Topic: Bitcoin Development: Lack of Progress? (Read 2920 times)

Interoperability of multiple distributions that didn't even require a hard fork has gotta be a pain too.  Like when Dogecoin forked itself from having pools keep the last distribution instead of upgrading, because the newer one gave them more orphans.

That's a lot of pressure on basically one person to not destroy a 10 billion dollar enterprise lol.  I hope the CIA has trained Gavin well.

And please, no stupid people in this thread promoting Bitcoin as the sole currency of the future, we need multiple chains solely to hedge to be able avoid problems like this, if not for a billion other reasons.  Like a government easily being able to take over just one chain, or blackmail a developer, etc.  It's a lot harder to destroy 10 simultaneously.  Also, all it takes is for Gavin to screw up once and this entire ship goes down.  You sure you want frequent updates then?  Because that's the inverse of Gambler's ruin.

Multiple chains is the obvious future that *will* happen because people will demand the ability to hedge, and we currently depend on the technical ability of one human far too much.  Hopefully the whole transaction fee model works without Bitcoin being worth a billion dollars each when some of that money goes to other chains.  Something like $10k could even be the ceiling for Bitcoin due to having to divide market share by 5-10.

Development is happening, but it's happening at Conformal.

Half the changelog of the 0.9 release are features ported over from btcd.

Re-read my post. I was referring to an anonymous dictator developer, e.g. Satoshi, and I specifically said foundations are corruptible.

You're right. This is one of the things I forgot to mention in my "complexity" explanation. With Bitcoin different kinds of changes require different consideration for if and when they can even be implemented. As a currency, forks are not something you want to have at all ideally, so if they must be done it should be kept to a minimum. Due to the consensus nature of Bitcoin these type changes require extra ordinary planning and consideration.

The bitcoin foundaiton are constantly flat out right? God didnt create the world in a day 

You completely misrepresent the point of the Bitcoin Scamdation. It strictly exists to get donations from suckers so Peter Vessenes can have enough liquidity to pretend like his "businesses" in Bitcoin are working. Back then he was still hoping he may be bought out, meanwhile MP put the kaibosh on that pipe dream.

Development is an afterthought at the very best.

Are people just blind to the obvious?  Any big changes usually require hard forks, and they will want to get as much as possible into one when it has to be done.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardfork_Wishlist

Its not the lack of progress that bothers me, its the lack of fixes to existing, known problems and bugs.

Using coin fees to pay devs was the idea behind DevCoin I believe. I don't see much to that.

As for forum advertising I believe that goes to maintenance of the forum, and paying moderators. You're right there would be some concern about anyone formally paying devs having influential special interests. For that reason a crowd funding model is probably better. We just need to set something up.

Cool  Wasn't aware of that.

I'm aware. And it is great. Gavin has complained about lack of resources, I made some suggestions further up in this thread, nobody commented on it.

You guys are all aware that:
Bitcoin 0.9 RC 2 has just been released
The Payment protocol BIP 70 has just been released (I actually used it with bitpay the other day).

I think releases maybe have slowed down a lot (?) but it's hardly the case that nothing is being done.

Ethereum is great, no doubt.  As are the other efforts (MasterCoin, ZeroCoin, etc).

Just wish we could make Bitcoin "be all it can be" first.   There are a lot of things that can be added safely, which have been in queue a long time.

-B-

Solution build something that compliments it the Oil to Bitcoins Gold
Ethereum watch the video for the explanation
https://www.ethereum.org/
https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Paper

I don't think that will end up being a limiting factor for Bitcoin.


That's not talking about how Bitcoin works fundamentally. That won't change. However, there are many other transaction types possible. Any added features we see with Bitcoin will likely be optional usage additions, which can enhance usability. The way basic transactions work won't change.

It's called escrow.

Chargeback, isn't that a nogo with bitcoin, and isn't that exactly a selling point for businesses? If you have received payment, you have received payment, and there's no undoing that.

Businesses who wants to give the customer money back can simply aks the customer for his bitcoin address and then send the bitcoins back. Who's proposed chargeback, and what does the proposal look like, and why on earth do we need this? Non-reversible payments is exactly what makes Bitcoin was it is, or at least it's one of it's strong features.

Do you all think we will see major enhancements like being able to handle (far) more than 7 transactions per second?
In a reasonable timeframe from now?
I truly believe that one is "top of the list" important.  For obvious reasons.
I heard some discussion about adding (at least the ability for) a chargeback option, which could be switched on and off by merchant systems.
Ability to do refunds, etc.  The basic things necessary for Bitcoin to be a currency with actual commerce, versus just a store of value.

-B-

Suggestions:

Set up a website - possibly a new forum - where users advertisements, like on bitcointalk.org, would go mainly to a fund designed to pay devs. In additon to Gavin, there could be 1 or 2 more full time/part time devs if possible. Then there could also be a list of features that are wanted, and there could be bounties for these. Either these tasks could be assigned to someone proving to have the necessary skills and be paid pr. mini project, or people could compete and if their contribution were accepted, it would be included.

Bitcointalk.org forum have collected a shitload of funds, and have already assigned a software firm with the task of developing new software for the forum to a rather costly price.

Perhaps some of the forum funds could be directed towards bitcoin development?

Another suggestion:

I'm not sure if it would be a good idea to force an extra fee on all or some transactions to fund bitcoin development, I'm sure most would reject that. But what about having another foundation (!) or atleast some way of managing bitcoin payments and rewards to developers, perhaps by making a fund that regularily pays out to devs and for bounties and the way it would receive money would be from mining pools, exchanges and other willing bitcoin services, that would be willing to pay say 0.1 to 0.3% of their profit towards such a fund.

After all, this would benefit everybody, as devs would have more incentive to work with the bitcoin software development, and that would then benefit the contributors as they would be able to run their services on top of a better system that's more scaleable, more secure, and overall better.

Then another discussion would have to take place as how to mange and distribute those funds. But before that's even discussed, it would need to be established that this is something the community wants.

I would not object to some devs working on bitcoin actually taking painstakingly measures to stay anonymous, to stay under the radar so to speak - so if there was a concerted attack or compromise on devs, at least some devs would be remaining.

I'm sure there are many skilled people who could contribute code, but for most people they also need to make money, so not everybody can work for free, at least not full time.

Also if a model like the one described above came to fruition, it would be important to do the outmost to ensure that there would be no main special interests or corruption in that arrangement. I do also think that bitcoin services contributing could all have a small graphic on their site, explaining that they contribute to the bitcoin project, which would be a good thing to have. For example: "Official Bitcoin project contributor".

Because we have the block chain, then all devs could have their btc address published, so it would be easy for anyone to follow the bitcoins and ensure they was used for the predetermined causes.

There is no explicit need for keeping history... So there is no need for keeping a ledger, in other words.