
Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts - sethbannon
http://gavinandresen.ninja/satoshi-roundtable-thoughts
======
Vozze
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 alternative implementations
of Bitcoin get DDoSed so heavy, that sometimes whole districts of cities get
cut off from the internet. But this is the internet. people manage to jump
over the fence pretty fast...

[http://imgur.com/xNjN0kH](http://imgur.com/xNjN0kH)

...and find ways to get together and discuss their opinions without
censorship:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/48zggz/a_behind...](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/48zggz/a_behind_the_scenes_look_at_how_bitcoin_core/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/](https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/)

~~~
rsi_oww
> 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 if a fork happened.

In fact talking about this topic, criticisms of developers and the like is
practically all you see there, for the last 8 months!

You are not explaining the origin of the "please don't promote network forks"
rule. ("Bitcoin XT", now "Bitcoin Classic").

The people pushing the need to fork would bombard the Reddit forum for many
months, very likely with sockpuppets. They were extremely hostile and
aggressive, down voting anyone who would disagree with them. Readers would
notice their posts would instantly be scored negative only seconds after a
post. This pro-fork group would harass the developers with personal attacks
and threats, forcing some developers to leave due to the harm it was having on
their mental health.

Only after this went on for a very long time did the moderators finally try to
get things under control. The pro-fork crowd yelled “censorship”. But this is
not censorship, it is long needed moderation.

> People who run alternative implementations of Bitcoin get DDoSed so heavy,
> that sometimes whole districts of cities get cut off from the internet.

The majority of the fork software run on freebie Amazon AWS servers:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/499bai/51_of_bitco...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/499bai/51_of_bitcoin_classic_nodes_hosted_on_aws/)

Where do you get this claim that "whole districts of cities" are being cut off
the internet?

~~~
riprowan
> The people pushing the need to fork would bombard the Reddit forum for many
> months, very likely with sockpuppets.

Or, maybe, a lot of people read the white paper, and took significant issue
with command-and-control style Bitcoin development.

Everything needed to understand the roots of the debate can be found here:
[https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)

> The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in
> majority decision making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-
> vote, it could be subverted by anyone able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-
> work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote. The majority decision is represented
> by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested
> in it.

~~~
maaku
> Or, maybe, a lot of people read the white paper, and took significant issue
> with command-and-control style Bitcoin development.

Bitcoin development is anything but command and control. Please stop repeating
nonsense.

~~~
riprowan
Nonsense?

If development isn't already centralized, then by definition, it cannot be
"taken over" by anyone.

------
jcoffland
Opinion is moving against the Core devs who currently control the code that
nearly everyone is using to run the Bitcoin system. What the Bitcoin community
is learning is that you cannot have a decentralized monetary system controlled
by a centralized group of programmers with out running in to conflicts of
interest. Decisions about the direction of Bitcoin's future should not be made
by a few coders, and the people pulling their strings, behind closed doors.
Bitcoin needs competing teams of developers. Miners and node operators need to
use a variety of softwares in order to support an ecosystem of dev teams.
These softwares must interoperate with one another but do not have to operate
in exactly the same way. Consensus will come about when a sufficient number of
dev teams decide to implement a certain feature and miners chose to run their
code. The methods for voting for new features via the Bitvoin network are
already established. As new features are implemented they should be developed
by multiple teams in parallel so that there is less risk of catastrophic
failure due to everyone running the same software with the same set of bugs.
This concept runs contrary to how nearly every other software system we know
works. Thus the current growing pains.

Ultimately crypto-currency will win out in some form. But please don't invest
in it now. You'll only dilute the profits of those willing to take on early
stage risks.

------
BinaryIdiot
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-...](https://medium.com/@barmstrong/what-happened-at-
the-satoshi-roundtable-6c11a10d8cdf)).

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 facing bitcoin with little to no consensus about what's going to be
done to scale it just scares me away from touching it.

Maybe I'm just not understanding the issue in its entirety but many of the
opinions just keep talking about how uncooperative everyone is, how wrong or
right one group is versus another and no solutions are really being worked on
that expect to be accepted. Blockchain is cool tech but bitcoin itself seems
like a horribly immature place to ever put real money into.

~~~
rsi_oww
There is near complete consensus, see:

[https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-
con...](https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-
consensus-266d475a61ff)

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". It's simply not true.

They want to take over the bitcoin network with a fork, which will follow
different rules, called "Bitcoin Classic". This is their second attempt at a
takeover, the last was the failed "Bitcoin XT" fork. There is no sane reason
to fork the network short of trying to take control of the protocol.

Here is the roadmap that the main Bitcoin ("core") team has put together and
is working on:

[https://bitcoincore.org/en/2015/12/23/capacity-increases-
faq...](https://bitcoincore.org/en/2015/12/23/capacity-increases-faq/)

~~~
Vespasian
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 evaluating the potential
technical and political challenges.

Bitcoin (and similar crypto currencies) seem to be a huge risk at the moment:
Everything might collapse tomorrow (or not). The market could be split into
incompatible segments(or not). One entity could become strong enough to take
control of the network and enact unfavourable policies(or not).

Right now,I do not see why somenone would decide to start investing (time and
money) into bitcoin while there are generally accepted, scaled up and working
solutions for the underlying problem of getting money from A to B (Banks
Credit cards, etc). These work fine for most people/companies and their cost
and risks can be estimated fairly well in advance.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc)

~~~
rsi_oww
"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 seems happy too (the price has gone up +68% over the
last 6 months.)

But you absolutely should not take some random internet person's word for it.
You'll have to invest large amounts of time reading bitcointalk, reddit and
the like to make a sound decision. Luckily it's pretty fascinating reading. In
time when Bitcoin's future is clearer, it will either be worth much more, or
nearly nothing. But I think you can get great insight into where it is going
by following it closely today.

~~~
dwaltrip
Your 95% number is completely made up, and doesn't match what others are
seeing. There are many posts in r/bitcoin that are pro-large-blocks/anti-Core
with hundreds of upvotes.

------
aedron
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.

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

~~~
eterm
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.

------
optforfon
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 ongoing issues with Bitcoin

~~~
bhaak
The beauty in what Satoshi did was that he took several existing technologies
(p2p, hashcash, public key cryptography, etc.), combined them and added only a
slight twist (how the consenus is achieved).

In his white paper he only describes the twist, so you won't get a complete
overview on how bitcoin works (even if you know how the stuff he's building on
works).

This link has been posted to HN before and gives a pretty good overview on how
bitcoin works: [http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-
protocol-a...](http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-
actually-works/) So you won't get

------
andy_ppp
So far as I can tell as a complete outsider...

Bitcoin developers and the bitcoin community (i.e. people trying to make
bitcoin much larger) are not finding shared solutions for the future of the
network.

It's impossible to know (from the outside) who is right, but both sides are
very very sure that they are in the right!

Time to fork it and move on I think.

~~~
fosco
and have two things half as great?

No, similar to Abe lincoln bringing the entire union together splitting the
country into a 'north' and 'south' would have disabled the progress that was
made in the 100 years after.

trying to make everyone happy is not possible and in my opinion is one of the
first steps towards failure.

------
riprowan
A simple and clear understanding of which group is trying to distort Bitcoin
from its mission can be had by simply reading this informative white paper:

[https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)

I would encourage everyone following this discussion to start by reading the
foundation document, and then comparing the design and goals of the system
envisioned by its creators and adopted by early-adopters, with the vision
being propounded by "Bitcoin Core" versus its opposition teams.

I would furthermore ask everyone who has read the paper, to decide for
themselves what it means for Bitcoin that "consensus" can be "reached" by
putting all the key players in one room and signing a document.

------
zaphar

        95% miner voting is a problem for some miners, who don’t 
        want to have veto power over such an important change.
        The chances of extortion either against them (“vote the
        way I want or I will DDoS you off the Internet”) or by
        them (“If you want me to vote a certain way, pay up”)
        are just too great.
    

One of the interesting parts of Bitcoin is how it offloads, to a certain
extent, the consensus guarantees into the economic and political realm. The
flip side of this however is that it opens up the network to exactly these
sort of considerations to a greater extent than other distributed consensus
algorithms.

~~~
maaku
What? That is exactly what it does not do! Bitcoin takes the politics and
money out of consensus -- once you are running a full node you are validating
the rules and the ruleset is unchanging. Being above politics is entirely the
point.

~~~
bhaak
The ruleset is certainly not unchangeable.

If enough miners and full nodes install a different bitcoin implementation,
having combined more than 51% of the hash rate of the network, the ruleset of
the new majority is valid.

That's how bitcoin reaches consensus and that's how Classic would activate
(going for 75% and a grace period of a month, because otherwise you'd probably
get chaos and the possibility of 2 distinct bitcoin networks).

~~~
maaku
> If enough miners and full nodes install a different bitcoin implementation,
> having combined more than 51% of the hash rate of the network, the ruleset
> of the new majority is valid.

No, that is a misunderstanding of how bitcoin works. If the miners activate a
new ruleset, and if that change is not so very carefully constructed as to
make the old rules a special case of the new rules (a soft-fork), then those
miners fork themselves off the network no one automatically follows. The
amount of hashpower on the fork has zero relevance to the validity of the
blocks they are mining, from the perspective of an un-upgraded node.

~~~
bhaak
Bitcoin is simply decision making by CPU power. Quote Satoshi: "Proof-of-work
is essentially one-CPU-one-vote. The majority decision is represented by the
longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested in it."

I didn't say that everyone follows automatically if there's a hard fork. But
if there's a hard fork and an un-upgraded node finds itself on the losing side
of the fork, it is lost.

Whoever generates the longest chain that gets accepted by the majority of the
networks, wins.

~~~
nullc
Don't mistake the ten second elevator pitch description for an engineering
analysis.

No version of any Bitcoin node software previously released has worked how you
describe.

The consensus selection rule is more complex: It's the longest _valid_ chain
that nodes follow. Chains that violate the rules are ignored, and this is an
integral part of the set of incentives that make the system work.

~~~
zaphar
You are correct. However the rules are determined by what the majority of
miners say the rules are. If the miners decide to change those rules and they
have enough others who agree with them then they can do so. And the economic
incentive for everyone else is to agree with that or get left on a worthless
network or a greatly decreased in value network.

The economic incentive is that if you play nice with others and follow the
majority ruleset then the coin that you mine will be worth something.

~~~
maaku
> You are correct. However the rules are determined by what the majority of
> miners say the rules are.

This is simply factually wrong.

------
thrillgore
Who'd had thought your unregulated currency would eventually fail.

------
ianai
As someone who's studied economics at the grad level, bitcoin has never made
sense to me.

~~~
rsi_oww
I don't understand why people buy baseball cards, either. But if I could send
those baseball cards over the internet nearly as easily as an email, I could
see it becoming a small niche currency (small as in millions of people).

------
LAMike
The lack of product managers and an abundance of engineers is both the
weakness/strength of the protocol. They have maybe 12 months of runway before
everyone loses faith and sells, and by everyone, I mean me.

~~~
paavokoya
>They have maybe 12 months of runway before everyone loses faith and sells

Yeah, and I'm gonna stop using the internet because the http protocol isn't
exactly how I want it. Grow up.

~~~
arianvanp
Yes i did. And moved to HTTPS instead.

Not having fate our doubting the backing technology is a very legitimate
reason to move your money eslewhere

~~~
tokenizerrr
HTTPS is just HTTP over SSL. It's still the same protocol, just tunneled
through a transport security layer.

