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Topic: Thoughts from Russia on the block size situation and Blockstream - page 6. (Read 7411 times)

legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1008
Core dev leaves me neg feedback #abuse #political
@MZ,  I'm not really interested in debating a dozen points with you, as I've already expressed my views/concerns/opinions/theories/observations about these issues in this and numerous threads.
Im burned out on this whole topic and not much of anything new that I feel I can comment on. 

There are threads discussing bip 100 vs 101 in the tech section you may be interested in.

The wiki states the core devs don't strictly oppose 1mb but I still call stonewalling here given the context.  You may disagree and that's fine.  Cheers, JF
hero member
Activity: 560
Merit: 509
I prefer Zakir over Muhammed when mentioning me!
-snip-
1. Again:  This was debated for 3 years.

There was no continuous discussion. It popups and goes down. Besides, earlier, it was not important as it is now.

Gavin was forced to release something with Mike Hearn

First of all, read https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3ilbit/mike_hearn_responds_to_xt_critics/cuhpil1.

Mike Hearn proposed a hardfork without consensus.

because Greg and the kids on the blockstream wouldn't play ball.   If they really wanted to
release something, they would have worked with Gavin so the solution is more to their preferences. 

Core developers said Gavin's 20 MB block size limit increase were not a good idea. They didn't say don't increase block size limit. And, it was Gavin and Mike who did not accept proposals other than Gavin's.

Either
their interests in Blockstream prevented that,

"Either Mike's and Gavin's Coinbase/Circle involvement made them do it or lack of communication/team skills." FTFY. I don't believe this though. FWIW, I am not choosing any side now.

or they lack leadership/communication/team
skills.

Mike and Gavin are the two people who in the middle of discussion proposed a hardfork without consensus.

Either way is a problem.  I think when you boil it down, they just don't see the urgency
as Gavin does.  Maybe that's because of their other solutions like the lightening network.

Urgency does not mean we should implement a bad solution of Gavin's. Applying Moore's law but it doesn't... You know what I mean!

Maybe they are willing to stall Bitcoin and take bigger risks.

But they are making progress and how can that be stalling?

They don't want to take technical
risks purportedly, but they are willing to risk slowing down adoption.

Purportedly? Undecided

Taking a technical risk is better and willing to risk slowing down adoption is better than not willing to risk slowing adoption and not taking technical risk. We should make our technical stuff better before going for adoption. Nonetheless, waiting for a solution for sometime does not slow down adoption.

There is a risk/reward.
and part of their reward is blockstream business activities.  This is what you seem to deny.

They will get their reward for working them and we, at least me, don't deny it. What I(we) deny is you telling they don't want an increase because of Blockstream. Both are false because Core developers didn't say they did not want an increase and Blockstream works work better in higher block size.

2.  This leads to the next point.

Above points are just your or other XT-supporters creation. So it does not leads to "next" point of yours.

Gavin says a fix is urgently needed.
I say an imperfect fix IS better than no solution.

I don't think we can come with a "perfect" solution but at least, we should come with a good solution. Not a solution with doubling every two years and hint Moore's law. Moore's law is not applicable anymore and it is not good to implement without proper testing.

Gavin
essentially said "Core devs won't agree, but we need bigger blocks,
so I'm going to do the best thing I can and release Bip 101 on Mike's fork."

You are right. Core developers don't agree to Gavin's solution but does that mean they are against block size limit increase? No.

No one ever said Bip 101 was perfect, but who are you to say its "broken"
and its worse than no solution?

Because Gavin used Moore's law but it is not applicable anymore.

I guess you know more about bitcoin than
Gavin so we should listen to you.  Roll Eyes
---

Certainly not!

The only way your position even makes sense is if you truly believe its not
important to have bigger blocks asap.

Its important to have bigger block size limit but we should not implemented a bad solution.

It must mean you agree with the devs

Not really. I agree with the developers that Gavin's solution is not a good one.

who aren't ready to raise the limit.

They will implement a good solution. We will get higher block size limit soon! Miners are voting...

Somehow it doesn't scare you.

It scares me when you and others say to implement Gavin's solution.

You're not
worried about scalability.

I am worried about Bitcoin's long-term success.

Again, risk/reward.  But you won't be getting the
rewards that blockstream and its investors get by taking their side.   

I certainly get a reward. Bitcoin.


Sorry but I don't see any relevant answer in it. Maybe you can post here with references.

I am asking one thing to Jonald, knight22 and whoever else who is saying Core developers hired by Blockstream is only for 1 MB block size limit. Did all these Core developers actually say it?



By the way, block size or bigger blocks is not equal to bigger block size limit.
legendary
Activity: 4690
Merit: 1276
...
Mike's remains the firebrand proposing polarizing ideas. (redlisting class as you put it). I figure someone needs to step up with their learnings from a modern bigco software shop and try to apply it to Bitcoin development.

There are plenty of people 'in the wild' now who have experience with so-called 'big data.'

One of Mikes famous quotes is that Bitcoin could run just fine with 4 or 6 copies of the blockchain worldwide.  (I should find the quote and figure out if it was 4 or 6.)  This is fully true.  If/when that happens, the small integer number of entities running Bitcoin would likely set up back-channels between themselves.  Bitcoin could then easily and reliable offer real-time service.  The whole idea of a blockchain structure which is actually quite inefficient would probably be quietly abandoned as well, and at that point, who would know or care?

The question is not whether these things are possible and I am confident to say that they are.  The question is, is it a good idea for Bitcoin?

sr. member
Activity: 289
Merit: 252
bagholder since 2013

I seriously doubt you are qualified to make a technical judgement about Hearn's or Gavin's technical abilities.  
I may not be either, but I know they both have concrete technical accomplishments in the Bitcoin space, so you sound foolish.  ....And this still has nothing to do with the issue.
...

Examples?




I was running


Yeah I missed the bloom filtering stuff. Don't know what to think of the recent changes with wanting to making it optional on core clients.
Concur with you regarding Gavin's pro mainstream/masses features/thinking.
Mike's remains the firebrand proposing polarizing ideas. (redlisting class as you put it). I figure someone needs to step up with their learnings from a modern bigco software shop and try to apply it to Bitcoin development.

legendary
Activity: 4690
Merit: 1276

I seriously doubt you are qualified to make a technical judgement about Hearn's or Gavin's technical abilities.  
I may not be either, but I know they both have concrete technical accomplishments in the Bitcoin space, so you sound foolish.  ....And this still has nothing to do with the issue.
...

Examples?


Rough recollection after reading reddit/fora (I could be wrong).
Mike: Adding levelDB, implementing bitcoinJ
Gavin: Relay network proposal?, counting codes on blocks to trigger fork in xt
For both: Code reviewing a lot of core code  Smiley

I was running bitcoind at the time of the levelDB fork.  I agree that it was a helpful and necessary thing.  For a long while I credited Hearn as the driving force behind this but later I ran across info that called this into question.  I'll go ahead and leave him with the credit though.

As we know, the levelDB/BDB swap created a hard-fork accidentally.  I lay the blame for this on whoever neglected to ever even try to run Bitcoin BDB up to the point when the mis-config would have been detected.  I see that as the 'principle scientist's job.  I in fact suggested this to Gavin in person back in 2011 and he just sort of looked at me like I was from Mars.

I do credit Gavin with making the decisions necessary to get the hard-fork resolved nicely.  I had a gut sense that Hearn pushed him to 'not let a good crisis go to waste' and do something (associated with block size IIRC) which would have complicated recover and Gavin resisted.  I don't remember the full details, but that was my take-away.

I got in before QT was fully developed.  There was a primitive GUI prior based on WX iirc.  I thought that development effort would be better put toward certain other things in these early times while it was still more practical (pruning in particular.)  I've never used any GUI so it didn't matter to me very much that QT was a focus.  Ultimately I will concede that Gavin was right and I was wrong and that Bitcoin actually did need to get some more people sucked in.  The various 'sales pitches' used at the time always bothered me though as there were several mutually exclusive ones which were used simultaneously.  Now in 2015 with the latest round of block size debates this is becoming more clear.  For my part, I only recommended Bitcoin to people who had Phd's in computer science and I was perfectly up-front about the theoretical problems that lay on the horizon so my conscience is clear...at least in my mind.

One you missed was the effort to simplify addresses via x.509.  I thought that was a dreadful idea due to how certs are issued and ultimately it exposed us to the OpenSSL heartbleed bug.

Since I have NEVER seen Bitcoin as something which would scale to serve the masses or should grow beyond what could realistically be supportable in the face of global network provider attacks of the most vicious kind, I don't have any use for IBLT's (I suppose is what you mean by 'relay') and am not terribly wild about SPV anything so bitcoinj doesn't do much for me.

In general, I would say that from a mile-high view, Gavin's primary focus has been on end-user stuff which I jokingly refer to as 'talking paperclip class' stuff.  I simply don't agree with this priority.  As someone pointed out not to long ago, Hearn has had a lot of ideas but many of them seem to be of the 'redlisting class' and nearly universally despised by most of the core devs so his input has been quite modest.

That's just my take on things.  I will say that even Hearn's contribution to Bitcoin has been infinitely more significant than my own.

legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1008
Core dev leaves me neg feedback #abuse #political
"Don’t argue with idiots because they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience."  Smiley
legendary
Activity: 1372
Merit: 1000
--------------->¿?
You were the one who started praising 'Backamoto' and 'gmax' while bashing Gavin and Hearn.  so those comments were ad hominem and have nothing to do with the issue.

I am praising the actions (IE HashCash/sidechains/lightning/tree sigs/CT) of Backamoto and gmax (and pwuille).

Recognizing their demonstrated (via those actions) expertise is not the same as 'gee aren't they swell guys' ad hom.

The same goes for [email protected] and [email protected].  I DGAF about their personalities because I'm too busy being amused and entertained by their ill-advised shitlord fail-clown antics (and thus demonstrated lack of expertise relative to Blockstream).

I seriously doubt you are qualified to make a technical judgement about Hearn's or Gavin's technical abilities.  
I may not be either, but I know they both have concrete technical accomplishments in the Bitcoin space, so you sound foolish.  ....And this still has nothing to do with the issue.

Go argue with someone else please.

jonald_fyookball   Date Registered:    March 02, 2014

I seriously doubt you are qualified to make a technical judgement about my technical judgement abilities.

Go assclown somewhere else please.  I hear voat/v/bitcoinxt is looking for new members, as is bitco.in's tiny disgruntled splinter group.   Smiley




#R3KT

What does that change exactly?
legendary
Activity: 2156
Merit: 1072
Crypto is the separation of Power and State.
You were the one who started praising 'Backamoto' and 'gmax' while bashing Gavin and Hearn.  so those comments were ad hominem and have nothing to do with the issue.

I am praising the actions (IE HashCash/sidechains/lightning/tree sigs/CT) of Backamoto and gmax (and pwuille).

Recognizing their demonstrated (via those actions) expertise is not the same as 'gee aren't they swell guys' ad hom.

The same goes for [email protected] and [email protected].  I DGAF about their personalities because I'm too busy being amused and entertained by their ill-advised shitlord fail-clown antics (and thus demonstrated lack of expertise relative to Blockstream).

I seriously doubt you are qualified to make a technical judgement about Hearn's or Gavin's technical abilities.  
I may not be either, but I know they both have concrete technical accomplishments in the Bitcoin space, so you sound foolish.  ....And this still has nothing to do with the issue.

Go argue with someone else please.

jonald_fyookball   Date Registered:    March 02, 2014

I seriously doubt you are qualified to make a technical judgement about my technical judgement abilities.

Go assclown somewhere else please.  I hear voat/v/bitcoinxt is looking for new members, as is bitco.in's tiny disgruntled splinter group.   Smiley




#R3KT
sr. member
Activity: 289
Merit: 252
bagholder since 2013

I seriously doubt you are qualified to make a technical judgement about Hearn's or Gavin's technical abilities.  
I may not be either, but I know they both have concrete technical accomplishments in the Bitcoin space, so you sound foolish.  ....And this still has nothing to do with the issue.
...

Examples?



Rough recollection after reading reddit/fora (I could be wrong).
Mike: Adding levelDB, implementing bitcoinJ
Gavin: Relay network proposal?, counting codes on blocks to trigger fork in xt
For both: Code reviewing a lot of core code  Smiley
legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1008
Core dev leaves me neg feedback #abuse #political

I seriously doubt you are qualified to make a technical judgement about Hearn's or Gavin's technical abilities.  
I may not be either, but I know they both have concrete technical accomplishments in the Bitcoin space, so you sound foolish.  ....And this still has nothing to do with the issue.
...

Examples?



I'm just shaking my head here that you would even ask that.
For starters, Gavin has more code commits on Bitcoin core
than Greg Maxwell, Peter Todd, Jeff Garzik, and Luke Jr
combined.

Debating you on this would be moronic and I'm not going to do it.

legendary
Activity: 4690
Merit: 1276

I seriously doubt you are qualified to make a technical judgement about Hearn's or Gavin's technical abilities.  
I may not be either, but I know they both have concrete technical accomplishments in the Bitcoin space, so you sound foolish.  ....And this still has nothing to do with the issue.
...

Examples?

legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1008
Core dev leaves me neg feedback #abuse #political
You were the one who started praising 'Backamoto' and 'gmax' while bashing Gavin and Hearn.  so those comments were ad hominem and have nothing to do with the issue.

I am praising the actions (IE HashCash/sidechains/lightning/tree sigs/CT) of Backamoto and gmax (and pwuille).

Recognizing their demonstrated (via those actions) expertise is not the same as 'gee aren't they swell guys' ad hom.

The same goes for [email protected] and [email protected].  I DGAF about their personalities because I'm too busy being amused and entertained by their ill-advised shitlord fail-clown antics (and thus demonstrated lack of expertise relative to Blockstream).

I seriously doubt you are qualified to make a technical judgement about Hearn's or Gavin's technical abilities.  
I may not be either, but I know they both have concrete technical accomplishments in the Bitcoin space, so you sound foolish.  ....And this still has nothing to do with the issue.

Go argue with someone else please.
legendary
Activity: 4690
Merit: 1276

This is the most stupidest answer I could ever imagine about the block size. The block size in not exchangeable. The block size as no value per se.

Hey icebreaker, want to trade some block size? 

I do.  Fork the motherfucker and I'll split my coins and sell off the XTcoin's ASAP.  If I can find anyone dumb enough to take them and the market doesn't take to big a dump before I can get in the game.

XT has one chance:  The govt mandates its' use as part of a crypto-currency license.  In that case all of the corporate vendors and Coinbase's and such will have no real choice to comply or close shop.  This is not outside the realm of possibility actually.  To save us all from them evil terrorists and Chinese miners and so on.  Unfortunately a lot of people would swallow that one hook-line-and-sinker I'll bet.

legendary
Activity: 2156
Merit: 1072
Crypto is the separation of Power and State.
You were the one who started praising 'Backamoto' and 'gmax' while bashing Gavin and Hearn.  so those comments were ad hominem and have nothing to do with the issue.

I am praising the actions (IE HashCash/sidechains/lightning/tree sigs/CT) of Backamoto and gmax (and pwuille).

Recognizing their demonstrated (via those actions) expertise is not the same as 'gee aren't they swell guys' ad hom.

The same goes for [email protected] and [email protected].  I DGAF about their personalities because I'm too busy being amused and entertained by their ill-advised shitlord fail-clown antics (and thus demonstrated lack of expertise relative to Blockstream).
legendary
Activity: 1372
Merit: 1000
--------------->¿?
Breadwallet just disagree with you:

https://twitter.com/breadwalletapp/status/636548340595843072

I hope you don't use it!  Cheesy

Is Breadwallet willing to be the first to defect from Core and start accepting XTcoins?

No?  Then they are useless posers, typical of XT's 'mile-wide but inch-deep' crowd of fair weather first world armchair insurgents.

None of them are willing to go first.  They all want somebody else to take that risk.

Also, Breadwallet's popular appeals to "support among bitcoin users and service providers" is not merely irrelevant but also betrays their lack of understanding w/r/t how Bitcoin works.

Has it escaped your attention that Slush is spoofing BIP101 blocks, and to date *ZERO* actual XT/NotXT nodes have mined a block?

XT/BIP101 are dead.  Szaboshi just put them out of their misery:




#R3KT

This is the most stupidest answer I could ever imagine about the block size. The block size in not exchangeable. The block size as no value per se.

Hey icebreaker, want to trade some block size? 
legendary
Activity: 2156
Merit: 1072
Crypto is the separation of Power and State.
Breadwallet just disagree with you:

https://twitter.com/breadwalletapp/status/636548340595843072

I hope you don't use it!  Cheesy

Is Breadwallet willing to be the first to defect from Core and start accepting XTcoins?

No?  Then they are useless posers, typical of XT's 'mile-wide but inch-deep' crowd of fair weather first world armchair insurgents.

None of them are willing to go first.  They all want somebody else to take that risk.

Also, Breadwallet's popular appeals to "support among bitcoin users and service providers" is not merely irrelevant but also betrays their lack of understanding w/r/t how Bitcoin works.

Has it escaped your attention that Slush is spoofing BIP101 blocks, and to date *ZERO* actual XT/NotXT nodes have mined a block?

XT/BIP101 are dead.  Szaboshi just put them out of their misery:




#R3KT
legendary
Activity: 1372
Merit: 1000
--------------->¿?

A simple example: Someone bought 1 bitcoin from you on OpenBazaar, paid $230 to your bank account, you release the coin to him. The next day, you found out that your bank account is frozen and police called you for an investigation, because the money is hacked from another bank account

How can you mitigate such kind of risk? You must make sure the money is sent from the users own account by asking him to upload his account screenshot together with his ID card. But normally users will refuse to show their ID card to a stranger on a decentralized platform, they would only show it to a well known registered finance institution which have strict rules for customer privacy protection

OpenBazaar is not a trading platform to exchange fiat (although you could with fairly high risk). It is a decentralized platform to sell good and services being paid off with bitcoin with 3 optional kind of decentralized escrow system.

It's the same, you bought something stolen, or some one were cheated to pay bitcoin to you and never get any delivery, while the scammer get goods delivered from you. Man-in-the-middle attack will be very popular on this kind of platform when there is no central authority make sure the legitimacy of each transaction


Everything have been discussed in length about the escrow and reputation system to ensure an E-Bay like security. I invite you to read more about OB. Of course it won't be risk free, nor is E-Bay.
legendary
Activity: 1988
Merit: 1012
Beyond Imagination

A simple example: Someone bought 1 bitcoin from you on OpenBazaar, paid $230 to your bank account, you release the coin to him. The next day, you found out that your bank account is frozen and police called you for an investigation, because the money is hacked from another bank account

How can you mitigate such kind of risk? You must make sure the money is sent from the users own account by asking him to upload his account screenshot together with his ID card. But normally users will refuse to show their ID card to a stranger on a decentralized platform, they would only show it to a well known registered finance institution which have strict rules for customer privacy protection

OpenBazaar is not a trading platform to exchange fiat (although you could with fairly high risk). It is a decentralized platform to sell good and services being paid off with bitcoin with 3 optional kind of decentralized escrow system.

It's the same, you bought something stolen, or some one were cheated to pay bitcoin to you and never get any delivery, while the scammer get goods delivered from you. Man-in-the-middle attack will be very popular on this kind of platform when there is no central authority make sure the legitimacy of each transaction
legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1008
Core dev leaves me neg feedback #abuse #political
Icebreaker,

"ad hominem" means relating to a specific person.  We were talking about whether
people who are core devs have an conflict of interest with a private VC backed
company.  THAT is the issue.  You were the one who started praising 'Backamoto'
and 'gmax' while bashing Gavin and Hearn.  so those comments were ad hominem
and have nothing to do with the issue.

For the record, I greatly respect Greg Maxwell, Adam, and all those guys.  However,
they are not great communicators and have not been very transparent about Blockstream.
Maybe they have expressed some opinions on some dev mailing list or IRC but certainly
nothing clear that I've seen.   As a general member of the Bitcoin community,
I haven't heard much from them.  Maybe they don't care.
On the other hand, I've seen very clear and cogent videos
and articles from both Gavin and Mike Hearn.  

Therefore it shouldn't be surprising that
 I'm utterly unconvinced about this 'confluence of interests' of which you speak,
given their lack of communication and apparent stonewalling of the blocksize increase
(which has been discussed to death).

If you are convinced, great.  More power to you.


legendary
Activity: 1372
Merit: 1000
--------------->¿?
You don't seem to grasp the confilct of interest between blocksteam and Core development. I doubt you someday will because you don't seem to know what a conflict of interest actually is. That's OK.

Repeating the 'Vast Blockstream Conspiracy' rumor won't make it true.

Blockstream is scaling Bitcoin in ways far more effective than XT's naive, ham-fisted, derpy 'duh just make the block moar big' approach.

Their Scaling Bitcoin workshops represent the proper way to gather information, share expertise, compare notes, find common ground, identify irreconcilable differences, and ultimately begin to move *with consensus* toward the goal of supporting more transactions, without sacrificing Bitcoin's unique distinguishing features.

Like it or not, at present Dr. Backamoto is effectively Bitcoin's CTO just as gmax is Bitcoin's Chief Scientist.   Cool

While Gavin and Hearn are busy splitting the community into warring factions, Blockstream is doing amazing things at the frontier of computer science and cryptography.

EG, https://blockstream.com/2015/08/24/treesignatures/

They are brilliant guys for sure.  However, your post is just an ad hominem that has nothing to do with the conflict of interest issue.

Accusing Blockstream devs of conflicting interests is an ad hominem attack, especially given their years of contributions in scaling Bitcoin to 1MB.

My posts demonstrates a confluence of interests between Blockstream and Bitcoin, which dispels OP's fuzzy evidence-free accusations of impropriety.

You can't accuse someone for being in conflict of interest. It is simply a position someone is in. It doesn't tell if that person is ill intended or not and will abuse of that position or not. Therefore exposing a conflict of interest is not an ad hominem attack. It is simply a matter of fact. You can choose to trust that person or not.

In this case you choose to trust blockstream while some here don't. Let me ask you: why should we trust them in the first place?
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