Topic: Forbes : the Biggest threat to Bitcoin is Gavin (Read 4826 times)

Bitcoin isn't about trusting, you shouldn't have to trust anyone, and to trust the core developers, is a shame. They have no documentations and according to that you could never build a 100% compatible client so you have to trust and that is what is going to kill bitcoin over the next couple of years. 

Agreed, and add the pool operators, while we're at it.

I agree there were no protocol changes just a recommendation to collaborate for a few hours on the earlier client to enable a fork to rejoin the chain. Now most are updating and handling larger blocks and gavins position as lead developer co-ordinating the action is justified. I feel this shows a strength in the team and therefore btc. I do not think gavin should be singled out here he did nothing unilaterally. this is still beta and this is one more step on the way. I support the action advised and taken by the community for the benefit of all. reg.        

What a load of crap.  As far as I see there was no change to the protocol or 'rules'.  What the so-called 'elites' did was rally the community to take actions that were in the best interests of the Bitcoin network (which was never in terrible danger anyway.)  Exactly what effective and decent leadership should be doing, and no mean feat in Bitcoin-land given the makeup and given that some of the effected risked a personal loss by doing the right thing.

I, for one, am appreciating the exceptional efforts and effectiveness of all of the core dev and management members while it is possible to managed the solution at all.  Even the ones who I dis-agree significantly with on the trajectory of the Bitcoin (which, as far as I can tell, includes most of them at this time.)

After the recent fork incident, my trust of the core dev's decision making ability increased a lot

OP: very misleading title of this thread, you should be ashamed of yourself

Will

I've read trought IRC while the fork happen.. My conclusion : This team of developper / mining pool operator are very intelligent, cooperative, and toughfull people.  To date, I trust each of them to do their best for Bitcoin !  They handle this situation like pros, and have been diligent and civil !   Congratulations !

Actually I found this article a good read. One of the first that offered some clear backgrounds to their readers without either being fanboy or high-horse bubble critic.

What is bitproof?

Gavin--First, thanks for your and the other devs' work.  The rest of the world and I get the product of your labor for free.  That's pretty cool.

Second--if you really want to have multiple, interoperable implementations, I think you have to get past the "source code is the protocol documentation" idea.

I understand the argument that additional implementations must mirror bitcoind behavior exactly, including bugs, or else risk block chain splits that could have a large financial impact.  However, source-code-as-documentation does not work well as a guide to other implementers.  It fails to distinguish between behavior that is essential and behavior that is contingent and arbitrary (just happened to be that way, could be otherwise.)

Developers writing additional implementations are unable to objectively verify that what they have done is proper, without some standard from which they can create unit and overall feature tests.

Yes, I'm familiar with what exists now on the wiki and elsewhere.  It is useful as a learning tool, and others have written bitcoin-related functionality based on it.  But documentation written by "reverse engineering" the thinking of developers based on source code suffers from the same problems.

Of course, it is possible to get into documentation paralysis, where so much time is spent nailing down details that actual development stalls.  However, this can be solved in an incremental and iterative way rather than an all-at-once, serial fashion.  I think merely having the sanction of the bitcoind dev team and a vision that someday the bitcoind code will follow the spec, not the other way around, would motivate a lot of people to participate.

This isn't a complaint, per se--you guys are doing the work and giving it away, and you are of course free to do whatever you wish.  Consider this a polite request to reconsider your team's attitude toward formalizing the protocol using something beside the source code itself.

Regards,

A very happy bitcoind user and fellow full-time open source developer.

Hear, hear!

The author is not a tool.  He's a smart writer who made decent arguments.

Stop calling anything negative written about Bitcoin "FUD".  For Bitcoin to succeed, it needs to be criticized so that legitimate weaknesses can be improved upon. 

Gavin may be a good guy, but Bitcoin needs to be able to survive even if Gavin was a bad guy.  That's the whole point of Bitcoin.

Nope, bitcoinj is a light node and armory is an addon to bitcoin-qt. I believe Gavin is talking about 3rd-party full node implementations, of which the only one that is actively maintained at this time (but has very little userbase) is Ufasoft Coin.

but, seriously: FUD or no FUD.

the question of fees is highly political. my poll indicates that the majority of users reject the current fee level.
what if s.o. had changed the fees in ver. 0.81 ? or changed it back?

the article points to a valid question.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ann-bits-of-proof-enterprise-bitcoin-services-168944

no, he means like BitcoinJ and maybe Armory.

what is flexcoin? premined & extinct? 

do you mean alt chains?

"A core part of Bitcoin’s appeal is that it’s not under anyone’s control. Supposedly, nobody has the authority to change the Bitcoin money supply, cancel or reverse transactions, or otherwise change the attributes of the protocol.

But in practice that’s not really true.

In the wake of last month’s fork, the elites in the Bitcoin community effectively changed the rules in a matter of hours. In principle, there’s no reason those same elites couldn’t make other changes to the Bitcoin protocol.

There’s a direct parallel here to issues of political legitimacy in a nation state. In principle, most democratic nations have constitutions that bind the behavior of government officials. In practice, a cabal of elites can and regularly do change those rules with minimal input from the rank and file. Yet the discretion of elites is not unlimited."

source: Forbes

Lee said "elites" as in plural.  he wasn't referring to an individual.  you are.

plus, the author has trouble defining who the elites actually are.  in his article he references one of his own earlier articles that claimed that the "miners" were the elite in that they could collude to perform a 51% attack.  which is it?

and furthermore, you seem to agree with the premise to begin with that there is a bunch of "elites" (plural) that do control Bitcoin.  i think you are wrong.