Topic: Is Fear About The Potential Impact of BIP 16/17 Suppressing Bitcoin Prices? (Read 3445 times)

 

Interesting.

Not going to get in to the fundamentals of the argument, more interested in the fundamentals of the price and how the current discussions will impact market confidence in the value of bitcoin if even over the short term.

Now's a rare chance to see how Technical analysis will reflect the fundamentals.

It's about the delay of deploying

Except that doesn't help because then you need both private keys on the same machine to spend them.  If your machine is compromised, it will wait until you try and spend, then steal your coins as soon as it has both keys.

I still don't see why we need to hack the protocol to support multisig at all.

Bitcoin uses ECDSA, where the public key is a known point multiplied by an integer private key. Generating a multisig address is as simple as generating two independent addresses, the second using the first one's public key as the known point. Such a combined address can be supported by today's clients, while only being accessible to someone who knows both private keys.

This fight between BIP16 and BIP17 isn't just a barn-painting argument, it's a barn-painting argument over a barn that's already painted.

My concern is that anonymous votes could be faked or hacked. I do like his proposal other than that however.

Sure. Here's genjix's take: Cathartic Progress

Although that point seems moot now that Deepbit is coming over:

Can you explain to me what theymos' proposal is?

Any potential crisis now averted. Log edited for brevity.

A good BDFL would have tested it enough before. They have much more patience and prefer long term maintainability over one-time patches, no matter how good they seem to be. Neither Gavin nor Luke-Jr have this reputation right now, I'm afraid... Anyway it's a good sign Bitcoin can't be changed too easily. I personally will be confident on any solution that also works in alternate bitcoin implementations (remember OP_EVAL raised alarms in a different implementation).

Gavin discovered the bugs after BIP was being implemented by several pools. Finding bugs after something is implemented in a financial system  is not a good thing. The fact that Gavin can make a bot to steal BIP17 transactions so easily should be a concern for everyone. This is not a matter of developers not agreeing but a matter of security. A big deal should have been made about this a lot sooner.

Yeah, it's called "unit tests" and both BIP 16 and 17 have them. At this time BIP 16 passes more tests but I think BIP 17 is a good solution too. The whole thing has attracted too much public view just because one developer doesn't agree. I wonder what would Satoshi have done.

In other projects I love such as Python and Blender, there's a "benevolent dictator for life" (BDFL) that has the last word. People trust them because they led their projects sanely for years. I'm really amazed with both Python and Blender. Guido van Rossum and Tom Roosendaal are my idols. Hm... both are dutch. Is there a dutch coder among bitcoin devs?

Also this^

Just thought I would point this out. There was an unexpected bug found that was dropping transaction fees from the block rewards. He is 'pretty confident' that he has found them all and I hope he is right. I am sure he is doing everything he can to make it as bug free as possible but it is obvious that more testing should be done before implementation.

This cannot be stressed enough.

Making bitcoin better understood by enough people, or failing to do so. That will be the main factor to bitcoin's future medium/long term.

Agreed.

+1

I have no fear regarding P2SH, it's the best feature to ever be added into Bitcoin. It's a very significant improvement and I hope it gets done. What does lower my confidence is that the whole issue was made into a public debate. Stuff like that shouldn't be public debates, developers should handle it themselves. Asking regular people about very intricate stuff related to the way these implementations are coded is useless. This lowers my trust in the whole development of Bitcoin, I just hope they make up their minds and get P2SH implemented at some point. Bitcoin will be overrun by competitors eventually if this is not added.

One shouldn't fear a blockchain split over this. P2SH will only be applied once 55% of hashing power is behind it and apparently Tycho of Deepbit is only adding his pool after there is already over 50% which means that there probably would be somewhere around 80% of hashing power behind this change before it's applied. So the blockchain split would be a small one and very temporary.

What people should worry about is how this affects the development of Bitcoin if it's not added. My personal hope is that they simply play hardball against Luke-Jr and force BIP 16. The second possibility is that we wait, possibly months or years, for a solution that everyone can agree on. Third option is that they go forward with BIP 17 but I think that's unlikely at best.

How exactly could it damage the decentralization? I think it's slightly improving it, as there are more and more supporters of P2Pool...

This is such FUD from the Bitcoin developers. "Tested for months now", oh really? What about public support for it, maybe that has gone on for "months now"? I hope the devs push that as late as possible, after the public has had a chance to vocalize about the damage this will do to the decentralization and union of Bitcoin.