Bitcoin Forum

The Bug Could be found if testing was done by having both 0.7.0, and 0.8.0 tested together in the test environment under suitable conditions, and watching the outputs with various bug catches, eg BlockFill.percent()


There should be a standardized set of test tools that extract information about critical parameters.

It is unchallenged that not all people will upgrade uniformally so why the 0.8.0 is not being tested with prior versions is a false argument, doomed to throw a bug out, and this has now been proven QED

I am somewhat disappointed 0.7.0 was not the test environs ( I assumed you were doing that) and more disappointed that currently a good percentage of "talented people" are claiming that this bug could not have been detected

It seems dev is concentraing on single points like upgrade this upgrade that, but not viewing BTC as the full system as it is
(and I suggest the full system maybe Crypto/BTC is about re-aragning human activity/social fabric...and that why is that to be very distibuted....not on a few asic miners and not through an exchange that can calim 80% of all bitcoin, though the latter is not such a problem)

When I write a collision engine for example I ratchet up/down various parameters to the absurd to see what will happen, and I use various checks to test faults, eg use conservation of momentum forums versus velocity/position/mass / momentum eqns


similar weighted methods could be used in almost any test environment

What you are doing by not doing this is BTC will tend to be the best possible test bed for something like LTC or maybe TRC latter using a closer system to BTC than LTC, or other Coin, as LTC/TRC will now not make this mistake!!!, but BTC stress-tested everything for them.

LTC/TRC are going to at least arbitrage in from BTC the security they gain BTC mistakes and from not being first


TL:DR
BTC is turning into a possible test system for LTC/TRC etc

You of course tested both v0.7 and 0.8 on testnet found the flaw and reported it to the development team.  When they ignored you, you went viral sharing the incompatibility with everyone you knew.  Thanks goodness we had you ... er wait you didn't do any testing.  Most of the developers are unpaid volunteers.  Given your extensive testing experience why aren't YOU doing something?

This is not accurate.

There was, indeed, testing on the testnet with a full (1 MB) block. This was accepted by both the 0.7 and 0.8 versions. There is no concern here.

Slush's block should have produced the same valid block. However, the block was structured carefully as to expose a problem in 0.7 that was never discovered. Not only was this an extremely difficult problem to catch, but its finding would in fact not have been accelerated with a mixed testnet. The introduction of 0.8 into the equation would actually delay finding the bug, as it would mean less time spent testing edge cases on 0.7.

So the problem was a pathological block, not simply a large block.

I have done qa, and programed some time ago....but fair point to you.....

Aha, seems we have flushed out a nuance in the problem!!!

[1] I don't quite buy you could not dial up the test parameters/code substrate variants to find this with both operating

[2] If I am wrong about [1] and I accept I may well be, then BTC is functioning as a testbed for TRC/LTC/Other coin (esp SHA), and that amount of value will be arbitraged out of BTC to OtherCoin

Gavin is paid, I think this month his payment should be revoked for this bug getting thru.

Or not. 

Source?

also I am doing something by asking these questions I have just extracted a nuance/detail of the problem that may not have been previously expressed...with as much clarity....I am meta programing/debuging...the meat space wetware, to throw out greater detail on the nature of the bug

with
questionGetFrom.BrainOfDevTeam()


Sighhhhh

He why don't you go medieval and fetch the pitchforks instead. Removing bread from the mouth of a man (and his family if he has one to support) isn't fun enough, you should definitely eviscerate him...

Hmm....I think the idea of a distributed anything is that it garners enough people who through self interest (ie bieng invested in the crypto) stand the best possible chance of fixing it

having one person to blame....may demonstrate a weakness in a distributed system

Gavin's pay and terms are just part of a debugging routine instituted by the larger [free] market,

the blame if it is to be leveled is at us all to....

I posit that the allocation of blame to a individual, is myopic/archaic, but convenient idea to the lenses of our mind to focus on....broaden you mind-scape and appreciate the interwoven nature of systems and outcomes.

Eg  A Car is an expression of pheno type of the genome of human DNA, but to look at human DNA you would not see this readily.

At most 4 hours mining wasted by the second bug impacting the blockchain in 4+ years is a problem for you? I fear there isn't many places where you can earn your bread without such risks...

There wouldn't still be a Bitcoin but for the many months he put into it unpaid. Lighten up. If you can't take the hit, you shouldn't be in the game.

I can take the hit, it is when a bug that could have been easily found is making the entire network take a hit. Ok but now he is getting paid, so terms are different if he wasn't getting paid, I sit here and read the FUD at the beginning, but he is getting paid.

You're just speculating that it was an easy-to-find bug. Bugs happen. They've happened before and caused hard-forks. This is experimental software, and that has been reiterated by the developers over and over, especially lately now that the price has skyrocketed again.

If you don't like it, don't send money to the Bitcoin Foundation. Send it to your own 3rd party source auditing group that can find these "easily found" bugs. Otherwise, seriously, stop embarrassing yourself over something which will correct itself.

It's your fault you invested in experimental software and can't handle occasional issues.

No I didn't, but given that you just proved you couldn't read properly and that illiteracy was high in medieval times, I may be inclined to think so now.


You know what, think whatever you want. If you want to be a jerk, fine by me. I'll fetch the popcorn and see how it pans out for you.

I Also add you are not forced to use this protocol, you may go to others or start you own...

see my points supra on LTC/TRC Othercoin

The cryptocoin paradigm is here to stay...but which instantiation(s) [of it] will be successful for which time frame is up in the air.

Bitcoin - and coders' work behind it - did not lose you money. It made you money, and that's why you are still involved. Also, Bitcoin is a p2p, decentralized technology. Build it and test it yourself, or as a part of a team, or be a responsible man and choose whom to trust to do the job for you. Pay them, or don't.  Audit their work, or don't. It's all up to you, so quit whining.

Then quit looking for retribution.

Nothing is as valuable as a counter point, and the fact others may have resorted to calling you a troll take as mark that likely you have thrown up questions found hard to answer....and gone down the pyramid of reason a bit

in oppositional ideas we may find closest/best truth, one sided agreement covers faults

So I for one do appreciate your views, and that they are forcefully put.

And you contributed how much to his pay?  And that gives you how much decision-making power?  Don't be so black-and-white.

If you are dissatisfied with the performance of the one paid Bitcoin programmer, then you are entitled not to pay for more of his work in the future. You cannot change the fact that you have already paid him for past work.

I expect that the vast majority of those who do donate are satisfied with the work being done and keen to keep it going.

@dree12: Do you mean it was done on purpose? Source?

On an open source project. A p2p system. We blame one person?

I blame people for not upgrading. Especially mining pools.

From IRC, all said by gmaxwell:
Seems to indicate that smaller blocks could trigger it.

Testnet blocks were at max size, so that type of testing could not have caught the issue.

This seems to indicate that not even a large number of transactions specifically causes the issue, but rather a large number of txins.

This supports the idea that only specific blocks could cause this.


In conclusion, it seems that it was not in fact a "big block" that caused this. A small block could in theory cause it if the tx-ins or tx-outs were small, which is entirely possible thanks to compressed public keys.

I did not mean my statement "structured carefully" to mean that someone has intentionally done so, but rather that the block's structure was rare and unique.

Hey!  None of that "nuance" crap here, this is the Internet!

In other news, Gavin is compensated well enough to work on the code, but not nearly well enough to assume all risk of an extreme-edge-case bug happening to show itself at an inopportune time.  Hence the language about "no warranty, express or implied, yada yada".

Every time we find a bug lets not pay Gavin!!!

This is the stupidest thing ever, its amazing how many angry idiots are into Bitcoin and makes me feel uneasy. This community is so aggressive sometimes.

No, Gavin is working on Bitcoin and this gives Bitcoin value! All the money everyone makes from Bitcoin is because of the developers first and miners second. We need the client for the network and set out the rules for the system as a whole.

Satoshi and Gavin and all the other developers have given you Bitcoin and all the wealth that has brought you. Stop being so selfish. Gavin is being paid to work all the time on Bitcoin and thus work on making our investment in this network that more valuable.

The lynch mob around every corner is boring and childish. If you want to help then test and code and help out instead of being a armchair warrior.

/rant

Gweedo has been butt hurt for a long time that Gavin can collect a salary for his skills.  There aren't a lot of people which share his opinion.  Don't let one loud butt hurt troll make you think it is a representative sample of the community.

I mean it is just an asinine reaction.  All software projects have bugs.  Salaries are for work not perfection.  The idea that any entity anywhere would retroactively seize one's pay because of a bug is just ... well stupid.

So how many other rare a unique blocks can be constructed that can ____ the ____ out of the system?

Do you mind if I PM you my bosses phone number and you can tell him that for me? thx

WOW you need to go read about economics, cause I am pretty sure Gavin working on bitcoin isn't what gives it value. Otherwise when that bug hit we be at zero. Satoshi and Gavin didn't bring me wealth. Satoshi created software that I am using to my advantage and I created my own wealth. Also if it wasn't for people like me pushing it on to people, contacting companies everyday to spread the word, it be at zero, so people like me give it value cause I use it. Gavin is being paid cause whined enough to get paid. I am starting to think the only reason the foundation was created was so he can get paid. Also why should I do the work that someone gets paid to do? If you think it is childish then that is clearly your opinion, I think hobbyist don't have a say anymore.

In reading about economics many people contribute to a system of wealth, and Bitcoin is a system of wealth.

Without the code Bitcoin is zero, its just a paper with some diagrams and mathematics. Yes you have built your own wealth, but its on top of the code that enables that wealth.

You are mistaken. Everyone else probably includes me last time I checked the meaning of words. I don't think Gavin is a god among men. I don't even have an opinion on his qualities as a software architect/developer as I didn't go through his commits and comments on the code.

What I do think though (and I write it there for the record) is that you are an inept jerk.

Have a nice day/night.

also gweedo you seem to be a angry person. I have faith in the developers and maybe its misplaced and naive. But I haven't the skill to help, it sounds like you do have the skill to help with the satoshi client codebase, why don't you help out?

I work in software, but I'd never work at *that* place.

It wasn't done on purpose. The bad block was produced by the slush pool (mining.bitcoin.cz) after he upgraded to 0.8 and set his max block size to 1MB. The problem was that the BDB (Berkeley database) settings (max_locks) used in the pre-0.8 clients were not sufficient to handle a large and complex (many txins and txouts) block. berkeleydb was replaced with leveldb in 0.8.


#bitcoin-dev IRC channel (http://bitcoinstats.com/irc/bitcoin-dev/logs/2013/03/12)


bitcoin-development mailing list (http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=30587843)

Interesting, I wonder your reason for calling me stupid.

Sure without the internet there would be no Bitcoin. I'm not really sure what you mean by this. Without electricity we would have no internet. The value of your Bitcoin's comes from a client program that actually works. This is a very direct relationship, whereas the internet is already there and used for many different things. (standing on the shoulders of giants, yada yada...)

Bitcoins have value because people think this is next big thing and this is because of a working system. Sure you and me tell people and make Bitcoin spread to a larger amount of people, and they look at Bitcoin and see that it works and then the value goes up some more. But the code is central and integral to this value. From what I can tell Gavin's involvement in Bitcoin has most likely generated more value than your involvement and this is the crux of the issue.

Your a little angry man calling out the people that are doing the real work. And its your reasoning that is invalid.

(I want to call you stupid but I don't know you, all I can tell is that your a little man and an angry one at that!)

Capable software developers, or mentally equipped people in general, can't be tamed by monetary threats. They are motivated as they are merely because they decide to do it. I'm sure Gavin isn't coding any better now that he's getting paid either. It's just a good gesture to ease his mind and concentrate on the project for the far future.

What Bitcoin needs is more paid developers and testers, coming from diverse backgrounds and working in diverse environments.

If I were to suggest something, it would be creating a new fund for an independent testing team, or even several competing teams if possible. That would be a case where monetary motivation could work.

In fact you can call him/her stupid: publishing such a rant on a public forum isn't a smart move for a variety of reasons.

Usually I'm handsomely paid to evaluate engineers adequacy to technical positions. Consider my "inept jerk" comment as a free service to the community ;)

Well I don't know if he is stupid as I don't think you can determine stupidity from a few forum posts. :p

Indeed, that said gweedo had plenty of time to cool down and the number of his posts on the subject is still growing. There will be a point were nobody would be able to claim any doubt about his jerkiness or ineptitude ;)

On the contrary. Speak and write all you want.

Don't expect to be convincing though...

Good for you, you won't be disappointed that way.


Oh, your first post? Did no one take the time to explain to you that what you suggested is already the way they tested the 0.8 version. No? My mistake then.

But as you didn't bother to study the corner cases where the bug in 0.7 manifest itself like the devs did you couldn't imagine that, could you?


This whole thread is of no use for anyone as the subject is a joke. It's just pure trolling and you are at the center of it. Maybe it's time you realize that and cut your losses?

Yeah me either.  My first development job was a glorified code monkey and it still sounds lightyears better than that place.  Never even seen a professional salary contract which involves docking ones pay.  Screw up bad enough and you might get terminated but even then I have never seen "take backs" on salary.

Now I understand, thanks for taking the time to explain. So we actually hit some arbitrary limit that existed all along because of the used BDB libraries, so developers will need to emulate it in future software versions until all network upgrades, then we can be sure no hard forks happen for this reason. Quite interesting to study but rather painful to experience when using bitcoin on a daily basis.

I had a job dealing with securities transactions where I found a couple of $20mn mistakes, but before the cost was actually incurred.  No one was fired, nor did I get a bonus for finding the problems before they became real problems.  (That being said, if I hadn't taken it upon myself to rewrite that process from a unwieldy batch of copy/pasted SQL statements, into a Java process with a businessperson-readable XML-based decision tree configuration file, the checks would have gone out with that mistake in 'em.)

Under no circumstances would I allow that company (or any other) to somehow shift the risk of a mistake onto me, if I were working straight salary.  The business is insured for that risk, not me.  If my mistake makes it out of the dev process into production and actually costs the company money, that's the company's process failure, not specifically mine.  That being said, I'm very good at what I do, so that might give me more options as to what terms I must accept to take a job.

Does Bitcoin have enough process and QA to ensure there will never be any noticeable failure in the flagship Bitcoin software?  No.  And "diminishing returns on caution" means that if we required that, we'd still be waiting on the very first release of Bitcoin.

How much money have you personally contributed to ensuring the software you use is bug-free, or at least QA'ed to your exacting standards?  FYI: Your right to complain is limited to approximately that amount.  Well, the max of that amount, and the amount of Bitcoin you directly lost because of the brief split.

Writing distributed systems with many nodes, high concurrency, and paranoid-level encryption systems, is Hard.  And Monday morning quarterbacks don't really contribute anything.

The BDB limit is the default set_lk_max_locks (max locks) setting of 10000. It is easily fixed (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=152208.msg1615346) by including a DB_CONFIG file in the 0.7 bitcoin application directory with a higher max locks setting.

That DB_CONFIG file should allow 0.7 clients to accept blocks up to the 1MB hard/protocol limit without choking, as the developers were expecting when they released 0.8 and asked pools to raise their target block sizes to the 1MB limit.

But we won't ask anyone running 0.7 to do that for 2 years. Ask Lukey Jr

Sorry, I admit I didn't check the first post's author.

But if you think your first post asking for Gavin not being paid makes more sense, sorry I don't concur.

In fact on the very method this is stupid, you don't refuse to pay someone you hired: you fire him/her. Continuing to employ incompetent people is in itself a sign of incompetence and this is what you advocate. If a developer or architect doesn't perform up to your standards, you find another, you don't "punish" the existing one by refusing to pay him (which is probably illegal in most civilized countries, at least it is in mine).

Your attitude simply makes no sense.

"If."  Your experiences in software development and mine vary fundamentally, which forces me to ponder your credibility.
Nominate a successor, then.  You?
I made no speculation as to how much you may or may not have donated (though there was an unspoken implication that seems to have hit close to home.)  Who ever said there was no testing?  In addition to any automated unit tests, there are 250,000+ tests of blocks in all sorts of configurations run by anyone who's ever run a full Bitcoin client and synched the entire chain.  We ran into something on the very edge, and the configuration of the underlying database (not code Gavin wrote, but arguably code he selected) couldn't handle it without editing a value in a config file.  Incidentally, the latest version would have passed this test, because the problem was fixed (this fix, ironically, caused the chain split we're all talking about.)  Should we fire / shortpay anyone who didn't upgrade, as well?

And I still contest your "most software companies have harsh punishments" assertion.  I can't imagine any self-respecting programmer working in the conditions you previously described.
Ummm....  You're entitled to your opinion, but you paint this part of your world with an awfully large brush.

It depends ... if after the harshest punishment possible my salary is still better than the other safer code crunching job, I will ;)

To be honest I haven't heard too many companies dealing out harsh punishment for software bugs. Although I'd imagine for people out there working for large bonuses it could get impacted pretty badly.

To be sure.  But in the context of his original post (I'd felt like I had quoted quite enough already) he was saying that base pay is cut or altogether withheld (which is what he was suggesting should happen to Gavin.)  I've never heard of anything close to that draconian for a salaried developer, and I'm not new to the industry, so I'm strongly contesting the assertion that "most" companies would have this sort of policy.