Topic: What is the right and fair way to stop Mike Hearn? - page 10. (Read 14041 times)

Personal banking aspects of Bitcoin? Is this a joke? Let me refresh your mind: Bitcoin is a P2P software, not an bank emulator.

I don't really see this as being the case. They're two different standards that have two different ideal uses, so the "network effect" doesn't really apply. Plus, from the user perspective the difference between the two is not as large as it is from the developer perspective. To your average user that doesn't know that the differing standards exist, a PGP-based system would seem similar to an X.509-based system, just with some additional features. This would make the transition much easier.


So you'd rather that core developers be financially beholden to organizations like Google or Microsoft than organizations like The Bitcoin Foundation? Or should Gavin flip burgers before coming home to program?


That's a pretty flimsy argument. Satoshi has nearly a billion dollars in Bitcoin. I doubt that he'd stand by if he thought that something was going severely wrong with it.

Wait red listing isn't unethical? I am sadly disagree. Also Gavin is getting a paycheck from the foundation don't you think he does their bidding?

You're talking to a crowd who thinks Mike and Gavin are actively working to harm the decentralization of Bitcoin, especially with the NSA leaks showing that the US government actually does spend a significant amount of time trying to damage computer security via subverting standards processes and development efforts - it's a reasonable thing to think. I'm sure many of the posters above would be happy to see them driven out.


Nah, actually implementing X.509 certs for person-to-person stuff does prevent PGP from being implemented later. It's a standard network effect situation so ensuring that the right path is what people go down at the beginning is extremely important if we want to have a decentralized and secure system at the end. For person-to-business the existing infrastructure is sufficiently entrenched that it's not worth fighting against for now, but person-to-person that infrastructure just doesn't exist yet. Anyway, as I wrote elsewhere, you can easily use the PGP technology to get the best of both worlds, centralized CA's, multiple CA's and WoT.

But... if the above posters were serious they'd go do something other than just argue. Donating to the Dark Wallet effort is probably worthwhile for instance.

You think it's unethical that people get paid money to develop a system that supports a multiple billion dollar economy? That's ridiculous. So not only should the developers do everything your way, they shouldn't get compensated either?


If Satoshi is so offended by the current development team, then why doesn't he come back to denounce them and retake control of the project? He personally picked Gavin to lead the community and he obviously hasn't changed that opinion yet.


I've seen Bitcoin be worth far less.


So basically everybody should be forced to use the solution that meets your standards, even when two solutions can be implemented easily without conflicting with each other? That doesn't sound very decentralized to me.


This is a good point. I defend Mike Hearn because of his behavior, not because of some mythical confidence in him.

Even if, or especially if, anyone deserves 100% confidence then expressions like this do more harm than good.

Put on your villain hat for a moment and ask yourself who you're going to try to bribe, blackmail, or extort in order to infiltrate and destroy a project. Do you pick the person who everybody is skeptical of and watches closely, or do you try to suborn the person who everybody trusts implicitly?

Skeptical scrutiny protects everybody, particularly people who want to do the right thing but may be under pressure to do otherwise. It's easier for honest actors to resist such pressure they can plausibly claim they would be instantly detected and countered if they tried to harm the project.

This seems right in principle, but in practice I think it downplays the concerns of the OP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof

Why don't you actually educate yourself before making a bunch of cryptic accusations phrased as questions? This ridiculous bashing of Mike Hearn has to stop. I don't agree with all of his proposed solutions but I'd sure hate to see a smart, capable individual driven out of the community by a bunch of people who can't even be bothered to understand what they're talking about. This is why Gavin doesn't even bother visiting these forums anymore. Keep making inflammatory comments and all that will happen is that Bitcoin development will continue without any sort of community input.

The Bitcoin community needs both Mike Hearns and Amir Taakis. There is room for both solutions that work now and aren't as ideologically pure and solutions that will work later and are "perfect".  Hardcore cryptolibertarians aren't the only Bitcoin users nor should they be. Look up "Worse is better" vs. "MIT approach". Mike Hearn is proposing things that will work as quickly and easily as possible and advance Bitcoin's utility for your average person. This is hardly treason. None of his solutions will conflict with having the perfect solution later. Implementing X.509 certificates won't prevent PGP from being implemented later. Grandma probably doesn't have to worry about Verisign collaborating with the government to steal her morning coffee money.

Wait so you are using a signature that comes from a chip that is put out by the government... Don't you think they have the keys to that? Someone hacks the database they can be signing rouge nodes all day. I understand what you are trying to do, I understand you are trying to look for a token that you can hash and prove that you can't get another one or fake one.

I ranted against core developers, too, only to be set right afterwards so I don't want to be too harsh with OP but I want to express my 100% confidence in Mike Hearn who does an excellent job at pushing Bitcoin in the right direction. Fortunately he is 2 steps ahead of most of us and sadly he's drawn into ridiculous threads like this due to a lack of … mind reading devices? Not sure what could fill that gap when there is such a small number of people that can code the future of Bitcoin/spend their time on explaining it to mere mortals.

I have yet to see Gavin, Mike or any core dev push for anything unethical in the sense of what most in this community see in Bitcoin and I wish OP would be satisfied with what he read so far and mark this thread as resolved to not draw more attention to this non-issue.

On the contrary, I think many people are "getting it."

Nevertheless, please explain how using government-issued passports squares with "no link to your identity."

Further, what does "trustless" mean to you?

Has your vision of bitcoin always included state-dependent, centralized solutions?

Are you playing the role of "bad cop" to promulgate further regulation of bitcoin?

Is the mention of Tor a clever way to toss breadcrumbs to us while blacklisting some and and passport-linking others?

Are you attempting to establish the parameters of the narrative in a coercive way?

A lot of the inventive problems with the network right now are due to the anomaly of the block reward being larger than the transaction fee revenue. Subsidies always cause economic distortions, and Bitcoin is no different.

In a future where the transaction rate is high and transaction fee are more important than the subsidy in terms of miner revenue then things start to look a lot different in terms of the miner/full node dynamic.

Perhaps it's better to get the network to that state first as quickly as possible because that's what needs to happen for long term viability of the currency anyway, and then see what needs to be done.

"Don't run a node for SPV clients to hook up to."

People need to start view the Bitcoin network as it is going to look in the near future (if not already.)

(Actually, I have to wait until midnight my time to watch the presentation for bandwidth reasons, but my take is that this is method to limit the potential for that infrastructure providers to cheat.  Some dirt-poor tribesmen in Africa is not going to be an infrastructure provider.  Nor are you and I for that matter.  We are all just SPV clients.  (But that's OK, 'cuz they're so rich, and we ain't nothin' but a dopeman's bitch! (I'm on a bit of an NWA kick these last few days...)))

I wrote earlier that Mike Hearn was just using the passport in his talk to demonstrate a centralised piece of ID and to show that there is a better way of issuing zero-trust non-centralised ID tokens based on some recent advances in mathematics.

I now stand corrected and am genuinely appalled at the idea of requiring a piece of real-world, centrally-issued ID to perform ANY activity with bitcoin.

Mike & Augusto - what do you say to the billions of poor and unbanked people around the world who stand to benefit from the personal-banking aspects of bitcoin, yet who don't have passports, encrypted USBs or other forms of trustworthy ID? Why are you interested in centralised solutions that only affect bitcoiners from wealthy nations?

Some people cannot visualize what they read because they lack the technical understanding of what you are talking about. I personally pretty much appreciate this approach which appears very interesting and not difficult to implement. Perhaps instead to use only passports to produce the mathematical proof, also government issued encrypted keys? I have one stored in an USB stick which is impossible to replicate.

Just an idea, but something like Ethereum can serve as the data layer for a fully decentralized reputation system... It seems to me that something along these lines would be less likely to be compromised than any central authority tied into a physical item with a key. a well connected trust web is equally hard if not harder to reproduce than a TPM chip.

of course its up to people as to whether or not they want to use it... If it gained traction i could see instant transactions requiring signing from a key with a trustworthy reputation, and large transactions requiring verification via confirmations as the preferable method.

This would also allow for people in less fortunate countries who are unable to get a passport to still benefit from the increased security.

Tor's got a structure that makes running fake Tor nodes not quite as trivial as it sounds. Remember that Tor node operators are not anonymous, and Tor on the other hand is a semi-centralized service.

In any case, my personal objection isn't so much the passports for Tor idea - that's a genuinely hard problem - it's the application of that to zeroconf and fee estimation where there's much better ways to do it by not relying on trusting third parties. That's an example of lazily resorting to centralization when there's better solutions out there.

You know, I don't think I've ever seen you advocate a genuinely decentralized solution to something. It's just not how you think, and the community recognizes this. I'll bet you had I advocated that passport idea people would have chalked it up as just another cool idea from Peter Todd, but I can do that because unlike you I seem to have a generally good reputation for honestly promoting decentralization - among other things I get the sense that people generally trust me not to gloss over the flaws.

Yes, but faking paper passports is probably a lot easier than faking the digital signatures. Unless the Mossad can break RSA, either:

1) They faked non-NFC passports (likely)
2) They managed to steal the UKPA private key

Given the date of when that event happened, not all passports were electronic back then (they still aren't) so there would have been no need to do anything with digital signatures.

Anyway, like I said, it's still better than the big fat nothing that P2P networks have today. Governments are not the only attackers we care about, remember!

Very true. And you do not need Snowden to tell you this (a short story how espionage guys duplicate passports of ordinary people to run their operations): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1261435/How-Mossad-blew-The-gripping-story-Israels-brutally-efficient-secret-service-botched-Dubai-assassination.html

This obligation flows both ways. If I explain why nobody is getting screwed, it's up to people who are worried to take time and understand those explanations. Some people are doing this, fortunately - thanks!