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Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

gavinandresen.ninja

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Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#51

Post by lhl »

rsi_oww wrote: post #13
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…

There is near complete consensus, see: https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-con... Nearly every developer, along with the vast majority of miners, have agreed to this. The group that did not agree (Coinbase, 2 developers, and some small miners) is extremely good at social media and has done a great job of spreading a false story of "serious scaling problems" and "developers can't reach consensus".…

I think the text of the linked summary refutes the consensus (at least from the reports of the Roundtable participants' show of hands).

Jihan Wu (CEO of Ant Miner, Antpool, formerly #1 and currently #2 mining pool [1]) has been pretty vocal about his unhappiness with the HK meeting on his Twitter account: https://twitter.com/jihanwu and posted a very lengthy essay on 8btc. Partial translation here: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/495866/the_rbtc_china_...

F2Pool (also a HK signer, currently the #1 mining pool) now offers Classic voting for miners, as does Slushpool (they've published their voting results which also clearly doesn't show a consensus among miners: https://slushpool.com/stats/#voting-results )

Here is Classic's roadmap, just since you posted Core's: https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/documentation/blob/master/...

I think both sides have been pretty politically adroit in their own domains, but to pretend that there aren't two sides, or to conclude which side has more support, or to even talk about takeovers, considering both sides have different visions for the evolution of the protocol (on-chain vs off-chain scaling may be the most succinct summary) makes me raise an eyebrow.

[1] https://blockchain.info/pools

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#52

Post by vertex-four »

bhaak wrote: post #12
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…

Your impression is spot on. Nevertheless there are still lots of people who have lots of money in it and that's part of the problem why there is so much controversy and why some people don't want to move away from their position. If you are interested in blockchain technology you don't have to go to bitcoin. There are lots of other cryptocurrencies where you could learn about it. Ethereum is currently the new kid on…

Ethereum has the same potential scaling issues as Bitcoin and has not yet defined a plan for scaling infinitely, aside from pushing for the development of technologies which move some forms of communication off the blockchain entirely. At the point where Ethereum gets to where Bitcoin is now, it's entirely possible its community could have exactly the same issue.

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#53

Post by Laforet »

rsi_oww wrote: post #39
girvo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> small technical change to a protocol I have no horse in this race, but isn't that understating the impact a bit?

Yes, the pro-fork group say they simply want to change the limit of megabytes per block from 1MB to 2MB. Somehow this is worth forking the network over. This may not sound like much, but also keep in mind eight months ago it was 20MB, with an eventual jump into the GB range, that they were pushing for. Also, recently they are talking about removing any limit altogether. This change seems small but the consequences wo…

Honest Question: As an individual what incentives are there for me to run a full node? Currently the storage/bandwidth requirements are not outrageous, but high enough that they will cost $20-$50 depending on how many connections I allow. Why would I bother?

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#54

Post by studentrob »

hartpuff wrote: post #42
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 doesn't look good when you ban a mode of thought entirely

I've no skin in this game, and I don't fully understand the technical problems and solutions for bitcoin. I also don't understand the challenges facing moderators of reddit.

It does seem strange to me, however, that people are calling for consensus on an issue where 1) most discussion occurs online, and 2) for which there exists no balanced forum that allows all points of view to be heard.

Perhaps the community should solve this problem first. Or get the right people in a room together again and hire someone like Dale Carnegie who's good at helping people work together to lead a session. If they haven't tried that, they haven't tried everything.

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#55

Post by theparanoid »

rsi_oww wrote: post #21
Taek wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has been an enormous and coordinated effort to disrupt the Bitcoin community, and many of the actions have been far from subtle. /r/bitcoin has been subject to spam attacks, sockpuppets, brigade voting, and a huge number of manipulations. The moderator team tried to control it, honest people became victim to heavy handed moderation, and a lot of damage was done. The grandparent comment really does not seem genu…

The group that is promoting the network fork is extremely good at social media. A clue that it is not genuine, is simply that nobody cares this much about a small technical change to a protocol. Yet these constant, daily, aggressive attacks against the developers have been going on for at least 10 months now. All anyone has to do is read the pro-fork subreddit, /r/btc, and see how toxic and hostile they seem. It does…

I recently had to wait several hours for a transaction to confirm, this materially effected me.

People actually using bitcoin wanted the 2MB increase months ago.

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#56

Post by kyrre »

optforfon wrote: post #16

Can anyone point me to good resources to understanding the technical side of Bitcoin? I tried to read the white paper but it glossed over technical details (for instance, what does "signing" actually entail?). Everything else is either very hand-wavey and high level or assumes you already know how it works. I'm interesting in understanding the spec and potentially expanding on it or being able to understand the ongoi…

This course is pretty good:

https://www.coursera.org/course/bitcointech

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#57

Post by CydeWeys »

Lazare wrote: post #46
rsi_oww wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/jav…

As a counter-example, there are lots of tightly-modded subs that I follow that benefit from strong moderation of off-topic posts. Such subs include /r/personalfinance, and /r/askhistorians.

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#58

Post by studentrob »

rsi_oww wrote: post #13
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…

There is near complete consensus, see: https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-con... Nearly every developer, along with the vast majority of miners, have agreed to this. The group that did not agree (Coinbase, 2 developers, and some small miners) is extremely good at social media and has done a great job of spreading a false story of "serious scaling problems" and "developers can't reach consensus".…

Wow. At first I believed the other posts that there was no consensus. And reading about the moderation of promoting alternate coins on /r/bitcoin does make it sound too heavy handed. But just reading this comment and seeing that someone does feel there is a large majority consensus is a really different point of view.

I'm just dropping this note to give an outsider's perspective. I have no stake here and no interest in betting on something like this. I hope it does get sorted out and the concept of secure digital, decentralized money lives on in some form or another. Good luck.

EDIT: Aaaand now I'm downvoted for no reason. This thread is absurd.

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#59

Post by ikeboy »

studentrob wrote: post #54
hartpuff wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 doesn't look good when you ban a mode of thought entirely I've no skin in this game, and I don't fully understand the technical problems and solutions for bitcoin. I also don't understand the challenges facing moderators of reddit. It does seem strange to me, however, that people are calling for consensus on an issue where 1) most discussion occurs online, and 2) for which there exists no balanced forum that allow…

The actual technical discussion takes place on the mailing list. No points of view have been banned from there as far as I know.

Re: Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts

#60

Post by hitekker »

rsi_oww wrote: post #32
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.

Everyone needs to follow the One True Ledger, or you can't know if Bob really sent you $100 of Bitcoins that will be accepted by Joe. There are already competing implementations like btcd written in Go. That's not the issue. This post is from a developer who is part of a small group in the bitcoin world, who want to change the rules of the protocol. Anyone that did not follow those rule changes would see a different…

"One True Ledger"

Oh boy.

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