Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[Richy_T]

Classic gets cool Gavin, Core gets nerdy Gavin.

Or is it the other way around?

 

[albin]

Or publicly stating one position only to be secretly planning the other?

Absolutely.

Poon said something really really bizarre recently about miners wrt LN, I'm starting to really see your misgivings about this guy --

 

[cypherdoc]

@albin

just listen to the crazy talk from Poon and read this post. ppl are catching on to the deception:


https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/3vssph/ln_dev_joseph_poon_claims_fees_approach_zero/

 

[cliff]

Seems relevant: http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21688885-ideological-divisions-economics-undermine-its-value-public-all-sea?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/allatsea

(Title: All at sea: Ideological divisions in economics undermine its value to the public)

 

[Peter R]

@Graphics latest masterpiece:

Reddit thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/428jg6/new_core_great_new_taste_better_than_ever/

 

[cypherdoc]

the economically naive may ask, "well, why wouldn't miners like BF want to diversify their tx fee processing income away from POW mining to LN hubs? wouldn't that be smart?" answer: no.

you have to understand that this Valery Vavilov, aka BitFury, is one-of-a-kind. i remember reading/following his development thread when he was drawing his ASIC up in his garage as i was an active miner. this guy is a genius. the complexity of what he was doing was orders of magnitude above everybody else around BCT, which is why i mined with BF units soon after my Avalons. now again today they are leading the mining industry with chemical liquid cooling facilities that have no competition. and they're building 3 of these things in Georgia. how stupid would it be to let LN hub owners into the tx fee game who would number in the hundreds if not thousands by simply spinning a server up with code? no, BF is going to try and snuff them out and the only viable way i see that happening is by increasing blocksize to increase throughput on the mainchain to keep fees where they are. they'll help figure out transport improvements through pruning, IBLT, weak/thin blocks, etc. it will be worth it for them to try and maintain a monopoly for as long as possible.

 

[albin]

@cypherdoc

That Hong Kong presentation is infuriating. This guy is a total space cadet.

"Lightning is about solving long-term mining incentives"??

That truly was a dog-and-pony to sell miners their snake oil.

His argument about why he thinks hubs are unlikely actually reveals a failure mode that he's spinning as though it's a decentralizing force!

The Q&A hurts so bad, I'm getting douchechills listening to his answers.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Many small blockers like /u/jensuth have taken to saying the big blockers just want to up the blocksize cap because it's easy to understand. "It looks simple to increase the blocksize, but it's actually complex. What an obvious pitfall, and of course it's going to be popular because free shit army. SMH that this is the default position." Then they quote Mencken about simple and wrong solutions.

But a similar thing can be said about the small blockers: the default position for people who like to feel smug and superior is to go with the experts, especially the ones who are winning - the experts at Core since its the dominant implementation. "Since there are so many people who like to feel smug and superior, or who just blindly follow authority and can't think for themselves, of course small blockism is going to be popular." Like Keynesians they seem to be wowed by counterintuitive claims, in a kind of intellectual class signaling (Real Men Wear Pink).

 

[lunar]

comedy gold from Vitalik B

Soft-forking the block time to 2 min: my primarily silly and academic (but seemingly effective) entry to the "increase the blockchain's capacity in an arbitrarily roundabout way as long as it's a softfork" competition

 

[Zarathustra]

@Graphics latest masterpiece:

Reddit thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/428jg6/new_core_great_new_taste_better_than_ever/

Now officially #COREKT

 

[cypherdoc]

Haha, listen to Petrov. This is great. Kudos to him and BF for changing course. Their mining centers must be ready ;

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-miners-bitcoin-classic-scaling-debate-evolves/

 

[BldSwtTrs]

It's weird it's seems the two sides are certain that they will win. Yesterday I spoke IRL with a bunch of smallblockist who was convinced that a hard fork will never happen.

 

[cypherdoc]

@BldSwtTrs

Most small blockists have small minds. They blindly follow their leaders, core dev, and can't think for themselves about what motivates economic actors in this space. Maybe good at math but either too young or inexperienced to understand the real world of ruthless capitalism. They are about to be taught a very painful lesson. .
[doublepost=1453548431][/doublepost]I'm reminded of a saying I came up with many years ago;

"The geeks fail to understand that which they hath created "

 

[Roger_Murdock]

Mr. Bitcoin isn't "firing all the devs" because Mr. Bitcoin never had any employees. He prefers the flexibility of independent contractors. Every code offering that any group of developers puts out is a fresh bid that Mr. Bitcoin is free to accept or reject. (Protip for future bidders: it looks like Mr. Bitcoin is getting increasingly less keen on proposals that include a 1-MB block size limit. Might be best to avoid those going forward if you want the work.)

I was thinking more about this analogy. When I wrote the above, I was considering a "bid" as a particular client release (e.g., Bitcoin Core version 0.11.2), but then it occurred to me that's probably not the best way to think about it. The logical consequence of the type of "unbundling" we've talked about is that every logically separable element can be considered a separate "bid." Thus, any given client release actually includes many "bids," e.g, a particular blocksize limit, RBF (or no RBF), SegWit (or no SegWit), etc.

When you think of the situation in these terms it really drives home how bizarre and inappropriate the behavior of some of the Core devs and their supporters has been. If Classic is successful, not only would that not represent the Core devs being "fired," it would represent the Core devs winning something like 99 out of 100 of their most recent bids. And their reaction to that possibility is basically to say "screw you" to their most important client and threaten to rage-quit Bitcoin development if Mr. Bitcoin doesn't award them 100% of his contracts, or push the "red button" of a PoW change? That is a weird reaction, is it not? One possible explanation is that we're talking about a group that won so many bids in a row for so long they've forgotten they are independent contractors and have started to think of themselves as "indispensable employees" who can dictate the terms of their employment. Indeed, a few seem to be under the delusion that Mr. Bitcoin works for them. Of course, another possible explanation is that Mr. Bitcoin isn't their "most important client" and that there's someone else they care more about keeping happy...

This analogy also makes me wonder if the branding of Classic and Unlimited might not have been a mistake. Even though I personally love both names, I wonder if they might not exaggerate the momentousness of a supposed switch away from Core. Because well, they don't really represent a switch away from Core. As I understand it, they're both forks of the Core code base and I assume that they're both 99% identical. Classic is really just "Core+2MB" and Unlimited is really just "Core+Configuration," no? And I say this as someone with admittedly limited (and dated) programming experience and meaning no disrespect to either dev team, but seriously, how competent do you really need to be to change a constant or add a few GUIs? But when these clients are perceived as being "completely different clients" rather than relatively modest forks, FUD (or simple conservative skepticism) about their respective dev teams is more likely to be successful at deterring their adoption.

At any rate, all of this actually leaves me pretty optimistic about the possibility of moving toward a healthier development culture where it will be understood by everyone that different dev teams' code offerings and suggested parameter settings on things like the block size limit can and should be considered on an a la carte / "mix-and-match" basis (and where the tools to make this a la carte selection convenient are widely available). Then, hopefully, the debates will stop being about "client A vs. client B" or "dev team A vs. dev team B" and start being about which features should be enabled and where various parameter settings should be set.

 

[molecular]

@albin
No way they let a bunch of LN hub owners simply code up fee siphoning server software as the future of Bitcoin. .

Then why aren't they taking the wind out of those sails NOW (or last year, really) by getting together and deciding to mine bigger blocks?

 

[Inca]

@molecular:

Classic codebase isn't ready. And before miners can mine a block greater than 1mb the non mining network nodes must accept it.
Once Classic is released to fanfare - and the miners 'en bloc' begin to mine blocks using it with a planned hard fork date then it will happen.

Another thing I think we should be pushing is that if you characterise the network upgrade as a hard fork then it sounds terribly technical, scary and disruptive. But if everyone on the network knew they simply had to upgrade their software by a certain date then it would be entirely straightfoward. All vital services will switch well beyond the date. It is just software and if the process was automated then non of this would even be an issue.

I also think the idea that has emerged of letting the community decide the rules of the protocol is very powerful. Imagine a scenario where all bitcoin users could vote via a cryptographically proven identity (say a bitcoin address) to decide the rules of the software. This feature could be added in a simple fashion to every bitcoin wallet software implementation. In this way the decisions of the protocol could be truly democratised and what the economic majority wish would be bitcoin. There would be no drama like we have now and developers would be back to where they are in the normal grand scheme of things - simple code writers and not idolised deities.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

It's so weird that people ask, "Where is Classic's roadmap?" As if all the key people at Core are automatically going to quit, and we're going to be reliant on a bran new dev team. Classic is really just doing what Core refuses to do: up the blocksize cap on their own implementation and offer it as an option.

Now even though only like 1% of their work is being rejected, Gmax sees it differently: a big-block coin is doomed, he says, so he will quit if that is what the market wants as it wouldn't be "worth having."

Still this surely doesn't explain the reaction to a mere 2MB. I think what does explain it is the belief that some wise devs must be vested with authority so that they can override these (and other future) "populist" initiatives. Although this means overriding the market, which is wellnigh impossible (at least in the long term), Gmax may either be in denial about this or believe that the market will support having wise devs override the popular majority. That may even be the case, as since the market often operates with a time lag or at the eleventh hour, and since its voice is being distorted by the tethering of these controversial settings to the dev team, no one knows for sure what the market will decide.

For Gmax's part I suspect the answer doesn't really matter to him, because if the market supports him he doesn't need to change a thing, and if it doesn't support him "it was clearly a mistake to work on Bitcoin anyway."

 

[Roger_Murdock]

It's so weird that people ask, "Where is Classic's roadmap?" As if all the key people at Core are automatically going to quit, and we're going to be reliant on a bran new dev team. Classic is really just doing what Core refuses to do: up the blocksize cap on their own implementation and offer it as an option.

Exactly! And the fact that people are asking that question is evidence for what I was talking about when I said that the branding of Classic may have been a mistake. Or at least it points out an important counter-narrative that we need to stress: Classic is really just Core+2MB. Adopting Classic is not "firing Core." It's simply not allowing them to dictate literally every single aspect of consensus code to the market. The nature of open-source software means that the 1-MB limit is just a suggestion. It's not unreasonable to grant that suggestion some deference, but that deference should not be and cannot be unlimited if Bitcoin is going to remain a decentralized system.

And if the Core devs are going to quit because the market doesn't blindly accept 100% of their recommendations, then -- and I don't say this lightly -- good riddance. Because that would indicate a staggering and absolutely toxic level of hubris, and betray a very fundamental misunderstanding of what Bitcoin is all about.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

What also gets me is how people care about the Classic team (besides those who just do it as a FUD attempt).

Although part of it is that people assume a switch to Classic fires the Core devs, another part of it may be that users aren't accustomed to "shopping around" for each upgrade, rather than just taking what each implementation offers in each new release. They could take the blocksize upgrade from Classic, then ignore whatever Classic offers in subsequent releases and instead take the Segwit upgrade from Core, and perhaps some other upgrades from Unlimited and btcd. Unless Core goes out of its way to make its innovations hard to pull into other implementations, I assume it wouldn't be infeasible to keep all the implementations updated with the latest and greatest of whatever any other implementation is putting out.

I wouldn't be surprised if a few Core devs think "it's my way or the highway," and (they at least imagine) they will quit if the market moves against them. However, likely most do not feel that way, and even if they are not interested in working with a huge block coin, they would likely make do with 2MB and just try to innovate fast enough to avoid having to raise the blocksize much further. There is a lot of fronting going on, because given the views of people like Gmax there is an incentive to front.

 

[cypherdoc]

Austin Hill struggling mightily to be diplomatic but instead coming off as defensive and even threatening. Let us not forget that post where he implies Blockstream devs will be prevented from collaborating on Classic;

http://www.coindesk.com/blockstream-ceo-bitcoin-industry-creating-toxic-environment-for-developers/
[doublepost=1453564102][/doublepost]

What also gets me is how people care about the Classic team (besides those who just do it as a FUD attempt).

Although part of it is that people assume a switch to Classic fires the Core devs, another part of it may be that users aren't accustomed to "shopping around" for each upgrade, rather than just taking what each implementation offers in each new release. They could take the blocksize upgrade from Classic, then ignore whatever Classic offers in subsequent releases and instead take the Segwit upgrade from Core, and perhaps some other upgrades from Unlimited and btcd. Unless Core goes out of its way to make its innovations hard to pull into other implementations, I assume it wouldn't be infeasible to keep all the implementations updated with the latest and greatest of whatever any other implementation is putting out.

I wouldn't be surprised if a few Core devs think "it's my way or the highway," and (they at least imagine) they will quit if the market moves against them. However, likely most do not feel that way, and even if they are not interested in working with a huge block coin, they would likely make do with 2MB and just try to innovate fast enough to avoid having to raise the blocksize much further. There is a lot of fronting going on, because given the views of people like Gmax there is an incentive to front.

Regarding the highway: how many times have you heard them dismiss your argument by saying "you're welcome to use an altcoin if you want" or "you're welcome to develop your own client if you want", the implication being you won't or you can't or "I dare you", along with the hidden threat that "I will do everything in my power to stop you".