Awesome post, I like how she uses language, it's almost literature.
And she has a point: What happened? Rick Falkvinge, not a single public comment - and I really like this guy - Jihan Wu, no longer Bitmain's chief, Roger Ver, pumping Amaury as "creator of Bitcoin Cash", Amaury silent beside the videomeetings, or mostly salty, and so on. Where are they?
Meanwhile CSW in constant conversation with the community, Jimmy Nyen flying through the world promoting Bitcoin, and so on.
I realized that I personally LIKE Craig Wright, independently of who he really is. He enjoys Whisky, poses with his library, promotes a wide education of math, law, economics, history, theology, has a balanced vision of privacy and transparency, and teaches to use your own mind ... It's really funny, he is the first character in Bitcoin I tend to admire, no matter if he is a crazy Satoshi or a brillant conman. Do I destroy the rest of my reputation saying this?
Edit: Here's an example flowing in about what I talk about. On twitter, someone brought up Craig pissing Julian Assange on the mailinglist: "Do we really need your amatuer political views?". In the signatur, Craig comes with a wonderful quote:
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims
may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons
than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron's cruelty may
sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who
torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with
the approval of their own conscience." - C.S. Lewis, _God in the Dock_
This is a book with essays of a theologist, and I never expected to find such a good quote from a theology book.
/End of edit
Anyway ... Peter and Andrew went public, in the very moment we continued this talk. Somewhere on r/btc
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/aphsc3/id_like_to_readhear_thoughts_from_bitcoin/
Andrew, signalling compliance with ABC's plans:
I like schnorr. Strategically I like BLS better but I get the impression that schnorr was already mostly done based off of core work so tactically it makes sense as it can be delivered quickly and doesn't stop deploying other crypto later.
But also complaining about ABC:
Third, graphene has been implemented and running just fine on mainnet for months now. Claims of experimental are kind of BS at this point, except that ABC will probably claim it experimental until they implement it. Sure there have been tweaks to increase compression, etc but that's it. Some people have made informal reddit-based claims of poor decode rates, but Graphene relies on having mostly synchronized mempools -- if you have a poorly connected node you may have decode failures. Its meant to be a very compact transfer format for the real "workhorse" nodes we envision, not the toy raspberry PIs running at home. But having said that, my home network has had no problems at all.
Fourth, if graphene fails to "decode" we fall back on Xthin or CB with minimal bandwidth loss. If Avalanche fails we could permanently fork the network, or allow transaction censorship.
and
Also, there is no preconsensus. There is only consensus. The preconsensus term is a lie to make the proposal easier to swallow. It is hiding the fact that Avalanche changes the consensus algorithm to a polling/POW hybrid, with POW in a very secondary role. Is the next step to remove it entirely? Let's not sugar coat it, let's focus on what it really is.
Peter explains why he is so silent:
I've got a baby on the way and we're building a new home, so I've been spending less time here.
and makes a brillant analogy:
I've also been feeling down about bitcoin since the hash war. Like
/u/capt_roger_murdock said to me recently, between 2015 - 2017 bitcoin was a tree growing in a container too small for it to thrive. For over two years, we tried to move it to a larger pot without success. So we ended up taking a small cutting from the bitcoin tree and planting it in a much bigger pot. The little cutting admittedly looked kind of stupid in such a big pot, but with some watering and fertilizer we told ourselves that it would grow to fill that large container and more. But then just when the cutting was starting to establish some roots and to bud with new leaves, we decided to cut it in half, move each half to even bigger pots, and then trample and pee on both.
What he imho misses is his own rule in seeding the toxicity towards one person that deepened the split before it happened.
He also comments on the state of Bitcoin Unlimited
I think the reality is that BU as a power center was paralyzed by the split, as our views sat somewhere between ABC and SV (ABC is science-based like BU but wants to make more significant changes and do so at a faster pace than BU, while SV wants a slower pace of change like BU but is largely faith-based according to the gospel of Craig Wright). After the split, BCH is more "ABC" than prior to the split (e.g., bitcoin.com used to run BU for mining but can't any longer [1]), and BSV is purely "SV." BU as a governance body is less relevant now.
[1] because of the largely-undocumented consensus changes ABC made to implement re-org protection [the changes were made for a good reason, don't get me wrong, but these rapid consensus level changes basically forced all miners and economically-significant node operators to centralized around the ABC implementation to ensure consensus if further rapid changes were required].
He's also not happy about the conceptual volatility of ABC:
Last fall,
/u/s1ckpig and I organized the
Instant Transactions Workshop in Gargnano, Italy. It was a great deal of work to bring the seventeen or so BCH devs together in Italy for 3 days, but I thought it was worthwhile. The "consensus" that came out of that meeting was to implement double-spend proof relaying, as this solved both the fast-respend and reverse-respend attacks, and required minimal development.
and agrees with Andrew about the selling of Avalanche es preconsensus.
I'll echo what Andrew said above: calling the Avalanche proposals being discussed "pre-consensus" is a misnomer IMO. Calling it pre-consensus sounds like what's being discussed is less of a change than changing bitcoin's consensus ruleset. But what were discussing is more of a change than changing bitcoin's consensus ruleset. We're not just talking about adding or removing some static rule (such as "blocks cannot be larger than 1 MB") -- we're talking about giving a new group the power to subjectively define any transaction as invalid.
The trouble now is that Avalanche partly competes with this proposal and thus no one is working on double-spend proofs any longer.
Sorry for reposten your comments,
@theZerg and
@Peter R
How about the Bitcoin Unlimited ranks - the two Peters, the two Andrews - do an AMA in this forum? Maybe this will help to revitalize it again.
I have a preditcion for the future: BU will protest the changes ABC wants, discussion will heat up a bit, ABC starts another "education campaign" accompanied by rBTC becoming hostile toward BU again, and finally a meetup will settle things, so that BU agrees with what ABC is planning.
