Topic: How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People - page 2. (Read 29579 times)

I suggest you read up on what anarchism means.

However, I agree that there is nothing there that tells me not to trust Luke, he looks pretty coherent.

1)
What is wrong in being "pro-government", whatever that means? We are a community and are free to think whatever we want.

Also, while we are on that subject, are you an anarchist? Do you really think that government has no function and a world would be a better place without goverments? Then I suggest you read up on some history like feudal ages or even earlier. If you would remove goverment, that shit would happen all over again.

Why do people think that bitcoin is supposed to replace governments?



2)

This is just silly. You seem to live in a wonderful world where everything people say in chats is 100 percent true, they are always dead-serious and things they way always portray their exact personalities.




About the DMCA note.
While you may or may not think it was "right" or "wrong", whatever that is, you seem to be thinking that he filed it because he didn't like solidcoin or because it was "a rival" to bitcoin. When in reality the note was about taking bitcoin's source code, which is governed by the MIT license, use it in an own project and violate that license. The DMCA note was fully legitimate.



This can't be said in a more right way. People that don't understand this are little girls riding on pink poneys in a magical world of total ignorance.

This has absolutely nothing to do with BIP 16 vs BIP 17.

This is not transparency. This is a smear campaign.

You make several assumptions here:

- that one shouldn't use the laws in place just because one doesn't like them. I agree with Luke that copyright and copyleft should be enforced by law. He had his code unlawfully misappropriated. It's completely necessary for Open Source to have licences enforced. Ask Stallman.
- he thinks a 51% attack is fraud. This is somehow bad for you.  Well, it's an opinion. Has zero relevance to the project as we want to avoid this possibility anyway.
- that having a gun is violent and that it's somehow relevant to the project. He has a concealed gun and carries it. This is legal in several states.

I don't think Luke-jr should be kicked out. But his actions & words definitely need to be exposed, so that people don't just blindly trust him and realize that he may not actually be working for our benefit.

Some problems I see with him:

- He filed a DMCA takedown notice on Solidcoin. While I never used Solidcoin and heard bad things about it, I think it's wrong. Bitcoin is strong because it minimally relies on government, and we shouldn't increase it's dependence on government.

- He attacked Coiled Coin (some sort of 51% attack). This shows he's not open to new ideas & competition in cryptocurrency that can help us achieve the goals we want to achieve with Bitcoin.

- He's not a freedom lover. He's pro government. He's hypocritical. He simply asserts he's right without explanation. Some examples:

(07:12:40 PM) luke-jr: this idiot is overlooking the fact that Bitcoin was designed with the "banking model" in the long run

(09:56:10 AM) onelineproof: just want to throw in that I also disagree with sending DMCA notices. We are the Bitcoin community. We must not be reliant on the government to solve our problems.
(09:57:50 AM) luke-jr: onelineproof: I am pro-government.
(09:58:26 AM) onelineproof: ok but we should be able to operate independently of government. Thats one of the main points of bitcoin.
(09:58:58 AM) luke-jr: onelineproof: SolidCoin is not Bitcoin

(03:59:22 PM) olp: bitcoin is beyond laws, we dont need laws to keep bitcoin working
(03:59:37 PM) luke-jr: olp: fail

(03:57:20 PM) bluefirecorp: If I performed a 51% attack on bitcoin, and totally crashed the econmy, I wouldn't owe anyone anything.
(03:57:29 PM) bluefirecorp: Everyone knows the risks of using bitcoins.
(03:57:53 PM) luke-jr: bluefirecorp: I beg to differ. if you actually did a 51% attack, you'd have committed fraud

From: http://luke.dashjr.org/ :
Some content on my personal web directory (this site) is for my personal use only, and may not be legally distributable to other parties. I actively try to keep these properly secured so others cannot download them, but it is possible this might not work for whatever reason. If you are able to download anything that I shouldn't be distributing, please contact me and I will gladly make sure access to it is restricted properly. By downloading anything from my personal web directory here, you assume responsibility for ensuring the copy is in compliance with the laws of your jurisdiction, my jurisdiction (Florida, USA), and my server's jurisdiction (Pennsylvania, USA). If you do not agree to these terms, you are not authorized to access this website. Accessing this website implies you have accepted this agreement as a binding contract.

From https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=57437.80 :
(Quote from: Luke-Jr on January 29, 2012, 07:34:39 PM)
No, Bitcoin is about a decentralized currency. Anything more is subjective. "Absolute freedom" is absolute evil. Bitcoin provides a useful monetary system for the Tonal number system, which is my primary reason for involvement.

- He's violent:

(09:04:50 PM) jjjrmy_: luke-jr: just leave your gun in the car
(09:04:58 PM) luke-jr: jjjrmy_: why?
(09:05:05 PM) jjjrmy_: luke-jr: there is no need to bring it into a bar!
(09:05:11 PM) luke-jr: jjjrmy_: there could be
(09:05:19 PM) jjjrmy_: luke-jr: such as?
(09:05:27 PM) luke-jr: jjjrmy_: such as if someone goes nuts and starts shooting
(09:05:42 PM) luke-jr: heck, a bar is one of the *last* places I'd want to be unarmed

Let me know if there's anything else I should add. I think transparency is key to Bitcoin's success.

UPDATES:

- He doesn't care about privacy

(~ Feb 17 2012)

(09:43:07 PM) echelon: ugh, why are all these sites that accept btc blocking tor!?
(09:43:20 PM) luke-jr: echelon: because you're not supposed to be anonymous
(09:44:04 PM) echelon: so what's the point of accepting bitcoins then?
(09:44:09 PM) echelon: it kind of defeats the purpose
(09:44:48 PM) luke-jr: echelon: the purpose is that it's inflationary and can't be reversed
(09:45:27 PM) echelon: i launder my bitcoin
(09:45:44 PM) luke-jr: echelon: laundry is illegal

Luvin' all of you and wishing for an amicable solution to all parties since both Luke and Gavin are definitely going to continue to be a part of this community due to their investment in time and resources, blood, sweat, tears...

Frankly, I don't think Bitcoin can spare ANY talent that is willing to put their fingers to work trying to make it better. Bitcoin definitely has competition and the statement which has stuck with me the most is "Bitcoin's greatest weakness is that it will become a forgotten project".

If Luke can continue to communicate in a manner as he has done in this thread, then I think he will show great promise as a developer-level Bitcoin contributor.


So glad to know you all.

-p

I only know LukeDashJR from his incessant mel gibson-esque radical religious trolling on IRC and btc-e, and semi hilarious DMCA of ScamCoin.

Gavin I only know from well thought out posts and transparency in Bitcoin's development. I could care less what they look like, both have easily available pics you can find in the interspheres. It is slightly disturbing Gavin doesn't have a neckbeard and is a dev but clearly he knows what he's doing so it's all good

See the How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People video at 32:00.  "Put up or shut up."  I was taught this rule creating stages at a community theater.  I had what I thought was a great idea.  I brought up this great idea but I had no interest in actually working on it because it is a big project.  It is disrespectful to other people's time.

So a good rule is:

If person A comes up with idea X, then person A should try to implements idea X.  If person A doesn't have time to implement idea X, person A should shut up and not talk about idea X.

I see a lot of this on this forum.


OK go do it.

I reject this rule. A corollary from your rule is "If person A doesn't have time to implement idea X, person A should shut up and not talk about idea X".

No, but VNC, NetBios, under some circumstances even SSH can. Or whatever else you use to communicate commands. Or simple screen or keyboard capture.

I did not understand the BIPs as security feature. I think the first thing in mind is some kind of escrow by the Bitcoin Net and by extension, some sort of scriptable contract. Safeguarding against a partly compromised network does not seem effective to me. And I don't think Gavin or Luke had that in mind. But maybe they can clear that.

Multiple computers don't help. When the intruder has one, she can wireshark into the rest.

[EDIT]: There is no reason to believe that any other electronic payment would be safer if your computer has a rootkit. Only cash and Bitcoin can help there.

I was comparing to the Web, not the Internet, for a reason. There was plenty of competition for both. Compuserve and AOL to name just 2. The Web killed them both. Not because it was technically superior. Because it enabled business in ways proprietary systems can't.

The proposals enable business, that's why they are important. But it shouldn't be rushed.


I am not suggesting to halt development. There is plenty to do. The GUI could still use a lot of improvement, for instance. The command line is still essential for making a backup of a running system, for instance. Blockchain pruning may be another issue - most stuff in the blockchain is garbage.

But this is about a standard and if we have a broken standard, then the competitors will eat us alive. With Chardonay!



Your wallet does not need to be on-line. Create wallets and a lot of accounts on an off-line computer and put the wallet (the private key, actually) into a safe. That should solve your problem

I was considering re-implementing parts of it, re-using some code from the original client, but there's some scarily nasty quirks Bitcoin has involving duplicate coinbase transactions that make that a frankly terrifying idea right now.

First rule of volunteer projects.  If person A comes up with idea X, then person A implements idea X.  Otherwise the project gets a lot of people with a lot of ideas and very little work done.

I don't think the analogy quite applies as is. First of all, compared to the Internet, Bitcoin is a sub-technology that is based on technologies, both software and hardware, that have required significant investments to reach the level of development and infrastructure where they're at today. Developing Bitcoin is cheaper because a lot of what Bitcoin does is built on top of existing infrastructure. This doesn't mean that it won't take a long time to develop Bitcoin, it sure does, but technologies such as Bitcoin could explode easier because there is less of an investment barrier involved.

Second of all, there is already competition to Bitcoin and we can expect this competition to radically increase in the next 24 months. The Internet didn't have this competition. Not only are we competing against other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is also competing against major payment providers that are working on mobile wallets and all kinds of stuff that makes payments fast and convenient. I believe those technologies and the currency itself would still be inferior to Bitcoin but from a marketing perspective that focuses on regular consumers Bitcoin does NOT have a decade to develop stuff, it's under tremendous competitive pressure from many directions.

I give Bitcoin 6 months, 12 months at most before we will see it suffer and decline from lack of development. This is if we let it stall, of course. It doesn't mean that we should be hasty with serious upgrades, but P2SH is not being hasty. It has been in development and discussion for many months and Gavin has got the best solution anyone has been able to come up with so far. Even I will be looking at Bitcoin's competitors with much more interest if enabling P2SH fails in March. I'm quite sure a lot of other people will do the same.

We are not living in the 90's anymore, development of a sub-technology such as Bitcoin must be faster than that of the entire Web. Otherwise our competitors will eat us alive.

Just thought I should note this post was written by Gavin himself...
If he doesn't consider himself to be qualified for the job, it's IMO quite silly to argue over it.

FWIW, I am also not qualified for this.

Nice post.
Spring festavle makes me long behind. 

The web required 10 years to become adopted. I think this gives a good idea how long it'll take Bitcoin. There is plenty of time to get it right. If this stuff gets released this year or even next year, it is just fine.

To me P2SH still sounds like a very specific extension targeted at only one client implementation. There are other ways how more secure wallets could be done, that wouldn't require any change of protocol (creating importable transactions offline for example - import the transaction at a connected node and it gets executed).

I'd rather have 6 months with "nonstandard" transactions in the blockchain and see some feature complete clients implementing these, than standardizing them first in a specific way with (seemingly) only one implementation in mind. As far as I understood, both BIP 16 and 17 would already be available today as nonstandard transaction. I'd rather keep it that way and focus on having completely new written bitcoinds than fighting over what gets implemented in the reference implementation, which means it also becomes the standard as noone can challenge this currently.

I disagree. After p2sh gets implemented, I think there are no big changes on the horizon. And I doubt these protocol changes (how many did we have last year?) would seriously delay other implementations.
We have to make as much of our time as possible, now that the hype has settled for a while. Stalling development (protocol) would do no good.

2nd