Topic: In re Bitcoin Devs are idiots - page 4. (Read 25432 times)

Let me take the opportunity to clarify some points of apparent confusion:


This question is malformed. If you are asking me whether they owe me, the answer is yes.


Yes, they are. This is what being a developer means in this context: that you are a servant. A slave, if you prefer that terminology. One who obeys. An inferior. A steward. Nobody, politically speaking. I'm running out of alternative ways to put this, but I would hope you get the idea.

If someone is interested in becoming politically relevant, being part of the dev team is not only a waste of his time, it's a waste of everyone's time. That a number of the more socially inept kids are doing this (Amir Scarface Taaki, who has meanwhile thankfully been ejected, Weirdo Luke, Gregory Pointless Maxwell and on and on) doesn't make it workable. It just doesn't work.

If someone is interested in becoming rich, being part of the dev team is not only a waste of his time, but a waste of everyone's time. It's just not how it works. Being part of the dev team is being part of the slaves, the servants, the stewards, the however you'd call them. This abject social position does not entitle them to immunity for their fuck-ups in any case. You may dislike that, and that's fine, but your likes and dislikes have no power to change this world.


You are not entitled to place limitations on the manner of my discourse. The correct question to ask here is, MP recently published an article about the problems in Bitcoin. Have the developers read it and noted this fact?


I would guess you probably haven't actually understood what's being discussed here at all. As a rule of thumb that may serve you well in the future: whenever things happen that don't make sense to you, it's likely because you've not understood what's actually happening. It's rarely because the people involved are wrong. This is because you are stupid.

As to the matter of "testing":


Fuck you.

This is not testing. Stop releasing new clients, you don't have the license to do it, idiots.

This is like saying Garry Kasparov is a shitty chess player. Then saying "By the way, I don't know how to play chess."

MPOE-PR:

Irrespective of them being idiots or not, the bitcoin devs owe nothing to you.

Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. If you feel strongly that something needs to be done urgently, then start a Kickstarter campaign to hire a team of "real" developers to clean up the code and write a specification.

I endorse writing a specification over new client releases.

This would definitely be the first step out of the current insanity and finally bring some layering into the code base client UI === depends on ==> bitcoind but zero backward pointing dependencies.

This would be the first step on the long journey to the promised land of the BPS (Bitcoin Protocol Specification)

Or you need to learn to read. I'm not sure that sentence brings us anywhere.
Same thing with "This is not up for discussion, it is a fact". This sentence only serves to prove your lack of open-mindedness.

Why are you speaking about the word "heroics" ? Did I mention it ?
I still disagree with you about the devs being idiots, this mistake was human, and mistakes DO happen, whatever the amount of ressources and good will you throw at development.

And did you ever pay these independant devs for fixing shit for you for free?
Are they your wage slaves so you can demand that they do work for you or anyone else?
Have you ever discussed your issues with the development team in a calm and adult manner?
Do you even have the capacity to understand what you ask of them? (your tone tells me you're oblivious)
How much further does your understanding of the problem go besides: "It's fucked up! fixitfixitfixitfixit!!@@!@!!!!" ?

And how would you consider devs being independend if you expect them to give in to your tantrums?
Reality is you need the devs and you have absolutely nothing to say about what they do or how they do it. That is why you come crying here on the forum to get souls for your case. Boehoe. You are turning a technical thing into a political thing. Which is quite ironic because it is exactly what you accuse the developers of. I wonder why you so readily wield tools that you want to deny others.

In any case, if you don't like bitcoin go make your own. Bitcoin does not need you. But you propably won't because you are enjoying the benefits that are made possible by the bitcoin development team and the community that emerged around the system?

As usual a lot of dumb arrogant shit packaged in expensive words.
 

I would say you grossly overestimate the importance of some irrelevant foundation thingee. It's a case of Rome, Alabama talking itself into the "center of Christian faith".


Then you need to learn to read.

And re "heroics": there were no heroics involved here. The in extremis forcing of a downgrade is not heroic. People doing it are not cool.

It is idiocy, and the people doing it were idiots. Yes, they had no choice. Guess why they had no choice, and guess who puts themselves in the situation of having no choice.

Let me make this perfectly clear: the current hard fork is the death of Bitcoin unless the consensus reached here (ie, no more bitcoin client releases until spec, first release code-cleaning release) is implemented exactly.

This is not up for discussion, it is a fact.

As far I've read (which includes this whole thread of course), consensus is emerging that the devs are doing a good to very good job overall. You are the only one calling them idiots in this thread, which is wrong, insensitive, and counter-productive. Most of your comments let me think you have no idea what quality management is in software engineering, and what "0 defect" means in this field. You might wonder why Amazon cloud can be unreachable during a whole, why Gmail can lose mails and be unable to restore them from backups, and why NASA shuttles crash.
I would advise you to stop calling people names because they are not delivering that free unicorn to you.

It is a question of wording - if we assume everybody knows all facts: you may call it a bug in bitcoin, that the BDB was used misconfigured.

Anyway, no need to insult people here from the very beginning of the thread - but this seems also a characteristic of this bitcoin forum(s) that this is tolerated. :-(

smtp

You are wrong. Devs'/devzombs' first reaction was that "BDB bug" because a. they are idiots and b. they think their shit doesn't stink.

Fact of the matter is, they just failed to configure the BDB. Because a.

Nice trying to hide behind the Jesus of your faith, but it won't wash.

And to add to #114 above, seems OKpay got swindled for 10k or so too.

How much money do you expect people to contribute to the "propping dev arrogance" fund? The unencrypted wallet cost millions. This thing costs however much. How much more is needed? How long are we going to hear "it's not our fault" and "Satoshi did it"?

If core developers are firm in this, i.e. their refusal to even entertain having a spec extracted from C++ warts and all, then we'll just have to live with sadness for a while ... until somebody like Ripple comes along and "does it right" ... we'll see how this goes ...

I am not sure how to read your post.  Are you suggesting the current state of affairs is a good thing or a bad thing ?  Obviously the original Satoshi client was a fact on the ground.  And "reality" hasn't given anybody a chance to pause, but can we not take a small time out now and actually define a 1.0 spec and THEN implement a backwards compatible version from 0.8 today to that 1.0 ?

It's not like every pull request on GitHub is a do-it-now-or-bitcoin-dies urgent fix, actually most of them are trying to refactor, fix & alter the existing single implementation, and some like pruning and bloom filters add huge new features with *more* latent semantics sprinkled around the C++ instead of being in the spec.

I hope the gods on mount Bitcoin Foundation are listening once in a while, but Bitcoin's monoculture of a single "magical" C++ implementation whose code serves as the spec cannot go on forever.

I wanted to create an independent implementation from scratch in Scala, but soon realized that not only there wasn't enough documentation for protocol messages on the wiki, but worse, their semantics were constantly moving targets, potentially with every github pull request being committed.  At that point I gave up.

I haven't heard of a from scratch C-based libbitcoin library much lately ... not sure if its author also had to throw in the towel after a while ... that would just be sad.

Guys, the time for heroics is great, but if you want Bitcoin to be Money of IP (as it's being advertised) then it has to be a network/message protocol spec that people can go away and implement in language X and interoperated with you.

In this Bitcoin will either follow in the successful tradition of TCP/IP, SMTP, HTTP, TLS, etc or it will be a series of heroic battles by "the community" to "save bitcoin" from future "genetic defects" found in its sole C++ implementation or one of third party libraries.

Cheers ...

I've seen at least one thread claiming that it's not a bug in BDB as much as a misconfiguration.

AND, as all critics ignore because they are clueless and it invalidates their criticism, the bug isn't in bitcoin at all!  It is in some versions of BDB on some platforms.  The developers wisely chose a better database for 0.8, but unfortunately the bug manifested itself in a bad way (it could have been worse, e.g. if the bug in BDB made remote code execution or altering old blocks possible) before almost all nodes had upgraded.

AFAIK none of the current developers are involved in BDB development, and BDB was chosen by Satoshi.  Satoshi made a few errors, but I wouldn't call him an idiot.  Shut up or do a better job.

Hmm .. the bug (or do you call it a hidden feature?)  effectively touched bitcoin-miners and not directly(!) bitcoin-users. So the other obvious solution, which Pieter also suggested at first, was to push the longer chain, the one which grew faster and not to conceal/press effectively bitminers to do an effectively 51%-attack for the "good" of the network on this chain, because the 0.7-fork is "correct". This dubious politic is highly questionable, IMHO. On the other hand, effectively convincing/forcing miners to switch to 0.8 would surely have had the advantage of a much more equal code base for almost all miners afterwards.

Appendum: Again a very important issue, which reflects a real-time behaviour is: how can one estimate which approach (if we restrict us two only these 2 alternatives) will succeed significant earlier?

smtp

Yes, the common/general "banker"-word can surely subdivided in many specific categories. Currently "miners" can't really, perhaps only into these 2 (raw miner, pool operator), but as longer as mining evolutes as more specific sub-work jobs will show up, like in bank-business, IMHO. Compare bitcoin-age with bank-business, say, 1000 years ago. :-)
But nevertheless, the general/principle equivalence/relation "banker" <--> "miner" holds perfectly. Probably, the miner-community likes to avoid the word "banker" for themselves because of psychological reasons.
smtp

Oh no, Berkeley is broken. How could you say Bitcoin Devs are just clueless? What heresy is this!

Take it to the BDB forums!

The problem was lack of a DB_CONFIG file in the bitcoin application directory. Without that file, BDB simply chose to use default settings. The default setting of 10000 for set_lk_max_locks is not enough to handle larger blocks with many transactions (inputs and outputs). Easy fix.

This issue has already been discussed, and consensus has already been reached.


Let's elaborate on that a little. Bitcoin's #1 pool is trading while insolvent at the present time because it just got hit by the double whammy of:

1. Oh, you made the mistake of updating to our most recent version? Well here you go, redownload the chain, pay submitted work as if difficulty were negative for a while. That's what hot wallets and autopayments are for right?

2. Oh, you made the mistake of updating to our most recent version? Well...revert. Oh, you need an old chain because the new chain you just paid half your house for is no good? Awww. Here, lose 16 blocks on top of the 1.1k BTC you lost before. We really want you to lose the whole house, not just half of it.

The entire "miners vote" is a sham and a total red weasel currently. Miners don't vote, miners just sheepishly follow around because "devs say so". And incidentally, a willingness to do the soviet thing and pretend this sort of crap is covered by "popular vote" when no actual voting took place speaks volumes as to the moral integrity of the pretenders. Ugly stuff.

If the miners had half a clue they'd have told Idiot Co-op exactly where to stuff it, and here's the beauty of it: with the arrival of ASICs and their significant capital cost, the odds that the sort of feelgood ninnies currently involved in mining will still be around are nil.

This is what money does, it shakes out the deadwood and culls the herd. Next time you do something because "Mike" said you should may very well be the last time you get to do anything. That little tidbit isn't too likely to pass unnoticed seeing how universal the conservation instinct is.

In other words: next time this happens devteam is gone, for the simple reason that miners will not revert, or even talk to those "devs" again.