Topic: An Open Letter to the Bitcoin Community from the Developers - page 2. (Read 5891 times)

Very good letter. Finally the people have heard the voice of the reason and will sit to discuss about the problem which faced bitcoin nowadays. This is the right solution and not the division. Hope that everything will go ok and will not be division. Even flaring the absence of the name of Gavin. Hope it will not be late for a pacific and overall solution.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/21809/open-letter-bitcoin-community-developers/

As active contributors to Bitcoin, we share this letter to communicate our plan of action related to technical consensus and Bitcoin scalability.

Bitcoin is many things to many people. However, the development and maintenance of Bitcoin is a human endeavor. Satoshi sought review and cooperation, and the subsequent work by Bitcoin’s developers has made the system more secure and orders of magnitude faster. The Bitcoin developer community is dedicated to the future of Bitcoin, looks after the health of the network, strives for the highest standards of performance, and works to keep Bitcoin secure on behalf of everyone.

We’re committed to Bitcoin and responsive to the needs of the community. For the past five years, we’ve written code and managed over 50 Bitcoin releases and reviewed more than 45 formal proposals to improve Bitcoin’s performance, security, and scalability. Technical discussions, while heated at times, are always focused on improving Bitcoin.

Much work has already been done in this area, from substantial improvements in CPU bottlenecks, memory usage, network efficiency, and initial block download times, to algorithmic scaling in general. However, a number of key challenges still remain, each with many significant considerations and tradeoffs to evaluate. We have worked on Bitcoin scaling for years while safeguarding the network’s core features of decentralization, security, and permissionless innovation. We’re committed to ensuring the largest possible number of users benefit from Bitcoin, without eroding these fundamental values.

There will be controversy from time to time, but Bitcoin is a security-critical system with billions of dollars of users’ assets that a mistake could compromise. To mitigate potential existential risks, it behooves us all to take the time to evaluate proposals that have been put forward and agree on the best solutions via the consensus-building process.

In the upcoming months, two open workshops will bring the community together to explore these issues. The first Scaling Bitcoin workshop will be in Montreal on September 12-13. The second workshop is planned for December 6-7 and will be hosted in Hong Kong to be more inclusive of Bitcoin’s global user base.

We ask the community to not prejudge and instead work collaboratively to reach the best outcome through the existing process and the supporting workshops. It’s great to already see broad excitement for the event and the high concentration of technical participants attending.

We’re confident that by working together we can agree on the best course of action. We believe this is the way forward and reinforces the existing review process that has served the Bitcoin development community (and Bitcoin in general) well to date.

We welcome your participation as we continue our efforts to bring Bitcoin into the future.

Signed,

Wladimir J. van der Laan

Pieter Wuille

Cory Fields

Luke Dashjr

Jonas Schnelli

Jorge Timón

Greg Maxwell

Eric Voskuil

Amir Taaki

Dave Collins

Michael Ford

Peter Todd

Phillip Mienk

Suhas Daftuar

R E Broadley

Eric Lombrozo

Daniel Kraft

Chris Moore

Alex Morcos

dexX7

Warren Togami

Mark Friedenbach

Ross Nicoll

Pavel Janík

Josh Lehan

Andrew Poelstra

Christian Decker

Bryan Bishop

Benedict Chan

฿tcDrak

Charlie Lee

Jeremy Rubin

ok, somewhat plausible I suppose, but idiotic as you say.

We can accuse both sides of bad motives but I think one side wants main chain scaling and one wants off chain scaling.  would you agree?

It's more like one side wants optimal decentralization and security while the other side is fixated on scaling the system by externalizing costs to the ones running it.

ok, somewhat plausible I suppose, but idiotic as you say.

We can accuse both sides of bad motives but I think one side wants main chain scaling and one wants off chain scaling.  would you agree?

The investors in circle coinbase etc want to either cripple or centralise Bitcoin. They are funding Gavin and Hearn to do that. 'Solid argument'.  Plausible on the surface.

...

Actually, both arguments are idiotic ad-hominems. Both sides need to reduce the temptation of using them. It just adds vitriol to the debate.

btw most of the people including core-devs who disagree with XT are not from blockstream

blockstream people held similar positions before blockstream

blockstream gains from making bitcoin better and bigger

blockstream gains from keeping block small is questionable and minimal if even existent. Its a very long bow to draw

there are much easier ways for core devs to make way more money then trying to keep blocks small in some hope they can make money of open source infrastructure

the core devs have a long history of being motivated primarily by privacy and tech not by money

lightning network is open source and blockstreams business model is crappy, it receives not revenue. Its essentially a way to  fund devs so they can work on common-good infrastructure. Infact its probably the best way for them to be funded yet remain independent.

By keeping the 1MB limit in place, Core developers would
force transactions off the main chain as Bitcoin scales.
And Blockstream is in the business of building sidechains,
and other extensibility.  I think that is a very solid argument.
You can disagree with the conclusion but should be honest enough
to admit that the argument is at least plausible on the surface.
What Carlton is saying is just nonsense
that he can't even explain.  

unclear if you mean "right" about the labelling of XT or whether it should be run.

My stance is that if 75% of the miners are running something, who am I to disagree.  
If I don't like it, I don't have to use it.

There's a reasoning behind calling XT an altcoin, to which I partly agree (though I think altcoin is too bold).
Of course you are implying that you're right here, and they are wrong, while they think the opposite way.

I just don't think there's anything bad in being afraid or suspicious when the economic majority is against you (in fact, it isn't). Quite the contrary, I think it's natural. Being afraid of 'small blocks' is nothing different.

People who feel the need to call XT an altcoin (when the reality is that it will only fork if there's a supermajority of miners running it) are mischaracterizing it, which is a form of intellectual dishonesty.

There's a reasoning behind calling XT an altcoin, to which I partly agree (though I think altcoin is too bold).
Of course you are implying that you're right here, and they are wrong, while they think the opposite way.

I just don't think there's anything bad in being afraid or suspicious when the economic majority is against you (in fact, it isn't). Quite the contrary, I think it's natural. Being afraid of 'small blocks' is nothing different.

People who feel the need to call XT an altcoin (when the reality is that it will only fork if there's a supermajority of miners running it) are mischaracterizing it, which is a form of intellectual dishonesty. Apparently they need to try to control opinions because they are afraid of letting the economic majority do something that they don't agree with.

You want Bitcoin run by corporation puppets of the governement who the hell do you think you are fooling with you trojan horse preaching?

Yup and bitcoin will only accelerate that but it doesn't mean they won't try. They will.
Don't expect governments to disappear though, they will adapt after hitting the hard reality of decentralization leaving them with less influence they currently have. Which is a good thing IMO.

Bitcoin is a trojan horse. Let it infiltrate the actual power structures around the world that think they can control it like anything else. They might have some influences but it is limited and they will eventually hit the wall of decentralization. Just like anybody else.

It is not.

Government control around the world is slowly disintegrating before our eyes. We only need to hold you animals off for so long.

Of course scaling is possible without harming decentralization. Just not the way those two self-proclaimed "benevolent dictators" want to do it. Their proposal which (among other privacy-attacking features) is now included into their Altcoin is not a well-thought-out solution. That's why the vast majority of Bitcoin Core developers rejected it.

Andresen and Hearn are very good at making PR and bully for their own interests. However that doesn't make them good engineers.

it is inevitable that bitcoin is/will go to another level where every major governments and corporations will want a piece of it.

You shouldn't have to trust anybody...