Topic: BIP 16 / 17 in layman's terms - page 10. (Read 38982 times)

You are missing the point. Miners' self-interest is not intrinsically linked to bitcoin's long-term prospects. They are asked to make a decision affecting bitcoin's long-term prospects. They don't care. Surprised? You ask them to behave responsibly and they will.... wait for it... NOT FUCKING CARE!

Good luck exhorting them to take up their responsibility. While you're at it please exhort the speculators not to short sell. Also, consider the malware programmers. They could use some serious exhortation as well. Clearly the problem is that everyone needs to hear more wholesome exhortations about responsibility. Should put up some fucking loudspeakers outside to broadcast them like in communist countries. If you are really an exceptionally dirty bastard, encourage people to attend church to get it in the ear from those child rapists.

Disclaimer: I may seem to be reacting strongly. For an economist, "Claim that outcomes would be different if everyone just behaved more responsibly" = "noises associated with child-rape". Profoundly distasteful. Difficult to distinguish the two behaviors.

*cough* um... 


Stability for new features = bad. Stability for underlying protocol = good. How much has SMTP, FTP, and even HTTP changed in the last 20 years? Sure the last one got a lot of new features, but overall, not much. We don't want actual money changing around too much, since stability = predictability.


Actually a closer analogy is like having the US president veto ALL new laws passed by an almost evenly divided congress. Nothing will pass, and no new changes will be made unless people REALLY REALLY REALLY want it. In this case, miners really don't care about change. They have their equipment set up in a certain way, and changes only mean extra work.


Why? a 3% mining fee is a 3% mining fee regardless of the protocol changes. Why would Tycho or any other miners care?


Hmm... that's true...

Simple-minded thinking from the likes of Rassah. What a surprise.

In the world of electronic devices, stability can be an ominous sign. Companies that don't adapt well-liked products to changing conditions get steamrolled. Think Nokia and Blackberry. In financial services, stability has a better reputation. Bitcoin is at the intersection of the two.

Regardless of what you think about stability, it is clear that miners have way too much power for bitcoin to be governed well. In most respects, the opinion of miners is neither here nor there as far as bitcoin's future goes. They are not the same people as long-term bitcoin holders and bitcoin business operators. The latter groups have a clear long-term interest. The miners do not. But miners are afforded all this authority. It is like asking the electorate of Bolivia to choose the US president. One wouldn't expect the Bolivian electorate to be highly motivated to participate in the election, or if they do participate, to try and make an informed choice.

Finally, given that miners make decisions, it is best for them to be made by miners with substantial market power like Tycho. At least these guys will care somewhat about outcomes. Moreover, if some emergency happens it will be much easier to mobilize a small group of oligopolists to respond. Small miners won't care enough to even think about the issue, let alone download an update.

^ This. If this whole thing has proven one thing it's that Bitcoin is a pain in the ass to change in any way, and that's good. Stability is good.

Don't worry, this likely does not happen. Nobody want to work on forked chain alone...

I say the core dev team need to play hard ball on this.. Make the change they agree is best, if Deepbit and other pools don't upgrade to the latest version then I assume the blockchain will fork, with official clients going one way and the pools going another.  The difficulty will plummet on the official chain and mining will be very profitable for the official client users.  The mining pools can keep pushing forward with their forked chain, but for how long? with no development it wont last long.  If enough warning is given to official client users that x, y, z pools will not be sticking to the official chain, then they have a chance to mine somewhere else or solo mine at the cut-over date.

If Bitcoin cant resolve this issue with a majority (peers) rule, and 6 pool operators can dictate the rules then the project is in trouble anyway.

I'd like to see what [Tycho] said. 

I did. That's why I started my own pool.

I apologize-- I did not mean to attack you, I thought I stated nothing but facts. I am also sorry I didn't speak up about some of the things that were said about you earlier in this thread (e.g. suggesting an attack on your pool is NOT cool) but I don't have time to read every forum post as soon as it is posted...

I had no doubts about someone not getting the joke.

But yes, much less than 5 induviduals can weaken the community, and it's not the pool owners, of course.
At this moment it was only a small confrontation between Gavin and Luke-jr (but Gavin attacked me too while I did nothing wrong).
Imagine what can happen if 2 or 3 core devs will have a fight over something ? That's exactly why I hope some new full clients will appear, like Ufasoft's one, but opensource.

Well, may be Gavin did it intentionally, trying to force me into joining efforts with you and thus cause a major split in pools/devs team to weaken the bitcoin community ? :)
Who knows what he really wanted...

Except that still hasn't been merged, though it should have been by now considering it has been well-tested for over 8 months and has zero effect on anyone who doesn't want to use it... There are also other mining-related improvements that should be, but also haven't been merged, which are needed to solo mine too (all bitcoind releases so far cannot handle the load required to solo mine). I'd like it if I (or someone else qualified) were allowed to maintain solo mining, at least until p2pool matures enough to be a viable replacement for solo mining, but the developers with push access seem content to let it stagnate until finally removing 'getwork' entirely in the future. But this is really getting off-topic IMO...

Specifically the ability to reward the generated coins in a new block to multiple addresses, thus making it easier for many new pool operators to payout to their miners. I recall that being a significant boost to the pool op community.

I'm not the only one who concedes BIP 17 is better than BIP 16, and certainly better than nothing. Hopefully the pressure to rush BIP 16 will lighten up after it fails to meet its voting deadline, and people who just want P2SH rushed in will realize BIP 17 is not delaying things.

I'm pretty sure Tycho is aware that his hashrate has been dropping for quite some time before BIP 16 already. There's no reason to think people are switching over this issue in particular.

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Gavin, I would appreciate it if you would stop emailing other pool operators in secret to try to convince them to support BIP 16 (or at least stop with the FUD I've been hearing). Is there a reason these emails can't be posted openly?

That's complete nonsence. Why would they wait for me ? Just because of Gavin's words about me ?
slush and BTCguild combined are more powerful than Deepbit and they are working on it already.
I don't see any point of being first, and I think that I must never be the first.

psychological reasons.
he's the "leader" of a big chunk of the bitcoin network
people will assume that he knows what he's doing and that after having 40% of the hashing power the full support for bip16 will be soon enabled.

To what are you referring?

I'm talking about support from other pool operators.

There's no incentive for others to wait or switch. Why would they be waiting for Deepbit?

thats a deadlock
the others are waiting for you