I agree that the miners made a mistake. Basically, if Gregory Maxwell wasn't at the agreement, you don't have an agreement.
I disagree. He's smart enough not to participate in closed-door meetings which are counter-intuitive to Bitcoin.
He’s also cunning enough to wait several months before vociferously denouncing it, calling the participants, including the president of his company, well-meaning dipshits.
If doubling the throughput of the network does almost nothing for scalability... then segwit does less than almost nothing for scalability with its 3MB per block max increase to data requirements and its 0.8MB gain in effective throughput.
It does nothing and comes with a risk. Wake me up again when the Classic developers coded up something useful, just don't come to me with trash like header-first-mining.
Does nothing hm? The only risk is the risk of Core throwing their toys out of the pram and starting a 1MB4EVA keccak altcoin. Please explain the danger of header first mining, for the network, not for the miners that could potentially mine a block that nodes consider invalid. Concerns about SPV security can be assuaged, as Gregory once described.
I agree that the miners made a mistake. Basically, if Gregory Maxwell wasn't at the agreement, you don't have an agreement.
I disagree. He's smart enough not to participate in closed-door meetings which are counter-intuitive to Bitcoin.
Just so.
But beyond that, this weird fantasy that I am some uniquely important person in Bitcoin is just completely without basis. It's a narative spun by Mike Hearn in an effort to bring down regulatory hellfire on me to drive me out-- since for years I (and most other people actually doing the work of supporting the system) was very careful to keep a low profile, it didn't work.
Some of us recall, at the time of the second Stalling Bitcoin conference, your email to the mailing list literally became the Core roadmap. Some of us see the leadership dynamics at work in the core-dev irc chan. Bring down regulatory hellfire on you? Please. We just want to see you, your company, and your fellow Core devs make a good faith effort at a reasonable compromise… like the HK agreement.
The main concern about regulatory hellfire won’t be because it is directed at you, personally, that’s silly. It will probably relate to lightning hubs being designated MSBs depending on jurisdiction.
Having my support on something doesn't magically make it a success. The fact that efforts I support are often a success is much more because I have nearly a lifetime of relevant experience that lets me identify initiatives which are likely to be successful and I prefer to spend my time working on those... than it is because I or anyone else has some kind of magical influence. ... regardless of what stories some people find advantageous to tell.
It would be a huge mistake to underestimate your competence in this field. Your influence on the Core project isn’t magical, most of it is well deserved. To deny that your influence is elevated above most, if not all participants though, is wishful thinking.
Your ideas are composed into an email to the mailing list… that email becomes the official Core roadmap… the initiatives outlined in your email are implemented…
The careful observer can see that you haven’t chosen to support things that just coincidentally happen to be what is meritoriously implemented… they are implemented because you chose to support them, while ignoring input from outside sources (notably from miners and [non-Blockstream] Bitcoin businesses).
If you wonder about the acrimony… consider that people, especially Bitcoiners, don’t like the idea of the table being tilted by those in positions of power. The “online community management” employed by Theymos on r/bitcoin, for example. The censorship and steering feels and looks like an attack, so... surprise surprise, perceived (and criminally real in the form of DDoS against classic nodes) aggression is met with retaliatory aggression.
This question is important because my belief has always been that if something else wins out, core will adjust and may again become the best client, however, what the best developers do is far more important than what core does. So as a developer with "nearly a lifetime of relevant experience" that helps to "identify initiatives which are likely to be successful" I'm interested in whether he would jump ship if he had to (supporting classic or unlimited, for instance) and also in whether or not he would believe he had to (vs expecting the ~75%/+ longer fork to die off without confidence in the ~25%/- fork concurrently being so shaken that there is no longer a "successful initiative" on either "side").
Many of the people pushing for hardfork size increases are pushing a vision of Bitcoin that will almost certainly become highly centralized-- See for example the comments on Reddit today with people arguing that it's possible to handle 8GB blocks using computing systems at quasi-youtube scale-- some don't consider this a problem; from my perspective such a system would be completely uninteresting (and a detriment to mankind, if it survived at all).
No one _has_ to support anything here they don't want to; and I'm surely not going to support something that puts us on that route and I doubt practically any of the active development community would. Presumably anyone okay with that path would already be supporting Bitcoin "Classic", but clearly
none are.
Slippery slope, defined.