Topic: Post your SegWit questions here - open discussion - big week for Bitcoin! - page 15. (Read 84845 times)

No one is disputing that Adam Back and Greg Maxwell are leaders of Blockstream - but Blockstream and Bitcoin Core are two completely different entities - one is a private company, and one is an open source software project.  OSS projects frequently do not have a formal 'leadership' structure.

Bitcoin Core is not a corporation, it does not have a CEO, it does not have a CTO, it does not have investors. Bitcoin Core is not a product of Blockstream. I don't see why you can't understand that Bitcoin Core is not a product of Blockstream and Blockstream's leadership does not have any say over what goes into Bitcoin Core.

I feel like I woke up on a planet other than Earth today.

I'm not sure why it would be good if Core has "no leaders"? And why you're making this argument? What do the terms CEO and CTO mean to you? Who writes the bitcoin core roadmap? Would someone really invest $75 million in a corporation that has no leadership? Is this what happens to your thinking if you spend too much time doing open source development?

If bitcoin core really does not have leaders, someone needs to step up immediately.

Please explain in what way Adam Back has any say about anything that happens in Bitcoin Core. He is not a contributor, and AFAICT, never has been. He is not a member of the "team", he doesn't have commit privileges, he doesn't even participate in developer discussions on the IRC channels nor in the weekly developer meetings. So how, exactly, does Adam Back "lead" Bitcoin Core? If anything, I would say that the leader of Core is Wladimir as he is the release maintainer, usually the one who merges everything, chairs the weekly dev meetings, etc.

Some contributors (not all, in fact, only 4 IIRC), were at the Hong Kong meeting and are the ones who made the proposal. Any individual can make a proposal, but that does not mean that everyone who works on the project frequently will think that it is a good idea and that everyone will agree to accept the proposal and implement it. There is no "higher up" but rather a group consensus decision.

There isn't documentation really, and there really isn't a leadership structure. You can see who is considered a part of the "team" at https://bitcoincore.org/en/team/ but the team does not included everyone who contributes, just those who do so fairly frequently. The leadership consists of the three maintainers as they are the ones who merge everything (and Sipa who has commit access but isn't a maintainer) and I suppose you could say Wladimir is the leader as he is the release maintainer.

Basically. People who contribute to Core frequently became noticed by other contributors, and over time, became associated with "Core" as a "Core dev". The only people who were "appointed" were the three maintainers, and only because they were basically doing the position that they were given for a while before they were actually given the titile. E.g Wladimir was setting out release schedules, release TODOs, release notes, and making releases themselves for a while before Gavin officially gave him the title. Jonasschnelli was submitting wallet and GUI pulls and reviewing other wallet and GUI pulls for a long time and he basically became the final say on wallet and GUI related stuff for them to be merged or not until Wladimir eventually made him the wallet and GUI maintainer. The same thing happened with MarcoFalke for him to become the QA maintainer.

Your logic above, if I follow it correctly is:
  A) A company called Blockstream has a lot of VC funding
  B) Some of the employees of this company (e.g. Adam Back) know a lot about Bitcoin (how is this relevant?)
  C) One of the employees is the 'leader' of bitcoin core development (not true by any metric I know, although Greg is certainly a leading developer
  ... (skipped steps?)
  n) Therefore Blockstream 'controls' core development

There are literally dozens of companies in the Bitcoin space that have millions in VC investment. many who have received even more such than Blockstream.  ALL of them, I assure you, have employees that are either directly involved in, or working hard to influence, the development of Bitcoin.  And this includes all Bitcoin-related projects, including BU, Classic, XT, etc., not just Core.  ALL of them have developers that have real-life jobs, many in these VC-backed companies.

So what is special about Blockstream that allows them to force their vision on Bitcoin Core?  If VC capital is the metric that determines who has most influence, why do you think Blockstream - not the richest company in the space - has ALL of the influence?  In your theory, wouldn't influence be proportional to VC money received?

Greg is not the most prolific developer in the Core development team, and he has no control over what ultimately gets committed to the code, so in what sense is he the 'leader' of Core development?  I'm sure his exceptional expertise and ability to deliver actual working (not bug-ridden) code afford him a position of influence among his peers, but I don't think he has any kind of direct control over Core development other than that.

Hi achow, always respect your answers and insight. If a number of contributors not listed also help decide what goes into Core, how is it that the Hong Kong agreement resulted in a "proposal" by contributors? Does this mean that contributors may have an avenue for opening ideas but a higher layer still calls the shots?

Where is there documentation on the leadership/direction of "Core". I (think I) understand that decentralisation means just that there is no such thing, but to my uninitiated mind, it seems more a (non-deliberate) lack of transparency rather than decentralisation.

Who got to choose who became "Core"? Were they self-appointed?

P.S. This thread has really picked up in the last week and that's been really good for learning for most people like myself.

No idea what your point is. Did you understand mine?

Hey. Dont tell me whats good or not for me, OK? Thats exactly the point im making.......a tiny minority defining whats good for others.

STFU CB. 

Bitcoin has created its own ecosystem. A system that includes, and was created, by many differing players/actors/interests. At some stage certain other users/players/actors/interests, will need to be accounted for......even Back and Maxwell's employer! An example i would cite in this context, is the fact that some Bitcoin organisations/companies are reporting that they are receiving complaints from simple Bitcoin users, that their tx's are taking too long to confirm. This has a resource hit on said companies, and also creates an experience that at the least, does not meet the users expectation of how cool Bitcoin is, or should be.
Are these users/players/actors/ interests accounted for within Core? Whats the official channel for doing so? Do they actively and professionally seek their concerns?  

Im watching a broken process that has not dealt with issue/s that were brought to the fore, years ago. The definition of dumb, is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.
Consensus and self-governance aint working, or really needs to be better defined. The current and exhaustive arguments are demonstrating to all and sundry, that this way of reaching agreements aint working for the broader good.
Do something different, before BU becomes a thing.  

Remember the door you came through, to get your Bitcoins? Use it


The code speaks for itself, and there's nothing anyone can realistically do to ensure that every single iota of desision making is publicly observed, without destroying the privacy of the developers. If you don't like that, Bitcoin is not for you.

So you want perfectly working, pure, unfuckupable Bitcoin for everyone, but you don't want hard work or responsibility or difficult decisions.

Let get a hotline to some hyper-intelligent aliens who can help us out.

But bitcoin is high technology which requires high level engineering. How would the average Jo ever have come up with what bitcoin has become so far, and then where to take it from here? Why dump the high technology now and treat it like a black box that should never have high level engineering applied to keep advancing it, only to have a few dials and buttons adjusted by users?

No, and no. Im just a simple Bitcoin user. Reddit and Github is not my world.....and not the world of thousands of Bitcoin users. Thats the point. Its just not good enough, to expect the current set-up of 3, 4, 5 ultra nerdy codey types, to tell us how Bitcoin goes forward. This is simply not sustainable.

So keep on arguing/talking'debating' all you want about blocksize..........this issue of laissez-faire self-governance is the real story, that needs addressing.

Sorry for slightly OT.

OT but I had to:

What are you even talking about? Have you tried reading the bitcoin development mailing list which is open to everyone to see what is being discussed? Have you tried connecting to #bitcoin-wizards IRC channel to see any of the discussions or even reading reddit summaries posted by eragmus? Have you tried going to Bitcoin github to see comments on pull requests?

This is how i see it. However, theres just no way this set-up is sustainable......and is now at the heart of whats wrong with Bitcoin going forward. Can we see the discussions/decisions that this 'group' have? Can we see the process where they come to an agreement, on our behalf? Are there minutes we can read and discuss? I bet not. I bet this group of people think they are trail-blazing this brave new world of decentralised consensus.......not while they dont have a way to demonstrate to the many thousands of users, how their checks and balances work, they dont.
I bet the legacy system operators out there, are laughing their heads off, at this embarrassing Bitcoin shitshow, thats played out for too many years. Thanks Back and Maxwell, but your position and approach is now embarrassing, and is revealing how your version of 'consensus' has little value, if any.
Please get over that Hearn and Andresson video in that London pub years ago, and UPGRADE Bitcoin ASAP. Thanks.
 
I cant accept a 'group' of people who dont seem to be accountable to any one else, let alone themselves, are deciding between themselves what Bitcoin should be. And for that reason, Bitcoin has a ceiling of adoption, especially for VC's or angels who would quite rightly consider Core to be an unknown entity, to be associating money with.
 
Got very little to do with HF/SW/miners/etc. now, and all to do with how we get things done/upgraded on the Bitcoin code.

Adam Back is CEO of Blockstream, Greg Maxwell is CTO of Blockstream. Blockstream has $75 million in investment from DCG (Digital Currency Group). Obviously 95+% of Blockstream's intellectual capital is in bitcoin development. Adam Back designed his own crypto-currency (Hashcash) and is well-versed in the concepts of bitcoin. Maxwell is the leader of bitcoin core development, and he spearheaded Segwit development. Commit access to source code is an irrelevant metric of leadership.

Is there really any question who the leaders of Core are?

Maybe these "leaders" are embarrassed to step forward and be leaders right now. After all, day by day, they're losing the privilege of influencing bitcoin code development as they continue to ignore the fact that Segwit is done. They've been losing credibility daily over 4+ years for not fixing bitcoin's ongoing issues. The latest whining about Chinese miners is getting really old. All the FUD about hard forks is wearing off. And so we're left with a team of people wedded tightly to some code that just won't work, because people don't want it. And they don't want the vaporware centralized level 2 network being concoted by the same people. The market is not buying.

I agree with everything you said, Shiver.  Except your last point.

Why double the blocksize limit if it is not necessary, if there is no justification and the costs of such a step may outweigh the benefits?

In an interview on youtube by a guy that was trying to get the 'Ver' name into Dash, Ver stated that the vast percentage of his holdings were in Bitcoin, and he loves Layer 2 and a lot of other things that made me feel "we're on the same page here", then he went back to BU and my head got totally confused.

The impression from an outsider like me is that there are two teams and you support one and hate one.  My understanding is that Core is a diverse group of 100+ developers working mostly for free, and has had submissions from well over 400 developers, so it doesn't sound like a team or political party or anything, just a gang of people with a mutual interest.

One other thing I'd like to know, if BU should become activated because of hashing power (indicating abandonment of the core people), would that make it right for core to then immediately activate SegWit anyhow since the BU people had made their decision and taken a fork?  Then holders of BTC can sit back and see how it turns out without having to move any coin?

Do users (customers) have no role to play in their preferences? as without them no protocol is worth anything.                         

I know there are some new proposals on the table now, but we need a solution now that will get us through the next couple of years to give time to safely implement the next block stage (with LN there may never need to be a new block sizeI, but if it were built with one in mind, then we should be activating asap.  Doubling the block to 2Mb with SegWit as well  right now should keep the majority happy surely? unless they've made a religion out of it.

Adam Back is not, and as far as I can tell, has never been a Bitcoin Core contributor at all, let alone the "Core Leader".  Greg Maxwell is certainly a respected contributor, but he has no authority of leadership, and doesn't even have commit privileges to the source code.

We're all bound by a moral code, whether those that choose to act like a pack of wolves like it or not. Marauding wolf packs can be successful, for a limited time.