
What Happened at the Satoshi Roundtable - pak
https://medium.com/@barmstrong/what-happened-at-the-satoshi-roundtable-6c11a10d8cdf
======
746F7475
Just by reading the top two points:

1\. Some of them show very poor communication skills or a lack of maturity —
this has hurt bitcoin’s ability to bring new protocol developers into the
space.

2\. They prefer ‘perfect’ solutions to ‘good enough’. And if no perfect
solution exists they seem ok with inaction, even if that puts bitcoin at risk.

I get this bad feeling that someone (author of the article) is planning a
takeover and for all the wrong reasons. I've seen this "yeah they are smart
guys, but they are introverts and our business needs to be extravert and agile
and adaptive and fast moving and all other buzz words", then you introduce
some of thous extrovert super agile people who just want to "bang out a
solution, since any change is better than no change". Next thing you notice is
that the old core team members are leaving after their protests about future
of the product fell on deaf ears and these new guys are just pushing their own
agenda/vision. Fast forward few years and just 1-2 or most likely none of the
original team members are there anymore and cracks start to appear and these
cracks are because the "better than nothing" solutions back in the day are
found after all flawed, but now you have a lot of work build on top of rotten
foundation and since your team now consists only of short sighted: "just fix
it" people they are going to try to fix the problem at the top instead of at
it's core "because we can't hold bringing in new features".

~~~
riffraff
I believe the author has been very careful in saying "if no perfect solution
exists they seem ok with inaction", highlighting a different problem from
"let's bang out code that sorta works and move on.

Also, poor communication skills and "immaturity" have also been a
"traditional" problems in FLOSS too. Being unwelcoming to new devs is
especially a big problem for a project that _is already_ losing the old
trusted devs.

~~~
kang
Unwelcoming to new devs is not true. Who wrote code & wasn't let in? Also, go
to the bitcoin irc and try asking technical questions and observe how everyone
is so willing to help new devs looking to get in.

~~~
riffraff
sorry if I was unclear but I am not backing the assertions, I am just saying
that the critique to what is written is invalid.

The comment I replied to does not challenge the assumptions, but the
conclusions. Whether the assumptions are true or not, I do not know.

------
Vozze
The problem Bitcoin is facing is not so much the technical question of what
blocksize would be best. It's a war about who is in the drivers seat. The
current developers of Core want to turn Bitcoin into what they call a
"settlement layer" and end its original function as a payment system. Then
they want to build new services on top of this "settlement layer". Most (all?)
of them are organized in a company called "Blockstream" that received $73
millions in funding to build these new layers. This turns away the original
crowd of hackers who liked Bitcoin in the early days. The hackers and users
want to keep the original vision of a "Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" as
outlined in the original Bitcoin Paper:

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

Also check the discussion about this on reddit:

[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/)

~~~
nadaviv
The Bitcoin development community acknowledges that bitcoin cannot get to
VISA-level scale using on-chain transactions, because that would destroy the
decentralized nature of the currency. It's not a matter of opinion, its a
matter of the technical limitations of the system as being understood by ~all
technical experts.

Building second-layer solutions such as LN is the only sensible way to grow
Bitcoin in the long-term. It'll allow tx capacity to grow by several orders of
magnitude with minimal load on the Bitcoin network.

> Most (all?) of them are organized in a company called "Blockstream"

That's simply not true. Out of tens of developers who contribute on an ongoing
basis and hundreds who contributed during the lifetime of the project, there
are about 6-7 developers associated with Blockstream. Out of the 6 maintainers
with commit access on GitHub, only a single developer is associated with
Blockstream.

It's also worth mentioning that Blockstream was founded by several prominent
Bitcoin developers that have been around for years and have a very strong
track record. It's not some company that popped out of nowhere and started
hiring Core devs. One of Blockstream's primary goals was to fund development
on low-level Bitcoin infrastructure code, which is blessed in my view.

Here's what one of their investors, Reid Hoffman (co-founder at LinkedIn), has
to say about that:

> And that’s why I’m participating in this first-round financing as an
> individual investor, and why Blockstream itself will function similarly to
> the Mozilla Corporation. Here, our first interest is maintaining and
> enhancing Bitcoin’s strong open ecosystem. And the structure we’ve chosen
> will give us the freedom and flexibility to prioritize public good over
> returns to investors.

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141117154558-1213-the-
futur...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141117154558-1213-the-future-of-
the-bitcoin-ecosystem-and-trustless-trust-why-i-invested-in-blockstream)

~~~
notlukejr
> Out of the 6 maintainers with commit access on GitHub, only a single
> developer is associated with Blockstream.

Please don't be so naive.

Greg Maxwell gave up his commit access for "optics" \- to make BlockStream
look better.

Meanwhile, Wladimir van der Laan, the project maintainer, says he won't accept
any code contributions which are "controversial". That is, he wants 100%
consensus for larger blocks. Yet he blindly accepts anything from Blockstream
employees such as RBF and segregated witness fee discounts which are
controversial.

Also, Blockstream burnt through $10m+ in 12 months, how much of that went into
paying consultants and "supporters" such as Peter Todd, Luke-Jr, and even Bram
Cohen who laughed at Bitcoin until suddenly in 2015 he loved everything
Blockstream was doing?

Finally, investors? Investors will say and do anything if it helps them make
money!

~~~
nullc
> Greg Maxwell gave up his commit access for "optics" \- to make BlockStream
> look better.

My reduction in involvement was not related to blockstream and wasn't
discussed in the company in advance. I can't personally take the toxic
environment created by people like you and it has been adversely impacting my
health.

Unfortunately, even when I have nothing at all to do with Bitcoin for long
spans of time people continued attacking and threatening me and my family.

> Blockstream burnt through $10m+ in 12 months

No we didn't. We have most of our seed money funds available after two years
of operation.

Blockstream has never paid Peter Todd or Bram Cohen (but sure, Luke-jr has
been a contractor, a publicly known fact all along).

Bram Cohen followed the same path as many other technical experts-- he
considered it implausible, and then after understanding it better considered
it implausible but super interesting. There is no sin in thinking that Bitcoin
is a long shot: it's a fantastic, exciting, potentially world changing long
shot.

> from Blockstream such as RBF

No one at Blockstream had anything to do with opt-in RBF.

But the functionality-- user selectable replacement for unconfirmed
transactions, something that the original releases of Bitcoin had until it was
disabled for DOS reasons-- was discussed for months without a _single_ person
speaking out in opposition while it was proposed. Only after it it was merged
and slated for release did a number of throw away accounts begin a
misinformation campaign about it (conveniently arguing that it was a reason to
switch to "Bitcoin Classic"). Subsequently, many others in the industry like
Stephen Pair at Bitpay have spoken up in support of it.

> segregated witness fee discounts which are controversial

I'm not aware of any controversy there. There appears to be universal
agreement in the technical community that UTXO bloat is one of the larger
problems the system has which would be exacerbated by bigger blocksizes. At
scaling Bitcoin Montreal there was widespread agreement that new costing
mechanisms were needed to make fees better reflect UTXO carrying costs. The
way segwitness costing works achieves that; by making removing UTXO entries
more equal in cost to creating them.

~~~
notlukejr
Your President, Adam Back, said on Reddit that half of the initial seed money
(which was $21m) had been spent, just after the announcement of your series A
($55m). Who to believe?

Or was he speaking as an "individual" rather than an employee of Blockstream?
Are we to believe that multiple employees of Blockstream fly to Hong Kong,
stay in hotels, but are there acting in an individual capacity?

[https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/46s54r/why_has_blockst...](https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/46s54r/why_has_blockstream_omitted_putting_their/)

~~~
petertodd
> Your President, Adam Back, said on Reddit that half of the initial seed
> money (which was $21m) had been spent, just after the announcement of your
> series A ($55m). Who to believe?

Source?

------
patio11
Miners make money principally through seignorage, but will eventually have to
replace it with transaction fees, as Bitcoin is designed to throttle
seigniorage down over time and does so in an abrupt, stairstep fashion (50% at
a go).

Core (a group of people who presently control the code of the only software
that matters on the Bitcoin network) has an argument for miners which goes
like this: "We believe the space on the blockchain should be scarce. If space
is scarce, people will a) conduct transactions offchain, which is conducive to
our interests and b) bid up the price of onchain transactions, which is
conducive to your interests. You'll shortly receive a counterproposal from
another development group which wants space on the blockchain to be abundant.
In this case, the price of transactions will go back to ~0 and, with it, your
revenue. Make the right choice."

The "economic majority" [+] of Bitcoin has an argument for miners which goes
like this: "You presently have been given, literally, a license to make money
-- substantial CapEx and OpEx, granted, but making money is what you do every
day. If you attempt to make the Bitcoin network unreliable to increase fees
generated by it, the tokens you are creating daily become not-money. You
should prefer your license to make money to the planned future license to make
not-money."

The economic majority is hoping that miners are long-term thinking
entrepreneurs and not, to pick an example totally randomly, slash-and-grab
operators taking advantage of a ponzi scheme.

[+] Jargon from the Bitcoin community. The Bitcoin "protocol" allows miners to
essentially vote with hashpower. The "economic majority" phrasing is an
attempt to recenter the notion of votes away from hashpower, by saying that
exchanges/retailers/customers/etc are substantial stakeholders in the network
even if they do not control a meaningful number of ASICs. In practice, the
economic majority is Coinbase, Bitpay, and "the loosely affiliated ecosystem
which turns cash to Bitcoins to drugs to Bitcoins to cash."

~~~
kang
> Core believes the space on the blockchain should be scarce

The demand for a free replicated database is virtually infinite. Space on
blockchain would not be abundant at any blocksize.

> Miners presently have been given, a license to make money

This is a license anyone took up on themselves & nobody is doing anyone any
favors; everyone(users as well as miners) is looking at their own advantages.
Rather this "economic majority" (debatable) desires something that is not-
money in future because in short-term greed of the insatiable desire for
golden egg that is the blockchain-space they will kill the bitcoin goose by
centralizing it even further.

~~~
sgt101
>The demand for a free replicated database is virtually infinite. Space on
blockchain would not be abundant at any blocksize.

but "blockchain" is not (only) bitcoin's blockchain, anyone can make one and
can validate and replicate it with any group of collaborators or adversaries.

I can't understand the second point, it would help me if you could explain
what you mean for a simple person like me :)

~~~
kang
Bitcoin has mining centralization problem due to following phenomena, bigger
blocks increase it further & will kill bitcoin in long-term:

1\. The median propagation time is comparable for various locations[0] &
mostly a factor of blocksize. Article[1]. Or you could watch the scaling
bitcoin conference videos on youtube.

2\. Mining variance[3]

[0][https://research.tradeblock.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/06/P...](https://research.tradeblock.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/06/Prop-Time-by-Geog.png)
[1][https://tradeblock.com/blog/bitcoin-network-capacity-
analysi...](https://tradeblock.com/blog/bitcoin-network-capacity-analysis-
part-6-data-propagation) [3][https://medium.com/@lmgoodman/why-mining-
variance-matters-80...](https://medium.com/@lmgoodman/why-mining-variance-
matters-80ef0ff4b183)

------
rsi_oww
For those not following the drama, there has been an organized attempt for the
last 6+ months to take over Bitcoin.

A fake "grass roots" campaign was started on Reddit, where numerous sock
puppet accounts were used to bombard the /r/bitcoin subreddit with calls to
change Bitcoin's "block size limit" to a much larger number.

This would allow more transactions per second, at the cost of hurting
Bitcoin's P2P decentralization (the main thing it is good at). These posters
claimed there was a dire, urgent need to do this immediately, and used spam
transaction attacks on the network to make it look necessary.

They also used downvoting/upvoting scripts to push their posts to the top, and
to censor the developer's responses (reddit hides posts with a -5 score; any
post by developers instantly would be downvoted to that level).

They harassed the developers with constant personal attacks, to the point that
it became impossible for them to engage the community. They also flooded the
development mailing list, and many developers unsubscribed.

As for the "block size increase", an absurd number was picked (20x increase),
and knowing that the developers would not go along with it, the "solution"
proposed was a fork of the both the software and the network itself called
"Bitcoin XT".

All but 2 of the 90+ Bitcoin developers thought this was a terrible idea,
especially since they have come up with much safer and better solutions to
achieve the same goal (scaling up the transactions per second).

Yet when this fork attempt failed to gain any support, a better funded, even
more aggressive second attempt (oddly named "Bitcoin Classic") started being
promoted.

It is being pushed by the CEO of Coinbase (the author of this blog post) and
backed by some of the other bitcoin exchange's CEOs.

I think the creator of bittorrent, Bram Cohen, sums up what developers and the
larger technical community are thinking about these takeover attempts-
[https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/697705876337995776](https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/697705876337995776)

~~~
gohrt
This story is a beautiful case study of how a pure libertarian democratic
community gets what it deserves, no better and no worse.

~~~
maaku
Bitcoin is not libertarian.

~~~
themgt
No _true_ Scotsman would do such a thing!

------
Malician
"Some of them show very poor communication skills or a lack of maturity — this
has hurt bitcoin’s ability to bring new protocol developers into the space."

"Being high IQ is not enough for a team to succeed. You need to make
reasonable trade offs, collaborate, be welcoming, communicate, and be easy to
work with."

The assumption slipped in here is that the writer is, in fact, reasonable with
good communication skills - and that those he is addressing are not. He evades
evenhandedly discussing their concerns with his proposal or their proposed
solution. That's a mark of trickery, not good, honest communication.

I don't know about the team in question, and I don't know who's right on this
issue, but I am considering leaving Coinbase after reading this article.

------
sbuttgereit
Reading these things I see two dangers in crypto-currencies. 1) it's difficult
to know all of the technical nuance that can have significant impact on value.
I bet many merchants and bitcoin holders had no idea of any of this was in the
offing. Even with research, non-technical people may not have been able to
appreciate the risks from specs and tech discussions. And 2) this really
doesn't feel decentralized. Sure there may be no formal organization, but with
apparently so few people being able to be closely involved, in almost may as
well be.

Of course, I'm a more casual observer on the sidelines, and maybe my take is
wrong as others with closer observations may tell me. But I never heard some
of these things being issues until just now... bitcoin is clearly not for
casual users.

~~~
austerity
Oh, come on, let's not pretend this is somehow different from the traditional
money. I am not particularly ignorant nor reluctant to learn as far as an
average person on the street goes and I have no friggin idea how the
mechanisms that govern it really work and cannot appreciate the risks. (Nor
really can the experts it seems.)

It's the basic reality of human existence that we have to get by without
having pretty much any control of the complex world around us. Bitcoin may
fail any time and as a casual user you cannot help it and cannot predict it.
But you can go buy some drugs with it right now without having to roam shady
streets and it's all that really matters.

~~~
sbuttgereit
Risk arising from technical implementation details are very different than
risks arising from aspects of human nature. One could look at the housing
market in 2006/2007 and know that something was very wrong without
understanding all of the underlying details: home appreciation, the kinds of
loans offered and who was getting them, etc. ... all without understanding
details of credit default swaps and the like. One can also have a sense,
without specialized knowledge, of how human nature may influence policies and
financial decisions. That doesn't mean everyone has access, but a reasonably
astute observer without specialized knowledge can at least see that "something
is wrong" even if they can't tell you why or how exactly. This is not true
with crypto-currencies. Why the transaction processing scaling problems? The
decisions are much more abstract and the impacts can be removed in time and
have to do with the way math works rather than a human decision.

------
apatters
It seems that these problems fundamentally boil down to there being a very
small number of people (the five Bitcoin Core developers) who control the
destiny of Bitcoin, and who don't represent users of the currency at large.

For a currency which purports to be open, transparent, and free from
institutional control, this seems like a huge deficiency. Consider that the
Federal Reserve's Board of Governors has seven members, all of whom possess
decades of experience in fiscal policy, are nominated by the President, and
are confirmed by the Senate. These are experts in the field who are selected
by a nominally democratic process.

And Bitcoin wants to replace this with five random devs that most of us have
never heard of?

I'm hardly a fan of the Federal Reserve or the US monetary system. But how
exactly is Bitcoin offering a more transparent, open, and democratic currency
when it can be hijacked by five people?

~~~
nadaviv
Bitcoin Core is really more of a process and a community than it is any
specific group of people. There's no set criteria for "being a Core dev" \- it
is simply the set of people who discuss on the mailing list, send patches to
GitHub and participate in the consensus-building process. In my experience,
the influence of community members grows organically based on technical
competency, domain expertise, track record and personal trust relations
between community members - not on some appeal to authority or an organized
hierarchical power structure.

The decision making process is based on an IETF-like[0] consensus-driven
approach, where a very high threshold of rough consensus within the technical
community is required for making changes to the protocol. This hardens the
protocol rules and helps protect the development process from hasty decisions,
political forces and tyranny of the majority situations - with the price of a
slower development process and reduced innovation. Overall, I personally think
that stability and resistant to change are good things, and prefer to be wrong
on the side of defaulting to no-op when there's no consensus, rather than be
wrong on the side of making harmful changes.

[0] "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and
running code" \-- David Clark, The Tao of IETF
[https://www.ietf.org/tao.html](https://www.ietf.org/tao.html)

~~~
mcguire
Based on several years (well, ok, decades; happy birthday, me) experience, I
no longer believe in rough consensus.

The people who have the power to merge patches have de-facto veto power over
any community.

~~~
nadaviv
If the people entrusted with gauging consensus among the technical community
and merging non-controversial patches only would show signs of bad faith or
try to undermine the open consensus-driven process, the ecosystem would
displace them with a new set of maintainers.

You have to remember that at the end of the day, Bitcoin Core is only able to
write code and propose it for adoption by the wider ecosystem. The only code
that matters in practice is the one being ran by network nodes. As we're
seeing with Classic/XT/Unlimited today, competing teams can indeed emerge and
try to build community support to alternative protocols.

------
witten
> It is difficult enough to get two people to agree. Three is harder, and four
> is even harder. Once a community gets to fifty or hundreds of people,
> getting everyone to agree is an irrational goal. But this is ok. Mechanisms
> exist to resolve disagreement amongst large groups of people (like voting).
> Waiting for everyone to agree is the same as saying that nothing will be
> done.

It's almost like we need some sort of mechanism or formal protocol for
reaching consensus among a group of geographically distributed people. A kind
of.. distributed consensus protocol.

~~~
kang
Bitcoin does not achieve distributed consensus based on choices but
distributed consensus based on randomness. Any miner can win a lottery & then
everyone agrees on that state. However, this lottery is not totally random
since probability of winning is not propotional to hashrate contributed by a
miner(mining invariance). That flaw is already a major concern that has led to
mining centralization.

Bitcoin is not a voting substitute. No such protocol exists yet because sybil
attack is unsolved yet without identity.

~~~
witten
Depends how you want to reach consensus. For instance, if you're going for
one-person-one-vote, then yeah, that's gonna be subject to Sybil attacks
without identity. But if instead you settle for plutocracy, then you can just
use something like proof of burn to tally votes.

~~~
TD-Linux
Someone actually created something like that using proof-of-stake (proof of
controlling Bitcoins): [http://bitcoinocracy.com/](http://bitcoinocracy.com/)

~~~
nullc
And the interesting thing about it is that it generally comes out
overwhelmingly opposed to these incompatible system rule changes:

[http://bitcoinocracy.com/arguments/if-non-core-hard-fork-
win...](http://bitcoinocracy.com/arguments/if-non-core-hard-fork-wins-major-
holders-will-sell-btc-driving-price-into-the-ground)

(the oppose side of that was up to about 4500 BTC at peak but the party
providing those coins has since moved them).

It's hard to say what it means; I know a lot of people around Bitcoin Core
whom won't use it because of the privacy problems with it-- in particular,
people on the Bitcoin XT subreddit were previously threatening to retaliate by
dishonoring the funds of people that didn't agree with them.

But I do think it's quite interesting that opinions seem to swing 179 degree
when you switch between very sockpuppetry vulnerable venues and ones which are
not.

------
fsiefken
Some other takes on Bitcoin Core:

* Double billing is not healthy competition [https://medium.com/@bramcohen/double-billing-is-not-healthy-...](https://medium.com/@bramcohen/double-billing-is-not-healthy-competition-b698c345b11e)

* Lesser known reasons to keep blocks small in the words of Bitcoin Core developers [https://medium.com/@elliotolds/lesser-known-reasons-to-keep-...](https://medium.com/@elliotolds/lesser-known-reasons-to-keep-blocks-small-in-the-words-of-bitcoin-core-developers-44861968185e)

* The state of the Bitcoin union is strong [https://medium.com/@muneeb/the-state-of-the-bitcoin-union-is...](https://medium.com/@muneeb/the-state-of-the-bitcoin-union-is-strong-3ca9a5f24a7)

~~~
maaku
Thanks, but seeing as I'm quoted in those articles I think I got it sorted out
:)

------
CydeWeys
Why should I trust what this guy is saying when he has such egregious
misunderstandings about Bitcoin? I expected better from the CEO of Coinbase.
The worst one was this:

> The next block reward halving is coming up in July. Let’s say that miners on
> average are able to mine a coin for $250 (I don’t know the exact number, so
> this is a guess). After the halving in July their cost to mine a coin will
> double to $500. If the bitcoin price stays around $425, it will be
> unprofitable for a number of miners to continue mining.

You can't just guess about these things! You have to do the math! There are
two components to mining costs: The sunk costs (the actual price of the mining
equipment), and the oncoming costs (electricity). Once you've already paid the
sunk costs, and the miners have, tautologically so, to get to the current
network hashrate, you won't turn your miners off unless their yield falls
below the cost of electricity.

I've done some calculations and, with the current most-efficient generation of
ASIC Bitcoin miners, you generate around $0.25 per kWh. So with the halvening,
you'll be generating around $0.12 per kWh. But guess what most miners are
currently paying for electricity? Around $0.02 per kWh (yes, they're locating
their mining operations like Google locates data centers). So while some
inefficient miners on the fringes may turn on, the halvening isn't going to
come close to causing the majority of miners to become unprofitable. So you're
unlikely to see a big drop in hashrate.

The most ridiculous part of the catastrophist argument is that we _already_
had a halvening from 50 BTC to 25 BTC, and nothing changed! The hashrate
didn't go down appreciably and block finding time didn't suddenly jump up.
There was nothing different about that time than now; both are governed by the
simple economics of mining profitability, which tends to stay at around the
same level above cost -- that is to say there are economic self-balancing
forces at work that cause miners to enter/leave the system to keep the
hashrate adjusted relative to the mining returns over the long term.

So anyone proposing a catastrophe over this halvening has an uphill battle to
climb of explaining why it's different than the last one when nothing
happened, and that hasn't been done so far.

~~~
ajross
Not being an expert and just trusting your numbers: you're saying that right
now the spread between power cost and the best-situated miners using the "most
efficient" hardware is a factor of 6. The halvening would make that 3.

That doesn't sound like much margin to me. What about all the people still
using GPUs or residential power? They certainly seem to be a decent chunk of
the mining community, but maybe that's wrong. What if we see another 50% crash
in BTC value? That too would take us right down to the edge of failure, right?

Like I said, I'm not a miner, own no coins, and am just watching this mess out
of macabre voyeurism really. But the concerns certainly _sound_ legitimate to
me, and what you posted honestly seems like apologism.

~~~
hitekker
As one observer to another, I have a strong feeling that the debacle between
raising the block-rate versus not raising the block-rate will end up similar
to Mt. Gox.

The true charlatans will be exposed and may make out like bandits, while the
fools who defended them so vigorously will suddenly become dead quiet.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

~~~
CydeWeys
Personally, I'm leaning slightly in favor of increasing the block rate to 2
MB, for what it's worth. But I wouldn't risk fracturing the ecosystem to do
so. I consider the opinions of the Coinbase CEO to be ill-considered and
foolhardy, and here is a good reason as to why:
[https://medium.com/@bramcohen/double-billing-is-not-
healthy-...](https://medium.com/@bramcohen/double-billing-is-not-healthy-
competition-b698c345b11e)

I also don't see many parallels to the MtGox implosion. There is no outright
fraud or staggering incompetency here, just differing visions of the future
that are being advocated for by different sides. If the weight of numbers
accumulates on the 2 MB side and that eventually ends up happening due to
sheer inertia, I don't see how that will expose the 1 MB faction as "true
charlatans". Merely losing a policy debate does not make you a charlatan.

In other words, you're over-dramatizing the situation.

~~~
hitekker
Actually, I didn't say who the charlatans were or who the fools were. You may
have filled in the blanks in your mind. I wonder what that means.

As for overdramatizing: the DDOS's, foundational people disavowing Bitcoin,
and general political intrigue prior to this post, make the stakes not
insignificant. It's a policy debate... at the core of Bitcoin. There's been
plenty of deceit, ill-will, stubbornness, and machinations to make up for the
lack of outright financial fraud as witnessed in Mt. Gox.

------
BoysenberryPi
As an outside perspective, the Bitcoin community is one of the most mysterious
clusterfucks I've ever seen. Every time I visit the Bitcoin subreddit or any
discussion here that has anything to do with Bitcoin it's all arguing over
Core vs the world or "we should be using this not that!" The thing that stops
me from getting into Bitcoin is the Bitcoin community itself.

~~~
kang
It is easy to game reddit & make it appear so by using sock-puppet accounts
which flood that forum these days. This is internet & sybil attack is
unsolved.

I don't know what you should do but reddit (or no other forum) represents the
bitcoin community fairly.

~~~
BoysenberryPi
Be it reddit, twitter, hacker news, or people I talk to offline. Everything in
the bitcoin community seems to be a dispute about something.

~~~
kang
Yes, what should be a conversation is now a dispute because of polarization
tactics deployed. A lot of money has been spent because a lot of money is at
stake. This often happens in a winner-takes-all scenario & that is the key
difference between bitcoin & other open-source projects.

~~~
BoysenberryPi
Is this article another "polarization tactic" because it definitely isn't a
sock-puppet account

~~~
kang
This is an article by a polarized person who was easy to polarize because
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11228638](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11228638)

------
KannO
The "Genesis" BTC blockchain seems to have its fate sealed.

Elements of a genius ponzi scheme mixed with psychology of the limited edition
beanie baby craze and enough allure of "technology is magic" created a
"valuable" cyber diamond to send hordes of processing power to "mine" and sell
off like hot potato stocks.

As we begin seeing more viable altcoin systems with practical improvements,
"investors" and processing power will jump ship to the improved cryptocoin
protocols. Bitcoin and the bandwaggon of investing in a BTC as a currency
which inherently encourages not spending that currency (deflation as a
fundamental design) is such a paradoxical mind fuck it's one of the most
brilliant pieces of art I could imagine.

Inflation is incredibly healthy for an economy because it creates an incentive
to invest money into new businesses and real goods and services instead of
being buried outside of the system where it does no good. The trick is to
prevent hyper inflation - and in BTC or other arbitrarily produced currency
systems, there should be mechanisms in place to avoid the abuse of the
fabrication of the money tokens.

~~~
derefr
I've never understood this argument. There's no person or market for which BTC
is their _only_ currency. It doesn't matter if BTC is inflationary or
deflationary, because there's never going to be a time when a nation (or
corporation, or really really rich person) is holding a non-negligible amount
of its wealth in BTC. Most of their money will be denominated in their local
currency, and through that, they will be affected by inflation, and driven to
invest.

The effect of people holding BTC on a given economy's inflationary tendency
would, I'd think, be about the same as the effect that people holding EFT
funds or gold or _permanent stamps_ has on inflationary tendency—which is to
say, negligible.

To rebut this, you _could_ measure the inflationary tendency of a made-up
virtual market like that of the "deep web"... but we measure inflation to know
about things like _affordability_ and _livability_ and nGDP—things that affect
the places people live in, and through those, affect people's lives. People
don't move their money into investments because Internet marijuanas are
inflating in price; they move money to investments because core CPI is going
up, and so it's costing more to buy bread and to pay their utility bills. And,
unless a nation adopts BTC _as_ its national currency, BTC's fixed monetary
policy will never correlate with any core CPI anywhere.

~~~
goldenkey
I suppose you think communism can happen in 1 step too, hmm maybe read some
Trotsky? The market cap and volume needs to be high for stability as a medium
of transfer of wealth. That gives bitcoin the largest use case. Internet
stamps is just a ridiculous analogy. Mail prices are artificially low due to
government subsidies.

~~~
derefr
I see what you mean, but it works both ways: if the world can evolve toward
using BTC as a universal currency, then BTC can, in parallel, evolve toward
being _usable_ as a universal currency. The two would meet in the middle.

You're imagining a gradual adoption of BTC for everything everywhere, while
BTC itself remains constant, which would never happen. Any nation that wanted
to adopt BTC for its sole currency would have enough force to change BTC to
make it no longer deflationary. Or, more simply, just create "BTC but not
deflationary" and start using it—it'd immediately become the primary
cryptocurrency from the sheer number of users it would gain in that country
(even if the country is tiny!) and then any other country that wanted to
participate would adopt that currency, not deflationary-BTC.

------
kisstheblade
Serious question; where does all the money come from to run these operations
(eg. the miners)?

I mean I haven't seen any legitimate use of bitcoin advertised for consumers.
So who is using bitcoins for transactions?

Is this like with torrenting where people keep telling "there are legitimate
uses for it like downloading linux iso:s" but in reality 99% of the traffic is
illegal.

I'm thinking that bitcoin is used mainly for money transfer for illegal stuff
(drugs etc.), because I haven't read or heard about any legitimate large scale
use of it (exept maybe speculation, so does the money for this come from
somekind of ponzi scheme then? Or maybe investors really believe that some day
this will be a large legal enterprise?)

~~~
yjgyhj
Someone who isn't me is using bitcoin when moving abroad - last few years he's
been living in different countries in Asia & Europe. His ATM is
localbitcoins.com. Has been nice to meet nerds from all over the world, and
way way cheaper than the crazy fees I pay for ATM withdrawals outside of his
banking country

------
MikeNomad
Interesting article. I am not a bitcoin user for a reason that the article
seemingly underscores: Bitcoin lacks stability. This makes me sad, because I
would very much like bitcoin to succeed.

The more I look into it (and I may not be looking at it clearly), the more
bitcoin seems like a digitized version of what we currently have in MeatSpace:
An unbacked inflationary currency.

I think worrying about scaling in mining activity is a problem in search of an
audience.

If miners hit the wall, and are not able to put more coins into circulation,
there is an opportunity to stabilize coin value by having demand tempered by
supply. Also, with bitcoin (or any other digital currency) there is the
capacity for psuedo-infinite fractionalization of coins.

------
tobltobs
> There are probably a couple dozen qualified computer scientists working on
> crypto currency research right now, but there are at least tens of thousands
> of qualified software engineers in the world who are capable of building
> bitcoin protocol software.

Maybe, but the problem is defining the protocol, not building the client.

------
omarforgotpwd
Wow, so Coinbase wants to throw out the Bitcoin core team. Mutiny!

------
kevingadd
The continued censorship on the main bitcoin subreddit and the main bitcoin
forum is ridiculous. It makes the whole bitcoin community and ecosystem look
like a joke, which isn't something anyone involved should want. If the
currency can't handle an open debate between adults, how do they expect to
weather attacks from serious bad actors (criminal, state, or otherwise)?

This article is pretty detailed and does a good job of depicting the events of
the roundtable - but as someone who didn't attend, I'd be curious to see how a
Bitcoin Core member would choose to describe things. I imagine their
perspective would be very different. On the other hand, the history of this
whole controversy seems to suggest that the Core crew are as bad at
communication as Mr. Armstrong suggests, so I doubt we'll ever see that
alternate perspective :(

The risk of miners dropping out en masse once the difficulty goes up isn't
something I've seen mentioned before, and it seems pretty scary. I would have
assumed that difficulty adjustment would happen more often, so if it continues
to have such a long interval, that seems like a threat to the long-term health
of the currency. I can imagine some other event knocking miners out of the
network, like a sudden spike in the cost of electricity for large mining
operations - so even if the immediate risk is addressed it seems like this is
still a threat going forward.

Ultimately, it's really sad that what seems to have happened with Bitcoin is
that Satoshi put together some really stellar technology and _completely_
overlooked the human component. Handing the project off to a random group of
contributors seems reckless under any circumstances, and then it turned out
that the random group of maintainers got along poorly. Now the de-facto
control of the currency is in the hands of a small group of people with an
obvious profit motive, because they have control over the central bitcoin
forum and central subreddit. Hindsight is powerful, but it feels like it
should have been obvious that the human risks needed to be addressed if
Satoshi was serious about constructing a new currency.

~~~
patio11
_completely overlooked the human component_

That's unfair: Satoshi got the incentives for Bitcoin brilliantly right, in
such a fashion such that "Satoshi scheme" should replace "ponzi scheme"
because it is better in every conceivable way.

Ponzi schemes rely on a central operator who has to do their marketing, and
who generally can't tell participants "Hey I'm running a Ponzi scheme so bring
all your friends because that's the only way you make money." Satoshi schemes
use the Internet to set up self-organizing distributed boiler rooms. (Also,
mediocre payment networks, but the payment network is not the interesting part
of Bitcoin.)

They can be totally upfront with participants on exactly what is happening --
early adopters (arbitrarily large number, arbitrarily geographically
distributed) get enriched by convincing later adopters that the things the
early adopters got for free are a) in fact actually money and b) going to be
worth even more in the future. And this empirically works on intelligent
people! Very well, in fact! You can even attach it to a memeplex which
suggests that you are doing the later adopters _a favor_ by creating a Satoshi
scheme!

~~~
kevingadd
Sorry, are you implying that Satoshi's intent all along was to set up a ponzi
scheme, so the current state of affairs is intended?

If so, okay. I mean, I don't find that especially implausible? But if so,
that's also really depressing.

~~~
patio11
Do I think Satoshi intended to set up a ponzi scheme? Punt on this question.
It requires me reading his mind and making judgments about sincerity of
purpose.

Do I think Satoshi knew what he was doing with regards to incentive
compatibility of making tokens widely distributed and essentially free early
with the implicit promise of them being highly valuable later if adoption
occurred? Yes, absolutely. He told people that that was the plan. He asked
them to avoid actions (such as GPU-compatible mining applications) which he
was worried would kill the goldrush phase before it had attracted sufficient
cryptocurrency evangelists to gain traction [+].

Should any evil person use a ponzi scheme when Satoshi schemes are now a
technology which exist? Surely not. Satoshi schemes strictly dominate ponzi
schemes.

[+]
[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=12.msg54#msg54](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=12.msg54#msg54)

------
simonebrunozzi
Posted 4 hours before this one, here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11227598](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11227598)

Wondering why one didn't pick any interest, and the other picked 160+
comments.

~~~
pak
Interesting. I had no idea you submitted that one. HN seems to be increasingly
stochastic these days. When this post fell off the new page last night, I
thought it was doomed. Then, it suddenly revived this morning.

I did trim the strange hash off of the medium.com URL, because I thought it
was a tracker from when I got referred. Perhaps that is why more people
eventually found this submission. The de-duping logic on HN is pretty bad.

------
api
If Bitcoin governance is miner voting, doesn't that mean the Chinese now
effectively control it? Or at least nearly so?

~~~
kevingadd
This has been strongly implied (if not explicitly stated) in some of the
previous articles on this subject. The Chinese have a huge amount of hash
power and once the difficulty goes up, I suspect they will have an even larger
percentage of it because they have access to extremely cheap electricity.
Miners in other countries will have a hard time competing.

At present, a big part of the resistance to the 2MB blocksize is that the Core
people have convinced Chinese miners that they will be unable to cope with the
increased bandwidth requirements, IIRC.

~~~
guelo
The people that built giant hashing factories using custom silicon and
dangerous amounts of electricity are not stupid. This idea that core
developers have somehow conned the Chinese is almost insulting.

~~~
kevingadd
I don't understand how you make the leap from "The Bitcoin Core people
convinced them that X is true" to "The Chinese are stupid and got conned".

This is a difference of opinion between the Core and Classic teams, and both
sides have money at stake. That doesn't have to mean that one side is lying
and cheating.

------
arm
Also, see this:

[https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-
bitcoin...](https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-
experiment-dabb30201f7)

------
cant_kant
Did Craig Wright come to the Satoshi Roundtable ?

------
aminorex
Massively bullish on XMR due to the short squeezing.

------
NelsonMinar
The author is the cofounder and CEO of Coinbase. It seems like an important
article.

~~~
kang
Coinbase centralizes bitcoin by removing it's intended purpose, peer-to-peer
cash, altogether.

Naive people who do not understand bitcoin, use services that take away
ownership of coins, like coinbase, circle, etc. because they achieve a few
advantages over traditional bank accounts - its fast, no downtime & without
limits. Banks are moving towards digitalization all over the world and these
advantages will no longer remain so in future if banks decide on getting their
game sorted. Then people who see value in using services like coinbase will go
away because banks can provide all advantages of coinbase even today if they
decide to, but much better.

However, what they can't provide is decentralization & privacy. But people who
use coinbase, by virtue of them using it, do not desire decentralization &
privacy. Thus, the bitcoin community should not pay attention to these
companies or their users (though they might be large in numbers & even be
current majority of users) unless decentralization & privacy is no longer
desirable in bitcoin.

~~~
guelo
Before Coinbase I remember spending days navigating dodgy sites trying to
exchange dollars for bitcoin and failing.

~~~
bcook
Localbitcoins has been around for years. Even in the early days, when I used
the less reputable sites, I always got the bitcoins I paid for.

------
tobltobs
Imagine the internet had been developed by guys like this one. Pushing a
agenda instead of looking for best possible solutions. The internet would like
teletext/BTX and cost at least an 1$ per hour.

