Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 295. (Read 2032266 times)

I did feel that Mike was pushing his points a little unfairly at times in the article, but then it should be relatively easy to bat them down. Greg's response was decent, especially his first point, but it seems like something that will come down to technical points I wouldn't know enough about to judge.  I went ahead and bumped the thread in hopes of getting more responses.

The fact that Greg neglected to point out the Elegius pool's ruining the "test" at the soft limits shows his propensity to grasp at whatever straws look plausibly available as long as it will advance the stance he wants to defend. (Again an unfortunately common debating practice, even in Mike's article and this thread, but once again Greg has it down to an art. Mike it's easy to tell he's doing it; Greg not so much.)

I also note that Matt Corallo actually pointed out that the lack of discussion on some points and seemed to find it odd as well. Sounds again like something interpersonal.

All good points. And yes, Greg's posts are full of clever sub-texts.

He did reply in the dev & tech on Mike's article, but only to hand-wave it away:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11318788

It remains curious to me that such a strongly written article was largely ignored by the dev & tech contributors, who sometimes debate the minutiae of an obscure software topic. There was no attempt to determine whether Mike is broadly right or not, and maybe Greg's reply "put-off" other people echoing the concerns.

Those quotes are nice to see in one place. Some evidence of flexibility overall.

Yes, Luke was tagged "poisonous". He runs Eligius which I mentioned earlier, never played ball when the soft-limits were being tested, though Greg omits this fact, and any criticism of Luke for it.

For completeness, here's Jeff Garzik's view, emphasis mine:


Matt Corallo is "rather strongly against any commitment to a block increase in the near future [without more testing]," but seems like he'd go definitely along with at least some increase on Gavin's time frame (if testing panned out), because when asked by Mike Hearn whether he had a specific, credible alternative to Gavin's plan, he said:


Wladimir van der Laan, who seems to be Gavin's appointed lead for the project now, is "weakly against in the near future" because the solution seems to delay better ones. Seems he'd go along if it came down to a fork:


I really don't think we are far from consensus at all, especially for 4-8MB after "more testing" (and especially when there is more urgency). Gmax seems the only real holdout, and even he is for 50% increases repeatedly. Adam Back is still pinning hopes on alternative solutions but I think would go along if it came down to the wire. As for Peter Todd, I'm not sure how much count to give him as he's a little too drama-queenish - if attention moves to XT we know where he'll be

Exactly. There's this weird mismatch in that he should be saying this *first* whenever the debate comes up. I didn't see him even comment on Mike Hearn's "Crash Landing" post, which is nevertheless the one everyone remembers and has in the back of their mind and directly opposes this position.

It's almost like he somehow wants to remain in his pessimistic curmudgeonly state, like he has a vested interest in it (not financial, but emotional/social). He has a way of not addressing the most key issues while looking like he is and looking like he's being the reasonable one. Now that I've read the Press Center thing I can see some parallels.

One classic Gmax thing is to make every statement interpretable in a safe way. For example, today's reddit post where someone was accusing Peter Todd of being biased against an increase because of his affiliation with Viacoin. I don't think there is much merit to the accusation (though that doesn't excuse Todd's sensationalism), but in Greg's reply he said, "Welcome to Reddit, 'Viacoin66'!"

He will say something that looks safe and unantagonizing (just the standard Reddit welcome), but his real purpose is to point out that the account was bran new and imply that it was obviously created to troll Viacoin/Todd. He's probably right about that, but nevertheless it's an example of what I mean where he'll say whatever serves any sort of low-blow purpose in a debate as long as it can be interpreted as not being that. I guess with his security testing mindset he has become Mr. Plausible Deniability.

OK, it's true that a lot of people do things similar to this in debate, but he has it down to an art. It has the effect of making him look blameless unless you know all the context and read between the lines. Again, I suspect this is part of core dev culture, where there is a lot of pressure not to appear inflammatory. Remember Gavin talking about "poisonous people" ruining projects (though he was talking about Luke)?

ah but you can always unintentionally "kudos" gavin's blog posts.



edit: ninjakudos! ^^

Interesting. I decided to read all Greg's recent posts and found one which makes his position much clearer.


He doesn't really want to engage in the mechanics of a block size increase right now, because his opinion is that the limit can be safely maxed out. I wish he had said this a couple of years ago in BCT because then the pros-and-cons of letting the limit be hit could have been hammered out before the question of how to change the limit needed addressing (which is the case now). Maybe he didn't say this two years ago because it wasn't his position then?

Compromise is very difficult when one side does not recognize that an urgent problem, or even just that a problem, exists.

He is looking at it from a very technical level. Advantages of hitting the limit is speeding the development of some software components, work in adversity etc, the downside is non-technical: a PR disaster, collapsing price, loss of VC enthusiasm, academics noting that a decentralized community cannot be trusted to manage a global currency. IMHO, these downsides far outweigh the technical, software benefits. It is simply playing with fire.

He also forgets that not all mining pools obeyed the soft-limits in 2013. A few didn't. e.g. when the soft-limit was 250KB Eligius was mining 500, when the soft-limit was 500 Eligius mined 750. There was always some level of extra capacity which does not exist at 1MB.

He repeatedly says that he is worried about centralization, loss of nodes. Well, the fact is the fastest way to kill^*off the most nodes at once is to quickly deploy a hard-fork. A hard-fork needs as much time as possible to be as smooth as possible, maintaining the network intact.

^*Nodes left on an old fork are not guaranteed to upgrade, some will just switch off.

Sorry need to quote the first one explicitly:


My english vocabulary is not wide enough to define how presumptuous gmaxwell's reply was. Thanks for the pointer Adrian, very informative.

wish there was a thanks button on BCT

enough with the hints, spill the beans please.

both versions are on github.  Hearn's claims there is only 2 functional differences.

how hard would it to run a diff?  shouldn't be.  have you?

Bitcoin XT is a poison pill for all the newbs and unwary, certain bug fix commits that went into Core have already been omitted. Both Hearn and Andresen have been covertly anti-privacy from day zero, paying it only lip service when pressed. Don't trust it or them. Not to mention it is poorly maintained and totally untested. I can't believe I'm reading such a mad approach being championed on these pages ... it's like a twilight zone episode wtf are you people thinking !!! following Pied Pipers now?

that was a great read. thanx.

i had suspected as much.  not being a coder but watching dozens of coders here and on reddit criticize bitterly not only Bitcoin's code but other code as well, i always got the feeling that it is just a given that everyone criticizes everyone elses code either out of envy or just trying to appear smarter than everyone else.  it's not like anyone can really tell or hold them accountable.  Peter Todd fell right into that trap yesterday on LTB with that stupid remark that Satoshi made a mistake.  just who the hell is Peter Todd?  answer: just an armchair critic who hasn't done anything significant with his life.  Satoshi was the best thing that ever happened to him; he provided himself as a target that can't defend himself from the likes of Peter.

Nope.  Szatoshi will back Back and Maxwell.  The cypherpunks will stick together (or hang separately).

You should change your handle to 'FrappuccinoDoc.'   

Against rewriting an entire codebase
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

On the importance of having a spec
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000036.html
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000035.html

but there is truth to the fact that those embedded bugs and general messiness somehow "contribute" to the behavior of how the system works in unknowable but apparently predictable and stable ways which seem to work.  by changing those bugs or trying to clean up the mess, someone somewhere along the line will disrupt the predictability to where how the code operates may become unstable or unpredictable.  that would be bad.  it would take someone or some group truly exceptional to be able to rewrite the entire code and have it function exactly like it does today.  and with billions on the line, that would be a tremendous responsibility for a volunteer, would it not?

The Bitcoin Core is in such bad shape that fully specifying its behaviour is indistinguishable from impossible.

You could say this is Satoshi's fault. What we now call Bitcoin Core started out life as a prototype and evolved into its present condition - it is not an engineered piece of software.

I think the best course of action would be to acknowledge that the prototype has served its purpose and retire it in favour of treating a non-prototype codebase as the reference implementation for which a specification can be written.

Doing that would have the beneficial effect of increasing the number of developers who can participate, since the reference would be more understandable and better documented.

i read about this here one time but i don't fully understand it nor the implications, not being a coder.

a spec is a written, detailed, normal language description of how the protocol works, is that correct?  wouldn't the current developer's guide qualify as something similar?

where as the code is what actually executes within the operating system and carries out the protocol rules?

and why NL, do you believe it would've prevented what we have going on now?

i'm open to looking at examples of Gavin's unfairness.  anyone?

we all want recognition but Greg goes over the top.  and this is why he started Blockstream, to be the CEO of something potentially significant where he will get that recognition he so covets.   it's dangerous for a project like Bitcoin though.

Gavin's strength is his maturity and calm demeanor, imo.  he'll win if it comes down to a battle.

I had a smile, the problem here is coders are not machines either. Your post reminds me of a typical plot to a batman movie, or the incredibles, a little humility could have gone a long way.

Luke presented the idea that the "devs = Bitcoin" and should have ultimate say, before he backpedaled on it. I can understand how devs would think that way, but it's of course silly for the reasons you mentioned there.

As for Greg, he does make unfair points whenever he feels he can veil it sufficiently (though so do Gavin and especially Hearn, from what I've seen - is this part of the core dev culture?), but more importantly he has this weirdly cognitively dissonant "I know best and get to decide, but everyone's equal" thing going on, and he's able to make his writing look watertight so that it can't be proven conclusively so he cannot really be caught on it so easily.

It's like he feels like he doesn't get enough respect for what he does, and is owed more sway in the sense of actual control rather than just influence and core dev status. That impulse explains his comment yesterday when he was lamenting all the work he'd done to make it just so things don't break with 1MB blocks (if not for those optimizations Bitcoin with 1MB blocks would be a "smoking hole in the ground" were I believe his words) and yet no one seems to appreciate it, they just want to march forward with even bigger blocks and keep working the hamster while Gavin gets all the glory.

The old underappreciated tech guy syndrome? (But with high-level writing skills)