Topic: How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People - page 9. (Read 29524 times)

Why do your posts keep disappearing?

Yes, exactly. At some point you have to say "enough is enough, I'm not going to let this person derail the project any more going forward."

I'm saying that point is right now; see the unproductive, one-sided argument about BIP 20 versus BIP 21 on the bitcoin-development mailing list that is re-hashing a wiki editing war that "the rest of us" just gave up on a year ago for the latest example.

subscribing... i'm not allowed to post anything else

Probably off-topic but can't you use deterministic keys, or even a single key (easy to keep a copy) on the confirming device? Also, it should be standard for services to send users their keys via a printout by mail or an encrypted e-mail. I'd use a service which would send me a Jabber message to confirm my payments. Easy, convenient and foolproof. We need this as soon as possible (there is a bit of structure that needs to be built on this technology, which will also take months, and after they mature will it be only as convenient and foolproof as we hope).

Gavin strongly has my support in this, for what it's worth.

I do not believe he is rushing things.  I agree with the sentiment that if we shelve it for three or six months, that no progress will be made on it, and we'll be back to square one with even more of a burden to get it going.

gavin, what they talk about in the video is one person derailing a whole project over extended periods of time. based only on information on this forum it seems to me that luke definitely had its part in not meeting a deadline that was already ambitious and even people agreeing with bip 16 didnt agree with the need to rush.
i also dont really get that part. either its really just a "different color of the bike shed"-problem. if its just a minor technical issue and doesnt matter much anyway then not just choose bip 17? on the other hand if its not so minor why rush it?

i understand why you are really pissed. but i think because of this you also overestimate the negative influence this whole affair has on the public. for me personally the bug in the encryption for example was way worse than this delay and public display of disagreement resulting in a litte bit of fud.
the fud btw would have been smaller if the other developers had voiced their opinion a little more loudly.

i also agree with the people that think a vote by the developers on the bips is a good solution. you may even vote on excluding luke from the development alltogether. but what you do is just incitement imho and therefore equally unproductive.

I really think the core dev team should decide how to go on (majority vote). It’s none of our business, we don’t code it and barely superficially understand it.

RE: debating ideas rather than people:  I've tried very hard to do that.

I said last year when I reluctantly agreed to function as the lead core bitcoin developer that I have zero experience leading open source projects.  But I try to do my due-diligence and learn from the experience of other successful projects.

The "aha" moment for me yesterday is the point in the video that I linked to, where the advice is to evaluate whether or not somebody causing issues for a project (whether intentional or not) is a net positive or negative to the project, and if they're "more trouble than they're worth" get them out of the project.

This isn't about BIP 16 versus BIP 17, this is about one person draining the rest of the development team with nagging, idealogical rigidity, and holy wars against "impure" ideas.

I try very hard to consider that maybe I'm wrong, but I think the evidence is clear.

You might also argue that the subversion people take the wrong approach, in which case please send me a link to some other open source project that has dealt with the issue in a different/better way.

I thought carefully about where to start this, and decided I might as well start it in the most public bitcoin discussion forum, because I think if I started it anywhere else it would eventually just appear here as "There's a Secret Conspiracy Started By Gavin To Oust A Valued Developer!"

No single svn repository is at the heart of svn. The block chain is the heart and soul of Bitcoin. A corrupted repository can be resored from a backup and lost commits can be recommitted. Bad enough, but a corrupted block chain is much, much worse that that. Therefore extreme conservativism it the right approach to any change in the protocol. That mindset seems to be missing from a lot of people here.

Split key is a step in the right direction, but it is not some magic solution that instantly solves all security problems. If a User has one half of their private keys on their phone what happens when they drop it in a river on a night out... If your trusting your split keys with a "wallet protection service" there is no way you can be sure they aren't colluding with other entity - or go rogue and hold you keys to ransom.

+1000

I trust our benevolent dictator.

I believe there is enough space for everybody's ideas in this community. That's why we have alt-chains.
If there is controversy over a particular issue, let's make sure that both ideas are implemented (in separate chains)
and then the time will tell who was right.

Bitcoin has been driven by Gavin fairly well so far, and I hope this will continue in the future.

i would vote to follow Gavin's lead.

Sure, let’s just wait with multisig until Bitcoin is deserted because normal people keep having their Bitcoins stolen by malware and therefore simply shouldn’t use Bitcoin, but rather stay with PayPal and online banking.

Remember what happened in summer? Why do you think did people store their Bitcoins with MtGox or Mybitcoin.com? The ability to not have your money stolen is not important at all when it comes to a new, hardly accepted currency, really.

We have time. Let’s implement it in a few months.

Whilst I do agree it would be best for everyone to just move forward with BIP 16 (since the wheels are already in motion). There is still no need to rush it, make the decision now, but the switch on date should still be at least a few months in the future (not a ~week as in the original proposal). Ideally there should at least one new client release before the change is switched on, giving both miners, users and merchants opportunity to upgrade.

Follow the example of Satashi. A change he made two years ago to the bitcoin client is only just being activated now http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2788/what-are-the-february-20-changes-to-the-bitcoin-protocol

i fear the same and hope gavin is a strong enough BDFL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_Dictator_for_Life to resolve this problem. And yes, it's a major problem - and also it turned into a nightmare once this discussion leaked to the actual users who don't know anything about software development …

how so? svn projects have a history that cannot be altered. there are many year old projects relying on svn! so, it's just like with the blockchain.
also, the amount of money behind the projects using svn is certainly far far higher and more important than bitcoin.

I've read many of the developer logs from Bitcoin and I must say I'm surprised this hasn't really come to a head earlier. If you read luke-jrs response to pretty much anything he disagrees with he does the "you do that and I'm not going to mine it" approach. "If you do that I'm going to fork the chain" . Basically turning every minor problem into a major one and using his pool as his body guard.

Does anyone actually think Luke-Jr is a positive presence? Attacking other currencies, filing false claims to hosts, inserting religious text into Bitcoin and finally holding Bitcoin development team to ransom to stall development? With that sort of positive presence I'm glad he's over here rather than focusing on SolidCoin.

What LukeDashJr did to coiledcoin, without his users consent, or permission, is proof positive of why he needs to be severed.

My worst fear is Gavin would leave because Luke wouldn't. I can't imagine a worse thing happening to Bitcoin right now...
This is n-th call to action by Gavin on forums these days and I think we should listen.