can call Musk a con-artist as much as we want. He's the man. He did it.
It was not a nerd (a representant of 'the technical people') who did it.

 

[KoKansei]

I just want to chime in here and say that, as someone who has called out actual hacks at academic conferences, albeit in a different field, my first instinct has always been to ask the culprit to go back to a specific slide and question them until it is self evident to most in the audience that they are a pretender, not call them names and request that they be banned from all future conferences.

If, like me, you take (a probably unhealthy amount of) pleasure debunking nonsense, you welcome the hucksters and the frauds to show their faces because picking them apart is fun sport and as long as they are paying their conference fees like everyone else they are helping make future conferences possible.

Where is Vitalik, Emin, etc. during the Q&A asking pointed questions instead of namecalling? Wouldn't a video of CSW being unable to answer a question and pointed follow-up be far more devastating a victory for the CSW "debunkers" than the same tired ad hominem?

 

[jessquit]

maybe we've gone backwards because now there is this imbecile who spouts nonsense on Twitter, writes papers of pure technobabble, and gives talks where he gets even the most basic of facts completely wrong, and then an army of fans (or his PR team or whatever) rush out to create some convoluted explanation where the mistakes was not actually mistakes but instead proof that he's a misunderstood genius. And some people eat it up.

I could swear that's exactly what Greg Maxwell said about you Peter.

Do I believe that CSW is part or even the main part of Satoshi? I don't know! To me it's just as possible that the polymath CSW lead the team Satoshi as the non-physicist Elon Musk leads the team Tesla. We can call Musk a con-artists as much as we want. He's the man. He did it.
It was not a nerd (a representant

Steve Jobs AFAIK never wrote code or personally engineered so much as a mousepad, but you'd be hard pressed to find a single individual who made a more important contribution to personal computing.
[doublepost=1523096658,1523096040][/doublepost]

 

[deadalnix]

Alright, then CSW never said anything stupid because Obama said something stupid. 100% strong logic. Absolutely Kosher reasoning. Certified vegan and gluten free.

 

[jessquit]

@deadalnix one of these days you're going to figure out that I'm on your side, buddy.

perhaps you aren't aware that Obama haters used this one flub (he clearly meant forty-seven, not fifty-seven) as rock solid proof of his incompetency to lead. This flub was pounded into Americans on dozens of talk shows and internet forums for at least a year. And frankly, anyone paying attention realized that it's an attack that discredits the attacker.

When we desperately hate someone, as millions of Americans hated Obama, and as you and Peter and others obviously desperately hate Craig, then there is a tendency to not even listen to what they're saying, but instead to seek out errors - any error whatsoever - and then latch onto that error as a weapon of attack.

People on your side will rally with you because they hate the other guy too. But people on the other side - and more importantly, everyone with a brain that's undecided - will see it for what it is: a stupid and impotent attack.

So yeah. Craig said "negative gamma" when he intended "the effect on gamma is negative." Maybe you've never given technical presentations in front of large, quasi-hostile audiences, but I have. These kinds of errors are inevitable and meaningless. Attacking them only hurts you.

 

[deadalnix]

So Craig math are correct because I and Peter hates Craig. Once again, 100% strong logic. I smell the fields medal incoming.

 

[cypherdoc]

he clearly meant forty-seven, not fifty-seven

people can be even more unintentionally obtuse than that. how many times have you heard ppl claim they are putting effort into something (like this stupid infighting for instance) of 110%? last time i looked, that's impossible since there's only 100% of me.
[doublepost=1523119726][/doublepost]and ppl wonder why i'm always so down on devs and the dev process. this is why i want to mostly just optimize the Bitcoin code around the simple concept of Sound Money. this would sideline most of the devs that can't help the tinkering that mostly destroys value while causing so much drama.
[doublepost=1523120119,1523119462][/doublepost]if that CSW video is THE only example of where he refers to "negative gamma", then it's obvious he's referring to a negative "effect" of SM on gamma. why the fuck won't you guys cut him a break on that?

as far as Vitalik's concerned, i've never been a fan of his around his views on the economics of Bitcoin mining. there's a video floating around from back when Eth was first being conceived where he complains/whines about ppl like him never having had the chance to get in on Bitcoin mining in the "early days" and this is why Bitcoin is a flawed concept; b/c it was "unfair" that he didn't know about and have the chance to mine. fuck, if he's taken up mining at that very moment as a career, he'd probably be just as/more fabulously rich than he is now. i think this was around 2013-14. his surprise attack on CSW from the crowd was immature and certainly unfair. Joseph Poon jumping up and shouting he was the designer of LN in support of Vitalik was equally immature and impulsive.

 

[Richy_T]

Kinda salty around here this morning

 

[jessquit]

So Craig math are correct because I and Peter hates Craig. Once again, 100% strong logic. I smell the fields medal incoming.

I believe that Craig is correct that adding nonmining meshnodes to an attack against a fully connected network that prioritizes incoming connections by demonstrated hashpower is not only unhelpful but actually counterproductive.

Now that might be incorrect but it's an argument I've never heard advanced and frankly it adds considerable value to the discussion, in my opinion.

 

[Zarathustra]

So Craig math are correct because I and Peter hates Craig. Once again, 100% strong logic. I smell the fields medal incoming.

Is this a joke? Or is it your serious interpretation of @jessquit's post? If yes, I'm worried!

 

[jessquit]

This seems like something we should all be able to agree with:

 

[Richy_T]

OK, so in the spirit of things that used to be a thing but got disappeared in all that was going on, I started looking back at the history of green addresses. Karpeles and Hearn seemed to be for them, Luke-jr was predictably against. Now that we once again have low fees and plenty of capacity, is this now something that should be revisited or should it just stay in the grave?

Not to be confused with the "Greenaddress" company (what's up with that anyway?)

 

[Zarathustra]