Topic: Is it good or bad that Core development is virtually controlled by one company? - page 4. (Read 8220 times)

IMO Bitcoinocracy, consider.it, and every other voting platform out there to get people's opinion are terrible polls and are vulnerable to many different sources of bias.

They are all volunteer samples, so really it will only get people who care very strongly one way or the other to actually respond. You aren't going to get the opinion of the average bitcoin user but rather of people strongly in favor or strongly against. It isn't representative of what the population really thinks and thus it isn't consensus

Those platforms are vulnerable to sybil attacks, though Bitcoinocracy less so. People can make multiple fake accounts and thus submit fake votes making one option more popular than it really is. Bitcoinocracy combats that by requiring that people sign messages with addresses so it really is based on how many coins. But that gives unequal weighting to the votes, although I suppose that is a better representation of the economic majority.

The questions asked in those polls are not without bias. The way that the questions are phrased typically imply one meaning or the other, kind of making people want to vote one way or the other. The questions should instead be neutral and bias free to get the most unbiased responses. Also, the questions should provide information for people to read about what those changes are actually for and how they will work so that people actually know what they are voting for. The information should of course be unbiased, but that information is not available in the polls.

In any scientific study, just having one of the above biases would invalidate the entire study. Therefore, since any online voting platform has those biases in them, the entire voting thing and checking those sites for the supposed consensus is invalid and thus should not be considered or referenced when discussing consensus among the population.

Correct. I don't think that they can be compared though. Consider.it let's basically anyone vote regardless of who they are or if they own any Bitcoin. Bitcoinocracy could be considered a decentralized voting platform because one can verify each signature themselves (IIRC), thus the system can't be cheated nor manipulated.

A network split remains a network split regardless of how many times you repeat the "51% is consensus" lie.

Not going to happen with a 51% : 49% split.

Bitcoinocracy is immune to Sybil attack, because you must prove ownership of BTC to participate.

Consider.it is so open to Sybil attack it might as well be a honeypot.

The former is signal, the latter is noise.

You're just butthurt the deep pockets support continued consensus more than contentious hard forking.

If Bitcoinocracy was in favor of Gavinista governance coups and contentious hard forks, you'd never shut up about what the "community" wants/demands/deserves.

^This is a private company. They don't owe anyone any explanations. Now get back to work, peasant!

This is AXA's distillation of the message from Blockstream over several weeks of presentations and complex due diligence. Is their understanding inaccurate?

and here is my rebuttal

As I said, this thread is just a hall of mirrors.

If you actually want a serious discussion you could start by showing some integrity and calling out the misinformation in this thread and stop repeating it yourself. Try acknowledging that even without determining if some people are following Blockstream's interests instead of Bitcoin's (where these interests differ) Blockstream has no special control of Bitcoin Core-- except by being the _only_ company in Bitcoin directly contributing to maintaining the infrastructure.

is gmaxwel still trying to flog the dead horse of classic, as a dead horse. rather then talking about the cancer inside blockstream

yes gmaxwell XT is dead, classic is dead, but lets talk about the blockstream cancer that is eating up bitcoin and mutating it. and isnt willing to listen to the community either

A few people here here keep arguing about some landslide "community opinion"-- and yet, strangely, that opinion is only visible in venues which are highly vulnerable to manipulation and not in person or, currently, on cryptographically verifiable counters.

The bitcoinocracy poll, as crappy and limited as it is-- both demonstrates that there is significant economically backed opposition to those views, and suggests that so much of that "landslide" is just bullshit manipulation.


You can keep repeating it, but it isn't true. I doubt you really believe it yourself. Otherwise, why aren't you calling your argument lost?

The beauty of bitcoin is that anyone can create a new hard fork version any time given a little bit IT expertise, so it is just a matter of whether enough people will use that new version. And I think over 51% of hash power is enough to present the major consensus, because that is how bitcoin was designed: With over 51% of hash power, you essentially control the bitcoin network consensus. People will move to the new chain and dump their coins on the old chain to kill it in a few days

Of course any company can lead the develop of bitcoin, only one condition: They must step down if the majority of community request it. That's the only requirement any company can lead the code development, otherwise it is a hostile corporation take over and can be solved by a hard fork

So just to be clear - do you maintain that block size increases are necessarily "Removing the rules against actions that the network protocol expressly forbids", and are therefore necessarily evil?


- Capacity increases for the Bitcoin system: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/011865.html


For better or worse (I would say for worse), in this era of industrial mining, non-mining nodes have essentially zero power. Any viable mining operation has sufficient  resources to run a node of its own, and connect explicitly to other mining entities that share its philosophy. The only power outside of miners is the threat that users abandon the chain en masse.

If Bitcoin Core was controlled by one company, it would be indeed bad. However, it isn't the case, so your question is answered.

Your incessant use of this canard only weakens your arguments. bitcoinocracy is no more credible than consider.it.

so we have had 3 corporate filled implementations which were rightfully beaten to the ground,
even if atleast 2 proposed code chances that the community wanted, they still dont deserve to survive due to the hidden corporate agenda


but where are these anti-corp bigmouths, now that blockstream has revealed their corporate hand aswell??..

is it, 'the first rule of blockstream club, is you dont talk about blockstream'?

i really hope the blockstream defenders are going to get paid, otherwise their lack of morals and blind devotion will be their downfall

Sounds a bit to me like they're being sold their own private on-ramp in the form of a sidechain maybe?

AXA SV have updated their site with this:


Sounds to me like they have bought Bitcoin. I wasn't aware that Blockstream had an alternative implementation that they were flogging, so I assume they mean Bitcoin Core. Were Blockstream in the position to do that? I guess core feel they were, if AXA  can feel justified in writing that on their website.

Fair enough. I was just trying to expain how the author might have been justified in choosing those words. (I wasn't the author.)



Re: Blockstream's strategic alliances; I don't know if this is a popular idea around here, but I see Bitcoin as a public good. Are you in a position to reveal the precise nature of these new relationships? Are you inclined to? Are there contracts? 

He used the right word, I used the wrong one.

Majority means 'the greater number', to me its pretty explicit, but I'll accept that it is implicit if it makes you happy.

It's explicit to me that your only rebuttal to claims that (in summary) "51% is a majority, this is consensus, it is implicit/explicit" is pedanticism over the linguistics.

Unless you want to argue about what the word majority means then we can agree that the definition amounts to 'the greater number'. So if it was 3 vs 1 that would be a majority. If it was 1000 vs 999 that would also be a majority. The 51% figure has been commonly used recently to express hashrate majority, but it is probably more accurate to state >50%.

Take a look at the closing sentence in section 12 of the white paper.

"Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism."

The phrase "this consensus mechanism" refers to the immediately prior descriptions of the mechanisms that detail how the majority of CPU power will prevail by working on the chain they think is valid. If >50% accept and work on blocks that follow particular rules then inevitably leads to that blockchain becoming longer over time. The longest chain is the valid chain (as per the line in the abstract which states: "The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power.")

So the white paper explicitly states that consensus is achieved through a majority of CPU power. It is implicit that majority is >50%.

This is all logically and linguistically consistent (subject to Skitt's law!).

This OTOH is your opinion:

I too have no time for seniority dick measuring. Its a vague appeal to authority that gets us nowhere, and moves the discussion away from the primary issues..

Everyone who contributes to making bitcoin a viable peer to peer cash system into the future should have their voice heard.

OK - you accept that it is implicit - but why then go off on the "many other lies" tangent? I'm not interested in the "many other lies" that can or cannot be implied from a loosely worded whitepaper.

We were discussing the issue of consensus and what it means -  Core have nurtured a false understanding that somehow it is written that consensus within Bitcoin means 95% or better. But this is not the case.  Without any explicit definition of what consensus means then we can fall back to the default - in this case the whitepaper - where it is very obvious that the idea of consensus within Bitcoin is that of a simple majority.

The fact that any hardfork is designed with a threshold of 75% should be considered a bonus.