This matter was apparently for the first time discussed
here, which is in itself ridiculously late, but the recent events illustrate the need of having the various issues much more clearly delineated.
Recently Bitcoin came close to unmitigated disaster, in the following way: Gavin diplomatically suggested that miners increase their block size, from the previous magic number of "250k" to something they themselves pick. This approach is flawed: the solution to the problem of having a magic number in the code is not passing the responsibility of choosing it to a larger group. It may work politically, in the sense that where large, vague groups are responsible for a bad move nobody will ever be hung. It does not work practically.
This point does not begin to get sufficient emphasis:
stop thinking politically, stick to thinking practically. The political importance, usefulness or competence of a dev is nil. This is not your job, and more importantly this is one of the things you suck at the most. A casual skim through the -dev sessions is ample proof for this, more ridiculous dickwad posturing and knowshitism has never before been seen (outside of the mailing lists of some meanwhile failed open source projects). Snap out of it. Stick to writing code.
But we digress: as a result of a number of miners implementing their own version of a magic miner, a number of large blocks were created and mined by them, as long as they ran 0.8. Miners running 0.7 failed to mine these same blocks, and a fork developed.
The reason is that
Bitcoin code sucks. It's not that "the blocksize", it's not that "the database", it's not that "nobody could have foreseen their using a plane like a rocket". That shit does not belong in this discussion, passing the buck is not and cannot be accepted in Bitcoin. The reason is that Bitcoin code sucks, and Bitcoin code sucks because people want to be Bitcoin devs, people want to call each other Bitcoin devs, people want to participate in idle irc chatter as if they in fact were Bitcoin devs, but those same people do not have either the ability or intellectual resources to write dependable, usable, good, clean code.
This is a problem, and this problem needs to be resolved, preferably by the people who are causing it. You know yourselves, I won't name and shame. Fix your heads. You won't be getting much more warning.
Today will go down in history as the day when Bitcoin nearly died, and its fate depended on BTC-Guild staying online. Stop and think for a minute. What are you doing here? Why are you here, really?
