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Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

gavinandresen.ninja

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Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#41

Post by lololomg »

rsi_oww wrote: post #35
roarkjs wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/r/bitcoin is also censoring mentions of Ethereum - it's main rival right now. https://twitter.com/DiginomicsNews/status/705258811192438784

That is true, because /r/bitcoin is about bitcoin. If you want to promote Ethereum, you can do so on /r/ethereum/. I am sure promoting dog ownership over cats is frowned upon by /r/cats readers, too.

> I am sure promoting dog ownership over cats is frowned upon by /r/cats readers, too

You are wrong, nobody on /r/cats have gotten their comment removed or been banned for talking about dogs or any other pet on /r/cats.

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#42

Post by hartpuff »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #37
rsi_oww wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main Bitcoin forum on Reddit is censored heavy handed. No criticism allowed, mentions of alternative software or forums get deleted right away. This is simply not true. The only rule on the /r/bitcoin Reddit is not to promote these network fork attempts. This is not just alternative software, it is software that follows DIFFERENT rules from the main bitcoin software and would follow a different ledger history i…

> This is simply not true. The only rule on the /r/bitcoin Reddit is not to promote these network fork attempts. A meaningful discussion cannot be had if you are only allowed to speak negatively of a subject. > The majority of the fork software run on freebie Amazon AWS servers > Where do you get this claim that "whole districts of cities" are being cut off the internet? You do realise that some people do still run f…

> A meaningful discussion cannot be had if you are only allowed to speak negatively of a subject.

I agree censorship of ideas or opinions is a bad thing, but if what he says is true, that the sub was being essentially rendered unusable by sockpuppeting, trolling, organized downvoting (which is also censorship, BTW) or other abuse, then what option is there but to clean it up? This is not a specific /r/bitcoin point, it's something that dates back to Usenet times, and applies to every forum since.

I don't know who is telling the (most) truth here, I have no idea, because I don't read that group and don't really follow Bitcoin (or even Reddit), but I do think it's fairly absurd that Bitcoin (a supposedly democratic, decentralized technology that nobody owns) has always had what are essentially a handful of very powerful 'official' channels and representatives, with enormous influence, and AIUI major forums, including /r/bitcoin and BitcoinTalk, are actually owned by one single person (perhaps the parent of your post).

But nobody in Bitcoinland seemed to care that much about such "dictatorships" before.

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#43

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

rsi_oww wrote: post #40
Vespasian wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your reply is demonstrating the parents issues with the discussion perfectly. Anyone not closely following the situtation(such as myself) just sees a enormously heated up discussion (I was reminded of [1]). Every party involved is accusing the others of spreading lies,misrepresenting the situation and trying to take control over the blockchain/bitcoin/protocol. Based on that, I have difficulties understanding and eva…

"The reports of Bitcoin's problems are greatly exaggerated". There is a small group who seem really good at spreading a message of "Bitcoin is about to collapse". They are doing this either because they control a lot of competing currency (Ethereum), or because they think it will help adoption of their Bitcoin fork. The reality is, 95% of Bitcoiners are very happy with the team working on the protocol, and the market…

Look, even without the block size issue, the infighting is a problem.

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#44

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

w1ntermute wrote: post #6
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #5

So this is #3 of the Satoshi Roundtable notes and opinions that have made it to HN, as far as I can tell (I was initially confused and thought this was a re-submission of Brian Armstrong's notes https://medium.com/@barmstrong/what-happened-at-the-satoshi-... ). As someone who has dabbled into the bitcoin and block chain area but never seriously, all of these reports and the constant reporting of the serious issues fa…

It seems very likely that building anything on top of Bitcoin will be seen in retrospect as a mistake, because the platform is controlled by a group of unpredictable individuals. You can't even predict the most likely outcome and plan accordingly.

Bitcoin does seem to lack effective leadership. This dates back to Satoshi leaving: he handed over the reins to people who didn't want them.

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#45

Post by Lazare »

rsi_oww wrote: post #18
Vozze wrote: post #9

There is a revolution going on in Bitcoin land. Very similar to how dictatorship gets overthrown in the real world. In the real world, dictators fight with censorship and violent force. In Bitcoin land these are social media censorship and DDoS attacks. The main Bitcoin forum on Reddit is censored heavy handed. No criticism allowed, mentions of alternative software or forums get deleted right away. People who run alt…

> The main Bitcoin forum on Reddit is censored heavy handed. No criticism allowed, mentions of alternative software or forums get deleted right away. This is simply not true. The only rule on the /r/bitcoin Reddit is not to promote these network fork attempts. This is not just alternative software, it is software that follows DIFFERENT rules from the main bitcoin software and would follow a different ledger history i…

> > The main Bitcoin forum on Reddit is censored heavy handed. No criticism allowed, mentions of alternative software or forums get deleted right away.

> This is simply not true.

So anyone trying to discuss alternative software won't have their posts deleted?

> The only rule on the /r/bitcoin Reddit is not to promote these network fork attempts.

In other words, heavy handed censorship. Thanks for clarifying.

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#46

Post by Lazare »

rsi_oww wrote: post #35
roarkjs wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/r/bitcoin is also censoring mentions of Ethereum - it's main rival right now. https://twitter.com/DiginomicsNews/status/705258811192438784

That is true, because /r/bitcoin is about bitcoin. If you want to promote Ethereum, you can do so on /r/ethereum/. I am sure promoting dog ownership over cats is frowned upon by /r/cats readers, too.

I participate in a subreddit focused on one particular modded mincraft launcher and set of modpacks (r/ftb, for the Feed The Beast launcher). Posts about modded minecraft in general are welcomed; /r/ftb is the largest modded minecraft subreddit, and there's a lot of overlap in terms of contents, users, mod authors, etc.

Similarly, I've never seen anyone upset about people discussing non-Javascript languages in /r/javascript; there's specific subreddits for some popular variants and libraries (like /r/coffeescript and /r/react), but nobody cares. The rules do say posts should be at least indirectly related to javascript, but a post talking about a better language would be seen as easily related enough.

/r/bitcoins rules do not follow the norms for Reddit communities, as far as I've seen.

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#47

Post by lhl »

Vozze wrote: post #9

There is a revolution going on in Bitcoin land. Very similar to how dictatorship gets overthrown in the real world. In the real world, dictators fight with censorship and violent force. In Bitcoin land these are social media censorship and DDoS attacks. The main Bitcoin forum on Reddit is censored heavy handed. No criticism allowed, mentions of alternative software or forums get deleted right away. People who run alt…

For those unfamiliar with how crazy the shenanigans at r/bitcoin (and bitcointalk.org), the historical primary online discussion forums for Bitcoin (both run by the same individual [1]), the subreddit uses a 70+KB custom stylesheet [2] to unhide collapsed (downvoted) comments, hidden points, thread sort order set to controversial, and very heavy-handed moderation/banning to unduly influence/control conversation [3].

The community seems to have done an ok job working around this with r/btc (although conversation there is almost completely dominated by discussions on the hard fork and against Core) and the bitcoin.com forums (although again, not without some drama/controversy, and both of those forums are still run/controlled by a single person (Roger Ver)) - it seems like guaranteeing open/neutral discussions for crypto-currencies is still an unsolved problem.

Personally, while I'm following along (and running a Classic node), I've liquidated the few coins I've had to see how it shakes out. It's incontrovertible that Bitcoin has hit its current capacity limits which is especially dangerous with the upcoming halvening, and the primary development cabal has been unwilling to scale it, despite foreknowledge/certainty and increasingly urgent calls over the past 2 years. If Bitcoin becomes viable again, I'll throw my money back in the ring, but if it doesn't, well, it was an interesting experiment and spurred a lot of innovation, but also pointed out some still unsolved problems (tracking consensus/governance among stakesholders and for protocol evolution, independent development funding, figuring out how mining/nodes should be incentivized in light of pooling behavior, mining concentration pressured by electricity pricing, etc).

(It's worth noting even besides the relatively simple/bullet-proof XT/Classic block-size increasing hard-forks [4] there are some really interesting other scaling technologies like [5] Xtreme Thinblocks or [6] parallel sync that have been either ignored or outright rejected while Core chases a Blockstream (sidechain, lightning network) focused agenda that simply doesn't seem to fix the right now problem.))

[1] https://bitco.in/forum/threads/who-is-theymos-and-what-did-h...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin/about/stylesheet

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/44umxm/i_have_to_say_t...

[4] http://gavinandresen.ninja/a-guided-tour-of-the-2mb-fork

[5] https://bitco.in/forum/threads/buip010-passed-xtreme-thinblo...

[6] https://bitco.in/forum/threads/iguana-parallel-sync-full-btc...

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#48

Post by forgetsusername »

rsi_oww wrote: post #18
Vozze wrote: post #9

There is a revolution going on in Bitcoin land. Very similar to how dictatorship gets overthrown in the real world. In the real world, dictators fight with censorship and violent force. In Bitcoin land these are social media censorship and DDoS attacks. The main Bitcoin forum on Reddit is censored heavy handed. No criticism allowed, mentions of alternative software or forums get deleted right away. People who run alt…

> The main Bitcoin forum on Reddit is censored heavy handed. No criticism allowed, mentions of alternative software or forums get deleted right away. This is simply not true. The only rule on the /r/bitcoin Reddit is not to promote these network fork attempts. This is not just alternative software, it is software that follows DIFFERENT rules from the main bitcoin software and would follow a different ledger history i…

>very likely with sockpuppets

How easily people look to conspiracy theories.

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#49

Post by eterm »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #34
aedron wrote: post #20

Why should there be One True Bitcoin implementation? What should be worked on is creating an official protocol specification, which would allow competing implementations, that miners could freely choose from. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

That would make sense, but sadly hasn't happened. Bitcoin has become defined by Satoshi's original C++ implementation.

It's not even the original that has the 1MB limit. That was added later as a temporary measure. Satoshi said that it could be increased and heavily implied it would be increased long before it acted as a limit to transaction amounts.

But I expect someone will be along shortly to "correct" my understanding.

As a neutral (I own no bitcoin), the whole thing is very dogmatic, very messy and looks like it's about control not about the limit at all. In fact many core devs were previously arguing for increasing the limit until it became clear that that position wasn't compatible with their position in core.

Outsiders see core as having been corrupted by the wishes of blockstream VC money. Pro-core see all outsiders as a conspiracy trying to wrestle control away.

In short, it's a complete mess.

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#50

Post by vertex-four »

roarkjs wrote: post #29
rsi_oww wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main Bitcoin forum on Reddit is censored heavy handed. No criticism allowed, mentions of alternative software or forums get deleted right away. This is simply not true. The only rule on the /r/bitcoin Reddit is not to promote these network fork attempts. This is not just alternative software, it is software that follows DIFFERENT rules from the main bitcoin software and would follow a different ledger history i…

/r/bitcoin is also censoring mentions of Ethereum - it's main rival right now. https://twitter.com/DiginomicsNews/status/705258811192438784

/r/bitcoin has never been a venue for discussing alternative cryptocurrencies. Due to reddit's lack of a concept of sub-subreddits or the ability to have a subreddit's front page filter out a certain tag, the only way to remove floods of people discussing off-topic subjects is to say "sorry, please discuss that in another subreddit".
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