Too dangerous for easy access - do you really want to enable people coins from newbies? Power users can already import private keys using the debug console.
What? Please listen to yourself.
The answer is yes, people can and will take care for themselves.I was missing a word: "stealing".
Importing private keys that others might have makes you vulnerable to theft.
Newbies could easily be fooled into this kind of an attack.
Advanced users can still do it via the debug console.
The correct solution is to implement the sweep function, and make
that easily accessible.
I agree this would be nice (in some form), but the filtering is inevitably a political move to try to force others to stop reusing addresses. While I think that may be necessary, it's arguable whether it belongs in the reference client.
Oh no, not again. The feature is there waiting for an approval that never comes. WTF?
I refuse to fork or join or split or whatever. The code is there waiting for what? Main developers mercy?The point is that people are not supposed to be reusing addresses in the first place, which would make the filter useless.
You are granting people "main developers" status. Don't complain about authority
you give people - if you don't like it, don't give them that authority.
But in the end, the decisions you're talking about here have reasons behind them.
Ignoring those reasons isn't the best idea.
I enjoy only using Bitcoin-qt, this way my coins are safe and I help the network because other implementations aren't even considering this issue. People create features and submit them to Bitcoin mainstream client, where main developers actually get "free lunch" and only have to merge those. What you don't understand from that? They have a long record of not accepting even minor changes and leaving them rot on Github. This puts off people wanting to help or develop new features more every day.
As you probably understand main developers consolidate their position by doing this, assuring no one has any significant contribution towards the reference client, so we depend on them for whatever minor feature we need or want.
Yes, there is a problem with getting things merged. But this problem
mostly comes down to testing.
You can "fix" it by skipping testing, or getting more people available to test. Only the latter is acceptable to Gavin, and for good reason.