Topic: Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud) - page 122. (Read 378996 times)

i'm at a loss for words, really. how is it that you can blame Core developers because some entity decided to coordinate a DDOS attack? i understand that it sucks to be DDOSed, but you're not saying anything relevant to the topic at hand. what does you (and your neighbors) getting DDOSed have to do with anything?

this is like me getting DDOSed and blaming the Chinese government because i have some idea in my head that they might benefit from disrupting stateside communications.

i'm not gonna tell it to your neighbors. your neighbors should tell it to their ISP. it's now Greg Maxwell and Peter Todd's fault that your ISP has insufficient infrastructure to deal with DDOS?

and what if Core nodes were the target, not XT? then, it's Gavin and Hearn's fault, right? and therefore XT is the problem, right? i believe that's the logic being used here.....

the next time your ISP goes down, are you really gonna keep spinning your wheels about how Core development is centralized? that's one of the most absurd arguments i've ever seen.

This is why we want Bitcoin nodes running in as many ISPs as humanly possible. Ideally on every ISP (although one wouldn't make it such a hard requirement that the system is unpractical).

In the end in a system with so many different constraints and where some of them are hard to measure or even agree to a target on, judgement calls need to be made.

Tell it to my neighbors.  Their Internet service was taken down for several hours.  The criminals DDoS'd the entire ISP, not just my node.  If my node had been DDoS'd that would have been an annoyance,  but I would not have called it a terrorist attack if there had been no collateral damage.

I have talked to customers of my ISP who experienced the Internet outage.  They know nothing about Bitcoin and are not interested in it.  Their experience was collateral damage.  Not just Internet service but also telephone service was disrupted because of this criminal attack.  People could conceivably have died.  Wake up.  Grow up.

i've seen nothing compelling from Peter R. ever. but that's neither here nor there.

i haven't seen many people at all suggesting that "it is wrong to hard fork." could you point to any examples? in fact, i've seen quite the opposite from XT opponents. i'd love for you guys to fork now with a mining minority, so we can write the epilogue on this embarrassing chapter in bitcoin's history, when a group of developers tried to use populism to break consensus.

i've seen many suggesting that it is wrong to promote a contentious hard fork, because it threatens to break the consensus mechanism. that's a lot more risky than forking with a hashing minority. in the latter case, XT will just die as any invalid chain does (perhaps its life could be temporarily extended with checkpoints). in the former case, we would have multiple surviving blockchains.

the specific misinformation i was speaking of here was your assertion that "power" could be "centralized" among Core developers. that's patently false, as i pointed out. stop using it as a way to rationalize promoting implementations that lack merit. you repeatedly do this: when someone criticizes the merit of XT (for whatever reason -- node centralization, increased latencies, bandwidth/storage limitations, IP blacklists, etc) you concoct this falsehood that "supporting anything besides Core" is rational in order to "decentralize" development. ive made clear this does absolutely nothing to "decentralize" development; by definition, open source development is decentralized. so, in effect, you are using a patently false argument to baselessly argue in favor of XT. further, erroneously projecting "centralization" onto Core is no mistake, as it has a loaded connotation among bitcoiners. this is a pretty dishonest form of debate, hence "misinformation" and "fallacy."

if you fear that people don't properly understand that bitcoin is open source and will blindly follow any implementation they are told to, that doesn't amount to centralization of power. the developers still have no power to force anyone to do anything. peoples' ignorance does not change that. if i build myself a cage to live inside of, and convince myself that the Core developers "made me do it," it doesn't follow that the Core developers are imprisoning me. this is just a bizarre roundabout way of blaming developers for other peoples' ignorance. and it has no basis in logic.

an "open source" project implies vigilance by those who use it. if you want to spend your time passing out flyers about what "open source" means, so that people understand, good on you. but this has fuck-all to do with centralization.

now, we are talking about "centralization" in the context of "development of the Bitcoin codebase." if you want to argue that the process within the development of a specific version is centralized, you'd be correct. but that applies to Core and XT both -- as well as any code updates to any engineering project. if there is no centralized review process within specific versions, unaudited code could be released at any time, meaning that anyone could hijack any version at will (whether that means increasing the 21 million coin supply, or anything else)..... this, of course, has no bearing on anyone's ability to develop alternative versions, nor on the decentralization of the protocol.

I think that Peter R makes good points.

I did adjust that last statement slightly in order to make it more consistent with what I am saying.

Well some people do argue that it is wrong to hard fork, especially away from the Core development team. Which is why I made these arguments in the first place. If enough people believed that it would be wrong to hard fork away from the core developer team then this would cause centralization of power, not because of technical or systemic reasons but because of social and cultural reasons, you could even say human reasons which are often flawed. It is true that the mechanism to prevent this exists within Bitcoin, however if not enough people properly understand this, then this mechanism can be rendered ineffective and cause problems which in effect could cause a disproportionate amount of influence and power centered around the Core development team. A technocracy if you will.

I am not arguing on misinformation and fallacy, if I am please point it out to me.

on the bolded: oh. lol. glad we cleared that up. now if only Peter R could understand that, and stop spamming his pie charts in the face of reason.

the only context in which this "mechanism" need be mentioned at all is if bitcoin were closed source. that is an impossibility at this point.

no one said it was wrong to hard fork (that is very different from criticizing the merits of a particular hard fork). opponents of XT have been telling you guys to fork off for months now. that doesn't mean that when you keep on arguing for XT based on misinformation and fallacy, that we won't explain reality to you (and those who read these threads).

lol, what a non-argument. terrorism? anyone could mount a DDOS attack on the bitcoin network, regardless of which version (if any) it might target. how is this relevant in any way?

if nodes (wholesale) can't withstand a DDOS attack, bitcoin isn't very robust, is it? indeed, there are various optimizations that could and should be implemented to assist in withstanding DDOS. feel free to contribute code to assist.

if nodes can be DDOSed to the extent that overall node health (and decentralization) are threatened, that has fuck-all to do with "centralization of development." it simply means improvements to the protocol need be made.

if you'd like to run XT, you ought to push Gavin and Hearn (and whoever else may be contributing to XT) to make it far more resilient to DDOS than it is. they are the only ones to blame for its shortcomings. if XT is to be a replacement for Core, it is incumbent on XT developers to address these issues, and all issues that might threaten bitcoin's robustness. i would question whether they are capable of that, especially considering the bugs in XT's implementation.

Centralization of power is prevented from developing in the Core development team, exactly because of this ability to hard fork away from the Core development team. It is this mechanism that ensures this aspect of Bitcoins freedom. Which is why intrinsically at least it is not wrong to hard fork away from the Core development team.

As to miners, the pool that I tried was DDoS'd and had to stop mining BIP101 blocks.  As to nodes the XT node that I was running was DDoS'd.  I am no longer running a full bitcoin node.

Do you believe that how bitcoin works should be controlled by terrorist attacks? Do you support "consensus" based on violence and fear?

how can centralization of power develop, in this context? i argue that it cannot. there is no power. this greatly differs from the protocol-level discussion where the various parties hold some level of power to hold the others accountable (e.g. nodes have the power to enforce the protocol and render a miner's fork invalid). these incentive-induced checks and balances have absolutely fuck-all to do with developers. development is completely external to the protocol, and developers have zero power to enforce code on anyone. all this "centralization" talk in the context of development is a silly red herring to confuse simple-minded people who take the word at face-value without thinking about it.

bitcoin is not closed source. that's the only instance in which developers can hold any power over users, nodes and miners. otherwise the latter parties can simply audit the code and opt to run another version.

I argued that centralization of power can develop within the Core development team, I have not argued that this is presently the case. I do argue however that having the ability to hard fork away from a core development team if we need to is an important mechanism of Bitcoin that allows Bitcoin to remain decentralized and truly free. Based upon what you have said here I would think that you would at least agree with this conception.

you repeating these misnomers just makes you look foolish. Core developers don't have any power; that's the beauty of the open source decentralized protocol that they are developing. at any time, miners and nodes can throw their weight behind a different version, developed by anyone. they have zero power to control anyone's actions. you and other XT fanboys are just upset that miners and nodes do not support other versions. i suspect the reason that only a tiny minority of loud developers shares your view that "Core is centralized" is that developers by and large have a much more sophisticated understanding of the technical issues, and therefore don't see a "civil war" of sorts as necessary. they'd prefer to continue to collaborate effectively on the bitcoin project; it was clear for many, many months that Hearn became disinterested in collaboration since no one was receptive to his ideas. since bitcoin is open source and development is indeed decentralized, he took the liberty (as anyone can) to fork the code.

and you know what? miners and nodes didn't support his fork. boo hoo. he proved just how decentralized bitcoin development is -- no one controls the code -- and even temporarily garnered some limited support for his fork. but it failed. and the idea that it could achieve 75% hashing power at this point is laughable. if nodes and miners do not support alternative versions, that is not evidence to say that "centralization of development" exists. it only says that unpopular versions are unpopular.

if you believe that a significant portion of miners and nodes will support an alternative version, go develop it. not a developer? well, too bad. because crying about "centralization" when you've no idea what it means won't make the alternative versions you think are so important magically appear. and it certainly doesn't provide any evidence that there is "centralization of power within the Core development team."

They're too cowardly to do that. They will stay panhandling at the entrance because they know they cannot replicate what Core devs are doing nor the support from the rest of us.

i'm a bit confused as to why any "worst case scenario" justifies ignoring the longest valid chain and intentionally breaking bitcoin into multiple blockchains. these are basic, basic defining principles and completely betrays the consensus mechanism outlined in the whitepaper.

the very reason this is a topic of discussion is because everyone possessing basic intelligence knows that 75% (less, including lucky runs) is not sufficient to achieve consensus. basic game theory. consider a 70-30 mining split---the 30% minority that remains on the pre-fork chain have strong incentives to remain there. the biggest incentive is that with 70% of the hashing power mining a different chain, relative hashing power on the pre-fork chain rises by 333%. especially if you are ideologically opposed to the forked chain or believe it is doomed to technical failure. a 75% threshold is so low that by the time the fork happens, we could see miner splits much closer to 70-30, 60-40, 50-50. without a very clear supermajority, this would inevitably break bitcoin in multiple chains forever.

if you're so intent on breaking consensus, just join frapdoc et al and start pushing for a hard fork with only a minority of hashing power. the result is more or less the same. you'd probably just look even more irrelevant than you already do.

Be my guest. Ask Mikey to do so, at best he'll further ostracise himself and lose even more influence. At worst he'll continue showing himself for the little coward he is.


But there is. There will always be a few deranged individuals.

0 out of 1000 blocks say the consensus is overwhelming. 

Perhaps it's time for someone who enjoys tilting at windmills to challenge these wikis.

Any respectable wiki will ban you for vandalism if you alter their established definitions.

How is one to decide what constitutes bitcoin and what constitutes an alt-coin? How is one to decide what constitutes the bitcoin protocol?  Invoking wikis, developers, forum posts, amounts to using the argument from authority and this will only be effective if there is agreement on who or what the authority is.  It is quite obvious there is no such agreement.

I trust the authority of the chain with maximum proof of work that started with the bitcoin genesis block.  I do not trust any other authority as to what is bitcoin.  To do so would require trusting in some group of individuals that I do not personally know and so have no reason to trust. I do not trust the authority of any wiki or collection of developers, unless I personally know all of the individuals involved.

Along this line, I am not fearful of being banned by any wiki or forum.  Indeed, any wiki or forum that were to ban me would automatically disqualify itself as an authority that I would care about.  Were the situation sufficiently egregious I would feel obliged to make efforts to subvert the wiki or forum, attempting to place it and its operators in disrepute.

I can agree with defining Bitcoin XT as an "altfork", this does sufficient justice to separate altcoins from chain forks which I do think are separate phenomena.

Chain forks or "altforks" are indeed sometimes justified in order to avoid the danger of centralization of power that can develop within a Core development team. However if Bitcoin Core forks for any reason at all then I suppose Bitcoin Core should also be considered as being an "altfork", which you might even already be able to argue, based on previous forks in Bitcoins history. I have already written extensively on why I think such "altforks" are justified. Read the article that I wrote on the subject if you are more interested in my reasoning.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/why-i-support-bip101-1164464

IMO it would be useful to distinguish blockchain forks that happen intentionally to make an alternative system, and maybe that's deserving of a new word other than altcoin, particularly when it's an attempt at an usurpation as it happened with Feathercoin or what BitcoinXT would aim to achieve.

Maybe altfork? However nobody says that.

Frankly I think altcoin is a neutral term and sometimes, albeit not often, they are perfectly legitimate and worthy of praise (as opposed to the XT hackjob).

The other question is whether something can be simultaneously "Bitcoin" and "an altcoin" given this definition of altcoin in the wiki, and whether XT is that.



Learn English.

Worst case as in it didn't happen the way he wanted, so why not going ahead? because he's a coward and he knows he would absolutely fail to get all that support he was so sure to get.

I watched the whole thing long ago. He turns my stomach, the little cunt. Even more now after seeing he doesn't even keep his word.