Topic: Is it good or bad that Core development is virtually controlled by one company? (Read 8220 times)

Code can be maintained. But we should avoid interference in the network. Dont conflate the two.

I suppose there are people who think they are more clever than a simple system built upon the basic principle of aligned incentives.

I just want all this ugliness behind us so's I can go back to my pigeons thread.

There is no need to dump any coins. The nodes _will_ ignore their blocks, as that is the very design of the Bitcoin system-- embodied in every implementation ever shipped; one which _completely_ deprives the ability of miners (even a super-majority) to carry out a broad spectrum of coercively acts against the users of the system. These protections are an essential part of the economic balance which keeps miners honest. Saying "if you shit it up, people will take huge losses (since-- who will buy if everyone knows its screwed) selling out and use something else" is a pretty fringe protection... as a concrete example it's one which has been fairly ineffectual in constraining the monetary policy of popular currencies.

I never suggested they did-- quite the opposite. Rather, I point out that the consequence of failing to comply with the hard rules set by the users of the system is that their hashpower is completely discarded while the users notice _nothing_ (except, perhaps, some slower confirmations for a few weeks or until they get a clue).

I haven't heard of any plans in the near future to make consensus rule changes for sidechains. Sidechains are completely open and you can play with the code and run sidechain node if you want. They are mainly used for testing new features right now. I understand what you are insinuating with your concerns... and let me address that:

I don't assume bad faith within Core developers, partly because I know of some and know of a majority of their mindset with following their logs and discussions. I really do respect your skeptical mind however. For the sake of argument lets assume that these fears are real, that blockstream is trying to subvert our ecosystem and is controlling core to sell their products on sidechains.

This is why I am not worried-

1) The core developers are very transparent and this is an open source project. If at any point in time notice anything nefarious we will instantly fork away with or without the miners. It really doesn't matter if Core developers are malicious or not because there are thousands of extra eyes reviewing their code. This being said we should indeed have other development teams (like we do) managing other repositories.

2) We aren't going to accept the LN or sidechain products that aren't open source or don't have a level playing field for all economic agents added to the network. Additionally, the LN allows for us to solve a really large dilemma with incentivizing full nodes by paying them.

3) Banks are going to produce private blockchains regardless... it is much better that future sidechain products are sold to the banks which make sure they are dependent upon the main bitcoin block chain.

4) Whether or not Core gets the economics and incentives right is up for debate... In reality this is a complex experiment with many known unknowns and unknown unknowns; anyone claiming to know the future or the right balance of incentives for nodes and miners is likely wrong. Cores conservative approach is prudent under this scenario and we are lucky to have a diverse set of bright minds working with us to solve these problems.


Yet miners make critical mistakes all the time that jeopardize the network (BTCC spinning up 100 nodes/ SPV mining ) , Developers make mistakes all the time (One of Satoshi's many mistakes - https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0042.mediawiki) . Thank Goodness no one controls bitcoin and we have to work together and rely on each other to solve these problems. 

Of course nodes could ignore their blocks, and holders can dump their coins. If a particular change is disagreeable enough to a sufficient portion of the market... an opportunity exists to change the proof of work and lower the difficulty to continue on an altchain that could possibly become more popular than the original. In any case, a blockchain needs solved blocks, and solved blocks require PoW.

It baffles me how you could remain so interested in Bitcoin if you see its central free market based consensus mechanism as natively flawed and irrelevant. Again, created sick, and commanded to be well.

Miners are incentivized by the market to make decisions, they don't make these decisions in a vacuum, free of consequence.

Yes, they are miners -- for the updated nodes/wallets/users.
The legacy nodes/wallets/users won't have any miners, and thus become subject to savage rapings by any kid with a couple of vidya cards.
Bonus points: no tx confirmations forever because outrageous difficulty/hashpower ratio, no diff. adjustment forever, because see aforementioned.
That's how hard forks work, always assumed it was understood.

/r/btc Bitcoin Classic math: Computing a proportion as x/y instead of x/(x+y). But hey, they're totally ready to handle making critical survival decisions for a global decentralized cryptography consensus system.

This is simply untrue.  Lets imagine that 75% of miners start paying themselves 50 BTC again instead of 25 BTC per block.  Nothing, it's the same as if they simply turned off (which they may do when the subsidy halves). Nodes simply ignore their blocks. So much for "direct control".  Miners do have power over some things-- they can choose the order of unconfirmed and recently confirmed transactions; but they can't break the rules of the system enforced by the nodes... if they do, they're not miners anymore as far as the nodes are concerned.

I apologize. I've had these debates with you before, so it's difficult to completely wipe that slate clean simply because it's a different thread.

Miners have direct control. Nodes /users, merchants, processors/banks/exchanges can and do influence miners by buying or selling their product, the coins. They may even form an altcoin if miners go against them in a way that is intolerable.

Users do have control: they can hold or sell -- that's their voting mechanism. Merchants have control: they can accept a particular coin or not accept it, value it higher or lower.
The notion of "economic full node" is ...empty verbiage.
P.S. How about another chunk of useless jargon: "economic light node"? How would those vote?

I keep suggesting the exact opposite and you keep insisting on ignoring my statements:


My question was in response to your statement. So are you insinuating miners have 100% control and developers/ economic full nodes /users, merchants, processors/banks/exchanges have no control or vote?

A majority of hashrate makes decisions by deciding to extend the chain of blocks, a bad decision impacts their profitability directly, as does a good decision. They have an interest in keeping the system sufficiently decentralized or they destroy part of the value of their product, bitcoin. This slippery slope argument is tiresome, we're talking about a 1MB increase to the Max block size.


Again, you are ascribing control to developers, which they simply don't possess. Miners decide to use a particular team's software, until they don't. It's a component of antifragility, an escape valve from capture.

Nope, most implementations don't break consensus rules thus there is no risk of a HF occurring even if they have greater node count (miner or not). There can be multiple implementations with slightly different features and unique wallets with no contention or risk of a fork. It does require more coordination but that is why Core is working hard on libbitcoinconsensus to insure that other implementations can prosper.

The good news is that Open Bazaar and Airbitz use libbitcoin implementations and thus are making that codebase more popular.


Yes, that why I suggested we must be talking past each other. You are better off trying to understand the code directly like I have done and read that book.

lessee... let's go back to where you jumped in...


Nope, one and the same, still unanswered

This is now a different question. Perhaps you believe that all the questions you are asking are the same, and you are merely rephrasing them? This is not the case. I can't keep holding your hand explaining things to you.

A good place to start to understand the role Full Nodes have is here -

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032281.do

The book is available for free as well.

I support the use of SPV nodes with fraud proofs, pruned nodes , lite nodes, and mining on scale. We don't need everyone mining just sufficient decentralization where governments or industry members or malicious actors cannot subvert the will of individual users. Otherwise we will just have a very inefficient paypal and what is the point in that?

You understand that bitcoin is an incredibly inefficient distributed database by design, right? Are you comfortable having only a few banks, processors, and governemnts running full nodes in our future? what level of decentralization would satisfy you?



Yikes, I haven't heard this argument before. So when should Classic devs walk away from maintaining their repository?

And I, in turn, have explained to you that is irrelevant since this mechanism is both available to/is trivially countered by "fake" nodes.
In other words, ineffective as a defense against a malefactor.
This is getting into heavy mystikal shit.
I'm asking you how this seemingly goldbergian contraption called non-mining node help to keep burglars out of our safe, and you reply "economics and the human factor."
My hands just drop, really.

Edit: But won't there be the threat of a contentious HF if one of them overtakes Core in nodes? Or are some implementations more benign than others?

I already described one way in which the nodes themselves (without humans) vote that you seem to ignore. The more important vote includes the human actor, or future AI/oracle controlling the coins. If you don't want to consider the agent as being essential to the nodes vote than so be it.... we are merely talking past each other.  


Excellent, I hope that cores percentage continues to drop... hopefully in the future we can have safer non contentious implementations steal marketshare from core like libbitcoin.

Not Classic, but Others than Core. That's my bad.

I'm not trying to subvert here. I swear.