Bitcoin Forum

Thanks to midnightmagic who directed me to this very helpful video about identifying and then dealing with "poisonous people" in open source software projects:
  http://youtu.be/ZSFDm3UYkeE

Advice on disinfecting:
  http://youtu.be/ZSFDm3UYkeE?t=34m22s

Watch the whole thing for examples of "poisonous person" behavior, like repeatedly flooding mailing lists/forums with their opinion or comments, not listening to the opinion of others, or making sweeping "the world will end if..." statements about the project.

I'll be blunt:  I think Luke Dashjr fits the definition of a poisonous person, and I think Bitcoin would be better without him. At the very least, we wouldn't be creating two BIPs for every technical issue, one for Luke and one for the rest of us (see BIP 16/17, and now we have BIP 20/21, too).

Maybe we should stop trying to implement BIPs until there is more agreement on them. It seems you did not find a major bug in your BIP until a couple of days ago and you also stated that Luke's was highly vulnerable to attack. Until you both can agree on something I think we should just leave it as it is.

One more point on this matter: You and Luke need to stop this public feuding as it is causing somewhat of a rift among the Bitcoin community. We need to get back to unity for the sake of the project. I don't know a whole lot on the matter other than that you two disagree and now it seems as if you are going for each other's throats (I understand the difference between BIP 16 and 17). It projects a negative image of the project to outsiders. Perhaps the only person that could resolve this issue is Satoshi but he has not been heard from in a long time so you two will have to work it out amongst yourselves.

Just my two bitcents.

bittenbob:

You replied 3 minutes after I posted.  You obviously didn't watch the video link I posted.

At that link, two experienced subversion (another successful open source project) developers talk about what to do if somebody in your open source community makes it impossible to have unity and agreement.

You say "we need to get back to unity" -- I agree.  That is why Luke must go.

You are right I didn't look at the video but I just wanted to comment on the matter as a whole. If Luke must go then there should be some consensus among the community and then he can be forced out.

Seems kind of important, could you please point to the actual discussion/description of this? I seem to be lost in all the late threads on these BIPs.

Statements like this are also poisonous.  Just saying.

I mean, I'm trying hard to be on your side here Gavin, but statements like that make me think twice about my stance.  Is attempting to excommunicate someone from an open-source rooted, decentralized community really the best way to reach consensus and move forward?

What about the recent bug caused by BIP 16?  What if there are other unintended consequences?  I really understand the need for better multisig support, but I really don't understand the rush.  Sure, it will help adoption, but we have plenty of time for that.  Patience.

Everybody watch the damn video and STFU until you have seen it all the way through.

I think that Luke has the mental skills and knowledges to give a great help to the Bitcoin project, but he has also the wrong attitude, and this ruins everything.
I hope that he will find a better way to give his precious help to the project.

From the other side, it seems that Gavin is taking it too personally ... so it will be easy that sometimes he doesn't think clean.
I also don't support this "rush" way to add a features that will change the future of this project without any options to come back.

"Maintain calm and stand your ground" I guess...

I guess we can write off a productive future with both of them developing, due to hostilities.

There's only one thing to do.

You (and the guy telling Gavin to debate Luke's ideas, not his person) have to keep in mind that Gavin is also a person. He's committed substantial amounts of his free time to this project and it must be immensely frustrating to feel like someone's intentionally wasting the little free time you have.

Of course, Luke has also committed lots of his free time to the project, so from his point of view Gavin (and many others?) might be doing the same thing.

In the longer run, I feel it might boil down to losing one of them (at least from the core team) over this disagreement. It's easy for us to ask them to sort it out peacefully, but sometimes different personality types just don't get along and shouldn't work together.

It's a good video…should be required viewing for anyone working on an open source project.  As for those that are advocating a position of not rushing things, I think the opportunity to move forward is now while it's on the forefront of a lot of people's minds.  If you delay or defer work on this, we'll just rehash all the same issues again in 3 months time and get nowhere.  I think it's time to move forward with the process as Gavin outlined it (it's not rushing anything).

My worst fear is Gavin would leave because Luke wouldn't. I can't imagine a worse thing happening to Bitcoin right now...
This is n-th call to action by Gavin on forums these days and I think we should listen.

What LukeDashJr did to coiledcoin, without his users consent, or permission, is proof positive of why he needs to be severed.

I've read many of the developer logs from Bitcoin and I must say I'm surprised this hasn't really come to a head earlier. If you read luke-jrs response to pretty much anything he disagrees with he does the "you do that and I'm not going to mine it" approach. "If you do that I'm going to fork the chain" . Basically turning every minor problem into a major one and using his pool as his body guard.

Does anyone actually think Luke-Jr is a positive presence? Attacking other currencies, filing false claims to hosts, inserting religious text into Bitcoin and finally holding Bitcoin development team to ransom to stall development? With that sort of positive presence I'm glad he's over here rather than focusing on SolidCoin. :P

how so? svn projects have a history that cannot be altered. there are many year old projects relying on svn! so, it's just like with the blockchain.
also, the amount of money behind the projects using svn is certainly far far higher and more important than bitcoin.

i fear the same and hope gavin is a strong enough BDFL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_Dictator_for_Life to resolve this problem. And yes, it's a major problem - and also it turned into a nightmare once this discussion leaked to the actual users who don't know anything about software development …

Whilst I do agree it would be best for everyone to just move forward with BIP 16 (since the wheels are already in motion). There is still no need to rush it, make the decision now, but the switch on date should still be at least a few months in the future (not a ~week as in the original proposal). Ideally there should at least one new client release before the change is switched on, giving both miners, users and merchants opportunity to upgrade.

Follow the example of Satashi. A change he made two years ago to the bitcoin client is only just being activated now http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2788/what-are-the-february-20-changes-to-the-bitcoin-protocol

Sure, let’s just wait with multisig until Bitcoin is deserted because normal people keep having their Bitcoins stolen by malware and therefore simply shouldn’t use Bitcoin, but rather stay with PayPal and online banking. ;D

Remember what happened in summer? Why do you think did people store their Bitcoins with MtGox or Mybitcoin.com? The ability to not have your money stolen is not important at all when it comes to a new, hardly accepted currency, really.

We have time. Let’s implement it in a few months.

i would vote to follow Gavin's lead.

I believe there is enough space for everybody's ideas in this community. That's why we have alt-chains.
If there is controversy over a particular issue, let's make sure that both ideas are implemented (in separate chains)
and then the time will tell who was right.

Bitcoin has been driven by Gavin fairly well so far, and I hope this will continue in the future.

+1000

I trust our benevolent dictator.

Split key is a step in the right direction, but it is not some magic solution that instantly solves all security problems. If a User has one half of their private keys on their phone what happens when they drop it in a river on a night out... If your trusting your split keys with a "wallet protection service" there is no way you can be sure they aren't colluding with other entity - or go rogue and hold you keys to ransom.

No single svn repository is at the heart of svn. The block chain is the heart and soul of Bitcoin. A corrupted repository can be resored from a backup and lost commits can be recommitted. Bad enough, but a corrupted block chain is much, much worse that that. Therefore extreme conservativism it the right approach to any change in the protocol. That mindset seems to be missing from a lot of people here.

RE: debating ideas rather than people:  I've tried very hard to do that.

I said last year when I reluctantly agreed to function as the lead core bitcoin developer that I have zero experience leading open source projects.  But I try to do my due-diligence and learn from the experience of other successful projects.

The "aha" moment for me yesterday is the point in the video that I linked to, where the advice is to evaluate whether or not somebody causing issues for a project (whether intentional or not) is a net positive or negative to the project, and if they're "more trouble than they're worth" get them out of the project.

This isn't about BIP 16 versus BIP 17, this is about one person draining the rest of the development team with nagging, idealogical rigidity, and holy wars against "impure" ideas.

I try very hard to consider that maybe I'm wrong, but I think the evidence is clear.

You might also argue that the subversion people take the wrong approach, in which case please send me a link to some other open source project that has dealt with the issue in a different/better way.

I thought carefully about where to start this, and decided I might as well start it in the most public bitcoin discussion forum, because I think if I started it anywhere else it would eventually just appear here as "There's a Secret Conspiracy Started By Gavin To Oust A Valued Developer!"

I really think the core dev team should decide how to go on (majority vote). It’s none of our business, we don’t code it and barely superficially understand it.

gavin, what they talk about in the video is one person derailing a whole project over extended periods of time. based only on information on this forum it seems to me that luke definitely had its part in not meeting a deadline that was already ambitious and even people agreeing with bip 16 didnt agree with the need to rush.
i also dont really get that part. either its really just a "different color of the bike shed"-problem. if its just a minor technical issue and doesnt matter much anyway then not just choose bip 17? on the other hand if its not so minor why rush it?

i understand why you are really pissed. but i think because of this you also overestimate the negative influence this whole affair has on the public. for me personally the bug in the encryption for example was way worse than this delay and public display of disagreement resulting in a litte bit of fud.
the fud btw would have been smaller if the other developers had voiced their opinion a little more loudly.

i also agree with the people that think a vote by the developers on the bips is a good solution. you may even vote on excluding luke from the development alltogether. but what you do is just incitement imho and therefore equally unproductive.

Gavin strongly has my support in this, for what it's worth.

I do not believe he is rushing things.  I agree with the sentiment that if we shelve it for three or six months, that no progress will be made on it, and we'll be back to square one with even more of a burden to get it going.

Probably off-topic but can't you use deterministic keys, or even a single key (easy to keep a copy) on the confirming device? Also, it should be standard for services to send users their keys via a printout by mail or an encrypted e-mail. I'd use a service which would send me a Jabber message to confirm my payments. Easy, convenient and foolproof. We need this as soon as possible (there is a bit of structure that needs to be built on this technology, which will also take months, and after they mature will it be only as convenient and foolproof as we hope).

subscribing... i'm not allowed to post anything else

Yes, exactly. At some point you have to say "enough is enough, I'm not going to let this person derail the project any more going forward."

I'm saying that point is right now; see the unproductive, one-sided argument about BIP 20 versus BIP 21 (http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=201201301344.08034.luke%40dashjr.org&forum_name=bitcoin-development) on the bitcoin-development mailing list that is re-hashing a wiki editing war that "the rest of us" just gave up on a year ago for the latest example.

Why do your posts keep disappearing?

Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible to debate Luke-jr himself, which is the problem.

I first became exposed to his debating style on bitcoin-otc.  As we know, OTC stands for Off-Topic Channel and I don't take discussions there too seriously.  But he'd get into debates with people, and respond to well thought out points with "No."  Or "You're wrong." Without providing any evidence, without saying he's already discussed that, etc.  Other responses proved equally obtuse.  How do you debate with someone who simply cuts you off with "No."?  With someone who refuses to take your opinions and even evidence into account?

At first I thought he was just trolling, since these weren't the most important conversations in the world.  But since then I've seen a pattern across the board, not just -otc, where he thinks in absolutist terms, and refuses to even consider other opinions or evidence once he's made his mind up.  You'll see the same thing in serious discussions about serious matters.

And it really is unfortunate.  Luke has obviously contributed a bunch of stuff to the bitcoin code itself and the community.  But I can see why Gavin thinks the problems outweigh the benefits, and why it's difficult to believe that Luke would 'reform' or moderate his behavior.

His memory is a PROM, not an EEPROM ;D Flash it once, set in stone.

Lol. Over The Counter is what it stands for, but I can see how it is definitely more of an Of Topic Channel by what actually goes on.

I don't speak for anyone but myself, but I am of the opinion that you are the legitimate lead developer for the current state of the standard bitcoin client.  Even the most openly sourced, and collectively developed, projects have their benevolent dictator.  The GNU/Linux kernel development over the past 17 years being the most prominant example.  If you are honestly certain that you are correct in your assessments, make your decision known and run with them; however, if you are not certain let that be known as well and let us has it out for ourselves.  If you force a code split, so be it.  We all know that it will work itself out eventually.  There has already been a number of splits among this community thus far, and such code splits don't necessarly spell the end of an open source project who's time has come.  This community is no longer small and weak enough to be destroyed by such a division.  I won't even promise that I will personally upgrade without my own due diligence, but the details that really matter will filter out over time.

Perhaps ironically, the entire reason I launched Coiledcoin in the first place was because I saw that P2SH was turning into a fiasco and didn't expect it to launch any time soon in any form - and it would probably have failed to do so even without Luke's meddling. Gavin was doing the equivalent of a hairpin turn in a supertanker and his code kept turning out to have bugs that would cost miners money, and none of the reasons for the last-minute change or the rushed schedule were terribly convincing.

It's actually gotten worse since then. gmaxwell keeps accusing anyone who dares to tell end-users about any of the technical details of spreading FUD by drawing the users' attention to something that's none of their business and is trying to shut them up, whilst spreading his own fricking FUD about Luke Jr's proposal (no it doesn't reverse the bugfix that evaluates scriptSig and scriptPubKey seperately rather than appending them, nor can it cause the kind of security vunerabilities that split protects against). Gavin claimed that Deepbit was somehow attacking Bitcoin by not immediately adopting his buggy code, despite the fact that hardly any of the other pools had either, in an attempt to force Deepbit to do so and use their hash power to force all the other pools to follow suit. And so on and so forth. Luke's actually been polite by comparison and frankly that's scary.

He's plotting something! Everyone go down to your tactical nuclear bunkers and wait out the storm!
/thread

+1 Gavin,

100% agree with your analysis on Luke-Jr.

I think to Luke-Jr, Bitcoin is merely a vehicle by which to deliver the tonal number system...

So let's say there was a consensus, either by the community as a whole or just the developers that he should no longer take part in development. How would that be enforced?

This isn't a competition. This is a volunteer project of some of the smartest SOBs on the planet. We use science and the scientific method to sort out problems. While I agree that there are toxic memes that influence people, hopefully the bitcoin community can move on and the folks that make mistakes can learn from them. It's called redemption.

Just make it happen already, sick of hearing about this shit..

Deepbit sucks..  nothing new..

Lukedashjr is a man-boy...   nothing new..

Gavin seems to be a very reasonable guy on paper and in person in videos.  Gavin is also very transparent.  Satoshi, himself, annointed Gavin to lead the bitcoin project.  Gavin's voice clearly deserves to be weighted more than others.  I believe in Gavin.

I'd like to see a video of Luke to see how really socially normal he is.  It is easy to hide behind a keyboard, write BIPs and code.  But to take responsibility and ownership of a project and to put your face and reputation on it is another story.

Everyone needs to read this again...

+1

Sorry, but you're twisting this to an extreme. I'm "poisonous" because I don't agree with you, and don't want to see a damaging change adopted? BIP 20/21 dispute was created by Matt, not me.

The P2SH dispute would end easily if you would accept BIP 17, just as easily as it would end if I accept BIP 16. You are the only developer dead-set against BIP 17, and for mere fear of the unknown, not real tangible things that people can solve (though I thank you for solving the sigop-counting issue that was once a tangible reason). It doesn't have to be BIP 17 that gets adopted; if someone has a better solution, that's fine by me. However, BIP 16 is not that: it changes more (and should be given more "fear of unknown" than BIP 17). Also, what a poisonous person would have done is simply argue against BIP 16, without providing any suggestions for improving it; I have gone to the work to provide a viable alternative - I have not only pointed out the problems, but also solved them.

FWIW, BIP 17 has actually completed more of the QA tests (chosen by Gavin) than BIP 16 has (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0017_QA), and as it is a much simpler change, can easily be reviewed by anyone competent in C++ (patches (http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/bip17/)).

I've tried to sort it out peacefully, but it always seems to come down to Gavin not wanting to "waste" his time discussing it. At this point, since he has made it clear his concerns are over the unknown, there's probably not much I could do anyway, since the unknown is ... unknown. :/

I keep suggesting those of us in the Tampa area meet up sometime, but it hasn't quite happened yet. Does that count? :p

---

As far as Gavin goes... my position is:
I'm fine with Gavin keeping his leadership role. I don't think he should be turned into a dictator. I do thing spreading out his de facto authority is a good thing. I hope he doesn't leave the project over this. I don't think he's immune from biases. I don't think his decisions must be infallible. I respect his opinion as a competent developer.

Edit: To clarify, I'm not immune from biases, nor are my decisions infallible either. I am prepared to accept BIP 16's route should it get implemented (and have even prepared a step-forward should that happen), but that doesn't mean I want to give up on the better solution either.

Have Gavin and Luke-Jr considered having a meeting/telephone conversation or would that cause some sort of rift in the continuum? Without more agreement within the community, I favor: "Don't just do something, sit there!"

+1  this is exactly why i support Gavin.  he's been even open to talking to me on the telephone several times and has always been transparent and open.  i trust him.

how socially normal he is.... WTF is this... how sick one must be to say things like this...

Luke's behavior on this matter is simply impecable... I can not find any cavity in his position on this matter...

As much I want to break free from position we are stuck in, but I can't dismiss what this guy says...

All of you, developers, are great people... I hope we will go through these days with lot of experience and it will make us stronger as community.

no, it actually doesn't.  you should make a video concerning your arguments and let the community view it.

this is actually an important point.  Gavin is actually someone i'd let babysit my kid.

How are personal issues relevant to choosing the right technical solution again? Maybe we should invite your normal babysitter, what he/she has to say in this, if that is a relevant metric_  ;)

yeah, i know its sounds a bit over the top but this is an important issue.

i'm not sure you can disentangle the technical from the personal issues here despite what we'd like to think.  integrity does play a role.

Bring your baby sitter to choose BIP... your are so stupid.. sorry for offense..

Next time ask dick size of the developers... on camera... with ruler

Yes, there is some true to this, especially when it comes to extremes. But what can happen on the other hand is someone being excluded from the project because he didn't agree with the project leader on one issue, and the project leader happens to have more friends here on the forum than that person. That is not right either. This is not the "surviver" after all, where you must form alliences and win over friends to get somewhere, this is supposed to be won by the best solution, not the best person. Just sayin.

for me personally, Gavin was a huge reason i decided to support Bitcoin.  i graduated from a top notch graduate institution and as snooty as it might sound, he being a Princeton graduate does carry some credibility.  its a vetting process whether we like it or not.

there are many brilliant people here on the Forum.  Luke is obviously one of them.  but i would never put my support behind even THE most brilliant if i never met them and had a chance to evaluate their integrity.

brilliance can be used for subversion.

just sayin' as well.

Luke's technical solutions are generally based on some sort of pattern orthodoxy and completely disregard anything practical.

There is no dispute over whether BIP 16 and BIP 17 will accomplish the desired multisignature feature.  The difference between the two is in what kinds of problems we should anticipate going forward.  This is a practical problem, more so than a technical one.  I trust Gavin with the foresight on this far more than Luke.  Gavin will almost certainly be around to provide solid direction toward solving any problem that pops up.  Luke most certainly will not.

Luke is still stuck trying to get the world to count in base 16, oblivious to what kind of practical problems such a change would involve, and persists in doing it today.  Imagine the confusion and resource waste that already surrounds using US units and metric together, and square it.  Luke is definitely not the person whose vision I would trust.

Luke possesses a bunch of wonderful skills, but extremely poor judgment.  Luke's proposal would have to be breathtakingly better than the one Gavin supports for me to support him on it, and yet it is not.

WTF you are talking about? USA elections still far away...

you want to convince me that Gavin is a good father ( I saw his album ) and Luke was jerking when he was 18  and smoking weed every other day.. this is why BIP 16 is better???

You must put fat IMHO after your words..

You guys starting to behave like a bitches that decide which of the guys will spend more money on them....

I think we're now talking about who to throw off the Bitcoin development bus (and who to anoint as the supreme, ultimate, forever, etc. etc. dictator of Bitcoin client development), as if we have a say or are involved with Bitcoin's development on that level. I would still prefer to see a fist-fight to the death.

For what it's worth, Gavin, you have my full support on this (not implying I'm anyone important in the project, just voicing an opinion).  Luke, you need to step back, take a breather.  As Mike said, you have lots of talent, but you need to work on your judgement.

Wow.....
People really need to watch this video before they comment further to defend Luke-Jr.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSFDm3UYkeE

When you have money involved, trust is out of the question so we're left with politeness, respect and humility.

edit: very good points in that video http://youtu.be/ZSFDm3UYkeE?t=20m32s

It's not called to step back... it's called step forward... because our goal is more important than us.

The only thing I can "find on" Luke - other developers do not support his idea...

The concept of "team" is very important in all organizations and maybe even more so in open source projects.  Team interaction and communication is key.  If a person cannot communicate, lay down his ego, or continually brings up old issues then the whole team breaks down resulting in software paralysis.

Gavin, I think you should separate 2 issues. This is not about an Opensource Project called "Official Bitcoin Client". The client is not really important - it's a reference implementation, nothing more. This is really about the *standard* any client must implement.

The movie you linked to is only about how an Opensource Project should deal with, what they call, "poisonous" people. But this simply is not about code. Perfectionism can be an impediment when it comes to code, but when it comes to a standard, perfectionism is essential.

I can't judge the BIPs for their merit, but it seems to me that this new standard did not have sufficient time to mature yet. Maybe the current quarrel should be looked at as a constructive effort to enhance a standard that is, in my humble understanding, revolutionary. You must get it right the first time. Please take your time!

Amir Taaki's comment from a year ago was unimpressive to me.  Of course I do not know if that is the Intersango Amir Taaki or not.

Nope. Bitcoin is not a team. It is many teams in a community and part of a process. In project development, relationships aren't always and sometimes shouldn't be cordial.

For instance a regulator and the company they are overseeing, should not have a cordial relationship. Or upstream and downstream if they are functioning properly will have a contentious relationship; I've had some vicious past arguments with downstream before but we remained amicable and professional while disagreeing.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Staying_close_to_upstream_projects#Tips_On_Upstreaming_Patches

Many of the characterisations I see people making all the time comparing bitcoin to a business, a team or charity (to name a few) are unrealistically simple and naive.

I agree.   If one of them needs to go, there's no doubt in my mind that it should be Luke, absolutely.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that all the core devs agreed on BIP 16 initially, but Luke was away at the time.  Upon his return, he disagreed with 16 and all this crap happened as a result.   From my perspective, I don't understand how it was allowed to get this far if only one person from a team of devs disagreed with the proposal.   The majority was in favour of it, therefore it should have been accepted as far as I'm concerned.

My guess is that [Tycho] is ultimately the person with the most control over the final say, and he is choosing to not act at this point.  If he changes his mind, this will probably be a done deal.

testnet both and decide on which is better in 6-12month ?

We have proverb in x-USSR after WWII (doubt a lot of people follow it now) "We,Russians, don't abandon our people"

If Luke wants Bitcoin to succeed, if he is putting effort into it he is "our" guy... You can not simply "boot off" him from Bitcoin bus.

We have a SAME goal but different views on it... if we will boot off people like this - nobody will be there to reach it...

We must find a way how to solve this rumble, but don't say "he must step back"...

Fuck - let this Bitcoin to be what it is and write new, better Bitcoin, I don't know... This will be an achievement and not a life hack!

Somewhat true.  The developers can decide to make whatever changes that they want, but if the majority of the miners do not support the changes, then it doesn't matter much what the developers actually want.  So it really comes down to convincing enough pool owners and miners that the change is worthwhile.  However tech savvy the miners may be, they are not all developers themselves, and dissent among the development team seeds confusion among the miners.  Tycho's insistence for more time, in light of some dissent, is a wise man's opinion.  I, for one, don't know enough about programming to even know what I'm looking at, so I (personally) have to trust someone.  I favor Gavin because he was knighted by Satoshi long ago, for good or bad.  It's entirely possible that I'm in error doing so, but if this is really a near-term security issue, then something must change and Gavin is (IMHO) the commander of necessary changes.  Even if a near term bug fix isn't forthcoming, a checkpoint update every few days would be prudent.  Of course, that means that we would need someone qualified to actually monitor the blockchain with human eyes to make sure that there have been no attempts to capitalize on this bug before releasing the next checkpoint upgrade, but at least then it won't be required that everyone participate, since if there is an attack that screws up the blockchain, a valid copy of it will still exist somewhere on the network that will allow us to contain damage.

I though this was funny ironic anecdote, not proverb? We Russians abandoned a lot of people, and then just honored them as fallen heroes, because it is easier (or because we decided they were traitors).
As for Bitcoin, it is idea, not just a open source program. If Gavin quits, or whole development team disappears, someone else will step up. The only dispute is how quickly the team we do have can work, make new feature, and fix bug, if one member keeps bringing everyone else down.
TL;DR Luke does not seem to be a good comrade.

At first I thought Tycho was being stubborn or taking his fellow pool-operators side out of some kind of loyalty, but I now agree with him that we should give it more time.  Another month or two of testing to calm the FUD is more valuable then getting multisig functionality right now.

Luke is brash and seems a bit arrogant, but I think his heart is in the right place.  I don't think he needs to be excommunicated by any means, but it wouldn't hurt for him to cool down a bit.

Finally got time to actually watch the video, so here are my comments:

• There isn't any constant back-and-forth revision of BIP 17 going on. This was a one-time critical fix to replace a major proposed change with a minor one that does it better.
• I think a clear mission goal would help bitcoind/Bitcoin-Qt tremendously. But let's not get caught up in another debate over what that should be. I suggest Gavin make the first and final decision for bitcoind's goal, and Wladimir the same for Bitcoin-Qt.
• I think this constantly opening new threads for the same topic (I think we have like 10 on P2SH now?) is probably the same as the "filibustering" mentioned. Can we stop doing that? (I subscribe to one to stay up on the topic, and next thing I know there's a new 3-page thread going on about the same thing that I missed!)
• I commend Gavin, sipa, et al with seeking peer review of their own changes despite having direct push access so we don't need the git commit emails. I'm questioning whether this is really on-topic, but that's possibly a flaw of my own speaking ;)
• This whole P2SH thing has been stressing me out a bit, and this "bus factor" thing seems like a good idea. That is, after this is resolved, I intend to at least try to be "hit by a bus" and take a break for a while. (Note: I'll still be reachable if there are problems involving my code that need resolving - ie, I'm not expecting the other developers to deal with bugs I create, if it turns out there are some)
• It would be nice to switch to a more consensus-based approach for development.
• P2SH isn't "voting on everything"; this is the first thing we've had to have any kind of serious vote over.
• I did admittedly start off simply opposing BIP 16 and expecting that someone else would fix it. I noticed this, so I wrote, implemented, and tested BIP 17 to provide a solution (doing something).
• Anyone want to make a wiki page documenting past decisions? I've only been involved for a year, so I'm not sure I'm qualified.
• I think they make a good point about not making decisions on IRC. A common thing put forward for BIP 16 seems to be that it was discussed at the IRC meeting and proposed based on that. But according to these guys, that's when the "real" discussion begins, it shouldn't be treated as a final conclusion.

To conclude, I think this video has a lot of good advice; I don't appreciate Gavin trying to make the P2SH dispute personal and imply the disagreement makes me a problem - that part is a distraction and non-productive.

Not to mention the fact that Luke has tagged the header of EVERY piece of code he has ever laid his hands on, should be a STRONG indication that he is not in this to be a Team Player, but rather to gain as much Solo recognition as possible.

As I said previously, everyone who hasn't yet, really needs to watch the video in the OP, as you would swear that the commentary can be applied 100% to Luke-Jr without ever mentioning his name or the Bitcoin project.

All of the tell-tale signs are there.
- He is childish and throws tantrums (ie. Wiki edits).
- He uses his Pool as leverage against this and other communities.
- He is extremely argumentative.
- He is an attention whore (code tagging etc) and is NOT a team player.
....and the list goes on.

As was said previously, if one person NEEDED TO GO and it came down to Gavin or Luke, my vote would be to keep Gavin.
I to am afraid that Gavin would quit the project if faced with constant battles etc from Luke and others should be as well.

Would YOU trust Luke with the present as well as future of your Bitcoins ?

Should being a Developer and a Pool operator not be considered a conflict of interest, when using your pool to help FORCE things your way ?

Perhaps it's time to show his dedication to the community and retire from 1 of the 2 roles (Pool OP or Dev) ?

Just thought I should note that I am intentionally ignoring znort987, CoinHunter, and bitlane, who have demonstrated themselves to be scammers and trolls in the past. If anyone else thinks I need to respond to anything from them, please say so (do note that a good amount of it is outright lies/FUD).

I am trusting that Tycho will wait for us to all calm down, eventually review this thread, determine that the consensus is clearly with Gavin, and run with it.

Everything I have referred to has been proven BEYOND the shadow of a doubt, on multiple occasions, so do your best.

Also, had I actually been on your ignore list, how did you know that I was commenting about your actions in the first place ?

Several people in this thread seem to think the sole issue here is differing opinions on BIP 16 vs BIP 17.  The original post cites that as a single example, and not the entire motivation, behind Gavin deciding that Luke was poisonous.  Maybe Gavin was being disingenuous and it really is about this single issue.  If so, call him out on it.  But lets not turn this discussion into a rehash of BIP 16 vs BIP 17.  That's a different discussion.

That's the way ignores work.  You see a user has posted, but it says that the user has been ignored, so you can't see what they said.  So Luke's post makes sense.

Perhaps in open source development relationships aren't always cordial.  (That was why in the video Gavin posted the leads of Subversion were venting.)  I do know that most successful for-profit software development shops where one needs to be physically at work tends, for the most part, to be cordial in environment.  Most people don't want to go to work in a hostile environment and people who don't fit in will quit or get fired.

If I were lead I would want to produce an open source environment that is as cordial as possible, even though that may never happen.

Seriously, this post needs more love. As a bitcoin saver the way this protocol change has been tried to be rushed through is far more worrying than some potential technical bugs with the implementation. If this will become the precedent for how future protocol changes will be handled then I'm out of bitcoin. Satoshis way of a 2 year plan seem far more conservative and proper.

Regarding the time frame, it could be that there are already other things in the pipeline related to scalability of the blockchain that would need to be addressed in a timely manner and that depend on how multisig is implemented.

Imagine another bitcoin boom by this summer and the amount of transactions increases tenfold. You can't really wait another 2 years with this, maybe not even another 3 months. I think the next big thing to focus on is scalability and we need to have multisig settled down right about now.

"Imagine another bitcoin boom by this summer"
my wet dream

Its dangerous to let Luke-Jr have anything to do with code for bitcoin. His recent behaviour of sending a DMCA notice to an alt coin dev shows what he really believes. Which is sending men with guns to your house if you do something he doesnt like.

This sort of action makes it too risky to allow him access to insert code in bitcoin that will allow him to take it down or worse threaten companies. Using your mining pool to bully alt chain devs then if hat doesnt work using the gun in the room is enough to disqualify him imo.
'

Luke,

I have yet to see you address this issue Gavin has pointed out:



Gavin,

I see that you just found a bug in your code the other day and fixed it:


I am sure you are both great programmers but it is reasons like this why I think further testing is needed before we try to push this any further on the main block chain. It is for this reason I have chosen to move back to Deepbit for mining, since they want to delay any hasty implementation. Clearly no one has a consensus among the Bitcoin community as to which one (or neither) to use but I believe since Satoshi essentially anointed Gavin as the head developer I think he should have final say. I would hate to see him leave the project over this.

Is it possible for both of you to scrap your individual BIP's and work together on a single common one? This will take some concessions on both your parts but I think the end result would be a much better and more secure Bitcoin project.

Let me take the time to point out the root words of community. Common Unity = community. There has to be a civilized way to work this out.

Looks like I have to remind one of my points:

• I don't think that there is any chance of BIP17 winning because it's not supported by any major force besides Eligius (sorry, luke)

I like the fact that it doesn't uses magic cases and serialized form, but it may have drawbacks too. Also, I expect most people to be disappointed if I choose BIP17.
So I'll repeat: I don't think that there is any serious competition between BIP16 and BIP17. The only question is WHEN BIP16 will be adopted (if no other proposals appear soon).

I would immediately support any plain multisig scheme or sane long-address multisig TX proposal as possible first-stage on our way to P2SH to allow people play with it and get more time for preparing P2SH deployment.

The only reason he could steal the transactions was because the BIP was not active. If it was active, he could not have done it. After he did it, it was a simple matter of enabling the BIP to bypass it. I disagree that a BIP-16-stealing bot would be a lot harder: we already have a "hub mode" patch to connect to a lot of nodes, and all one needs to do is modify the output address for every transaction they relay. I could probably finish it in under 10 minutes, but honestly I have better things to do, and giving people trying to test BIP 16 a hard time isn't my idea of productive since (for both BIPs) it isn't a practical real-world attack.

As I've said before, while BIP 17 is the best solution right now, I have no objections to a similarly clean solution being used. I'm fine with spending more time to address any concerns with it, including a "remake" if that's wanted.


After giving this some thought, I believe I do owe Gavin a public apology for not spending more time proposing BIP 17 earlier, before he spent all that time on BIP 16.

I'd like to point out that as a benevolent dictator coordinating a project like cgminer, it is much easier for me to selectively take parts of Luke's code and selectively ignore things he tries to push that I disagree with. There is a lot of merit to the leader of a project having that kind of power. This is not a vote either way on this issue by the way. Nor am I suggesting that we should necessarily be giving that power to Gavin. However, it works for Linux Kernel with Linus at lead which is a much bigger project and complex codebase than bitcoin is, and it works for the various projects I work on which are much smaller.

+1.

I'd be much more in favor of using earlier multisig efforts to classify as IsStandard and creating OP_HASH multisig transactions: https://gist.github.com/39158239e36f6af69d6f (https://gist.github.com/39158239e36f6af69d6f) or https://gist.github.com/dba89537d352d591eb36 (https://gist.github.com/dba89537d352d591eb36)

Developing such a large change as P2SH should be reached by consensus after sufficient discussion. Many didn't even hear about P2SH proposals until very recently. Something like P2SH may eventually be necessary for large transactions, I do see a lot of potential value in it (and think the developers put in a lot of good work coding & testing, which is highly commendable), but it is an endeavor that must be developed with sufficient deliberation and consensus. In the meantime, we should begin accepting multisig transactions as soon as possible, with a minimum of code change/risk for miners and users until P2SH has been fully explored. I'd be much more comfortable if there were not been any bugs discovered in P2SH code in the past weeks (let alone months), unfortunately there have been substantial non-trivial bugs in the P2SH code that had to be fixed.

I've switched my hashing power to deepbit.

Well as a competitor to Bitcoin I would actually very much like Luke-JR to get more power within the leadership group or even just stick around doing what he does...... ;)

People think when it comes to software development and protocol improvement the best thing is this massive debate over every small change... I disagree. Bitcoin isn't really at the stage where it just needs a few minor tweaks here and there as it sails off to its magical 21 million coin sunset. If Microsoft had this same "development model" we'd be on Windows 3.11 instead of Windows 7 or 8.

We'll see with SolidCoin in the next month or so, a complete rewrite, thin clients the default transaction method for users and out of the box ease for developers to integrate with their sites. All because we agree on what needs to be done and work towards that goal. Few disputes and if they are people are reasonable and decide what's best for the project.

It really strikes me how much is all this about politics/ego and how little about technical decisions.

I'm quite busy lately and I'm not following the project enough to pass technical judgement. Didn't even register to the forum until recently, thinking I should really study a fair bit before finally doing so, as it's all available here.

This is the single most striking difference between what's advertised and the real bitcoin: it really depends on a few people VERY directly.

Some of the arguments here... seriously?!

I'd really appreciate if you guys left aside personality cults and moral judgement.

I have been following this façade the entire time; even-tho I am not a core developer; I think that I can come to some sort of opinion.

In my experience those who are so-called 'poisonous' critically 'complain about things, spread FUD, and DO NOT provide an viable alternative'

Now, in this case Luke has.

• Complained that BIP 16 is 'ugly' (it is, imho).  Saying that there should be a better solution.
• In the technical decisions there are a few cases of 'this will have more issues than this' but overall not really.
• Luke has provided a viable alternative providing solutions to the problems that he claimed BIP 16 has.  (and is creditably calming that he is willing to maintain that solution).

This represents only one part of the things that 'poisonous' people do.

If both implementations BIP 16 and 17 are implemented and of high quality; it is the technical merits that should shine through.  What Luke has done is provide a viable alternative to his preserved problem.  Nobody should complain about that; the community is free to reject his proposals just as they are free to reject Gavin's likewise.

The developer-summit where after a fixed amount of time the core developers (including Luke) vote on what direction they want to take Bitcoin sounds like the reasonable solution to me.  Just we have three options to vote for now:  None. BIP 16. or BIP 17.

Either way.  I think that we should all take a chill pill; keep the debates technical, not emotional, and grow very thick hides.

EDIT: Spelling

Two comments:

1. CoinHunter, the SolidCoin lead, has demonstrated his lack of gratitude and respect towards Bitcoin and developers  multiple times. Luke-Jr's DMCA was spot on. Anybody can fork Bitcoin, but they should abide by the terms of the license (which in this case simply meant including a text header).

2. Attacking alt chains isn't evil per say in my book. I support alt chains and think they're important, but likewise it's important that all chains, primary and alt, build up resistance against all kinds of attacks, be they bugs or 51% attacks (e.g. not enable merged mining so fast). Luke-Jr's attack, while not pretty, helped build this kind of immunity - the next alt-chain will learn from the mistakes of the one Luke attacked.

Regardless of these two positive comments about Luke, if I had to choose, I'd choose Gavin (sorry Luke, I haven't seen any direct evidence that "you're poisonous", but I trust Gavin and I assume he's referring to a lot of discussions that took place elsewhere ... I don't read all threads).

The BIPs have nothing to do with software. They are changes in the standard. Bitcoin, despite it's version number is now production software which can't be treated like an academic toy. TX scripts are cool and all but most of all the system must keep running.

You may have noticed that OS/2 was lightyears ahead of Windows 3.11, technically, and even Windows 95 was just Windows 3.12 in fact. But where is OS/2 today? The secret to the success of MS was not technical superiority, it was network effects. Most ppl did not care about preemtive multitasking. Most ppl don't care for scripted transactions. They want the simple things to work.

Most ppl don't know how to secure their wallets.
Most ppl want to be able to buy a little bit of BTC without installing a dedicated trojan-free linux machine to hold their coins.

This is what P2SH is about.

It seems there are numerous projects involving mobile phones, deterministic wallets, two step authentication and the like that this does not seem at all to me to be such an incredibly serious problem that needs to be solved in the protocol right now.

That being said of course I support progress that will improve Bitcoin - I just hope level heads will prevail.

One of the core Bitcoin values is "you don't need to trust an organization ... just trust the code (which is open for review)".

Doing this at a protocol level is the only way I'm aware of of achieving true security. Otherwise, by definition, there will always be one address that owns the bitcoins in question ... this address has to be stored in the RAM of some device, sometime, in order to be used ... and can then be stolen*

* One exception is perhaps offline transactions (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Offline_transactions) ... which is not great on the usability scale.

Hmm... I think most people would have more chance of being able to set up a secure Linux box than to read C++.

:)

I'm enjoying this video.  I still don't which BIP I like though :( That serialized script in the script for BIP 16 makes me sad.

Whoa! Folks, what is happening here?

I'm following the Bitcoin saga now for quite some time and with the personal wars that broke out recently it makes me sad to have wasted most of my limited spare-time seeing this ingenious idea going to fail due to common human nature.

Within only half a year there were enough occasions to get distracted from the Bitcoin movement (lost considerable stakes when BTC tanked from 25 to 1US$, seen allinvain loosing >0.5M US$, seen my credentials openly circulating after MtGox hack, followed mybitcoin, Bruce, and much more), but believing in the potential of Bitcoin to positively change the world with an immanent leverage more than Linux did, made me (and majority of us) keep hanging on.

Sadly, with what is currently going on hits the rock bottom. What some of you are committing here is a direct and aggressive form of public which-hunt against Luke-Jr. I don't know (and it does not matter) if Luke is some 'poisonous' guy or not, but all of us should keep at least some remaining portion of decency.

I am contributing to different open source projects, but so far I've never seen any community slashing down on active members like it is done here. Posting captures of presumably private IRC sessions? Mixing personal with professional issues? Posting private photos of members to ridicule them? Come on, that's not the representation Bitcoin deserves. How do you expect this exposed on the official forum will attract potentially new members?

I am not advocating for Luke in any manner, I just don't know him other that being a core developer. What I for sure know is that personal fight should be carried out personally.



2 cents from a nobody. I'm also 99%, btw.

This just somehow proves more that you are against him based on personal issues... While you may think this is ok, not everyone agrees with you.

Just looking at this very topic, people don't even seem to read Luke's replies, which don't look very disgracefull or arrogant, but that doesn't seem to matter anymore... A sad day for opensource community...

This is a great! An old fashion BLOOD BATH !!!

“If you didn’t run code written by assholes, your machine wouldn’t boot”
 - http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=196

I don't disagree with the above statement, but I want to offer an alternate explanation.

It is the project itself that is poisonous.

It wasn't cooked long enough before it was put in a can. While in the can the bacteria producing botulism toxin grew on it. Now whoever eats a bigger portion of it develops various symptoms of neurotoxicity. Luke-Jr is the first to show acute symptoms because he ate a helping large in relation to his body mass.

Next time please cook your food projects more thoroughly before canning.

Edit: This food in this can could still be saved, but it will require a gamma-radiation sterilization and one-more cooking before it is safe to eat.

In other words: refactor the code base before changing the protocol.

Bitcoin is money. Money corrupts.  :-X

Who is responsible for the QT frontend?

bitcoin has never crashed so many times as it is doing so now.

As another silent observer, I agree with everything you said. Gavin has my full support (however little weight that carries).

What happened to the old Luke-jr? I commend him for his new found level headedness and willing discourse which was shown a few pages back.
If that is the pattern for the future, so much the better. Hopefully its not just a little temporary ass-kissing to keep his head above water ;)

As another non-contributor, I've watched the forums here since the first slashdotting way, way, way back. Gavin's integrity, openness and the amount of effort he has poured into Bitcoin has been massive. Gavin's conduct has always been about seeing Bitcoin become more successful, and safer. I remember when encrypted wallets got rolled out, BIG end user change. It took forever and affected everyone, Gavin rolled out the change when he was satisfied it was safe. This is a man I can trust with my wallet, so I trust his judgment with changes to the Bitcoin protocol. I watched the video also. I support Gavin, for what it's worth.

GAVIN FTW!!!!!!!!!!

subscribe. not enough information to compute.

I second that!

Are you saying then that you've met Satoshi Nakamoto?

ROFL!!!!! This is what I read during my 2nd minute I woke up... You just made my day!

Nice video.

I had meetings that never ended in voting, ever. We stood up to 5-6 AM until a consensus was reached. Exhausting it was, so tempting to decide issues by votes. But we always stood still.

In Bitcoin, there's is a mix about discussion and vote. The changes are ultimately decided on vote, barely simple hash majority (with momentum), "always winners and losers", and that is by design.

The Bitcoin's solution against attackers or distrusted protocol changes, genjix's cathartic progress proposal, this video. Makes me remember this great history:

End of Cypherpunks -- A List Goes Down In Flames
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9702/msg00034.html

i'm behind Gavin 100% (I don't understand the bip16-17 thing but that's not the point), I would lose a lot of faith in the bitcoin project if Gavin were to not lead it. 
Luke-jr seems prepared to flare up minor disagreements to cause infighting with Gavin as the target to further whatever agenda it is he has, eventually he will succeed in his goal of ousting Gavin when bitcoin gets bigger and the parasites start probing for weakness.  We're going to have to deal with real divide and conquer attempts with bitcoins growth and luke-jr is the guy that will be prepared to shaft the community to further his own goals, even if he has to make a deal with the devil to do it.

I <3 Gavin, but that's an odd choice of example. The encryption procedure didn't actually remove the unencrypted private keys when it was first released.

edit: <3 is a heart right? It's not in my normal vocabulary.

Yeah, it's a heart.

Never said nothing else matters. If nothing else mattered, I wouldn't bet a dime on Bitcoin as its major asset right now is a non-technical one: traction/popularity.

There is a middle-ground between "right technical decisions are everything" vs "popularity contest/who would I rather let baby-sit my kids"

I don't see what's the reason not to discuss long and hard about fundamental changes in the protocol. This is not your average OS project were continuous development is necessary and features can be added and removed at will.

The whole fucking idea behind bitcoin is that the system itself doesn't need "special" people or institutions behind. This is obviously false at this point, but let's at least not exacerbate this problem. Excuse me if I don't give top priority about who's nicer and I'd rather look at the right technical decision.

I meant it in the sense that a mistake in implementation could have been costly, like literally. Huge amounts of Bitcoins could have been sucked away if things went pear-shaped. Users were hollering for this, but Gavin only released the change after a long cooling off period. My point is he's very careful, didn't bow to a quick fix, and acted in the best interest of the network.

I second this position.

I feel that keeping Gavin is worth more than keeping Luke.

I mean no offense to Luke, I don't know him as a person. But I feel more certain that Bitcoin is better off with Gavin, and without Luke, than the other way around.

I think it's unfortunate that it has to come to this, but in the end I think it's up to Gavin to decide. I support his decision.

You can keep hoping. Luke is a manipulative personality type who has very low communication skills and he has proven to be abusive of power and he also has strange personal goals regarding his entire involvement in Bitcoin. This manipulative behaviour is very clear if you've seen his behaviour in mediums other than this forum. He clearly sees this as a more "official" place and does his best to be as polite and level headed as possible. His posts here, especially in this thread, doesn't give you a complete picture.

My point of view to this situation comes from years of experience in an organization which is run 100% by voluntary work. It's an activist movement so it's not the same as open source development, but the conflicts that happen in open source development are exactly the same. It's a conflict of leadership and eventually one of two things happen, either the people involved in the conflict settle their issues and everything is "back to normal" or the situation heats up and then it can only be resolved by a split of some kind.

To me it looks very unlikely that Gavin and Luke are about to settle their issues anytime soon which means that option #2 is becoming more and more likely. Happily for all of us this is unlikely to cause a real split because Luke doesn't mean much to most of the community, while Gavin is highly valued. I agree that Luke is a great coder but project lead is project lead and that is and should continue to be Gavin. We are truly in a situation where the leadership role of Gavin needs to be made clear.

Luke needs to be stripped of all decision making roles, he is the kind of person who should stay in the background and contribute to the code if he wants to. Leadership should stay where it is, Gavin has done a great job with Bitcoin and there is no reason to believe that this time is any different. Don't get me wrong though, this doesn't mean that Gavin should be a dictator that decides everything regardless of what opinions other developers have. But the fact is that Luke has been, and still is, pretty much the only developer that is strongly against BIP16.

Bottom line is that the development of Bitcoin is a team effort. Gavin is a trusted team player, Luke is not. It's as simple as that. As far as the BIP's are concerned, I'm interested to see comments on BIP22 as well. But that is a separate issue, the main issue here and now is the future development of Bitcoin and we simply can't afford to have poisonous people in central developmental roles.

I think there is absolutely no reason to bring this disjunctive. No one has threatened to leave so why even suggesting it?

At worst, they would release competing, mutually aggressive algorithms and the popularity war would wage mining-power wise. That would be bad enough but the loser would just end up going along with the winner. I doubt anyone would leave the project as they have massive time and effort invested.

I moved Casascius' proposal ("BIP 22") to the Dev&Tech forum, I will respond there.

I don't think you have experience over these matters if you feel it's not necessary to talk about leaving. It certainly is. The moment the debates reached the stage that this thread was necessary, the situation went to the next level. To me it's not just about anyone leaving, it's about forcing someone out if he doesn't want to leave. Open source project or not, I certainly hope the other devs can force a dev out if it is deemed that he is doing more bad than good for the project. I believe that Luke might not stop interfering voluntarily.

I'm not happy that the situation reached this stage but talking about it like "everything is fine" is not the way to go. This needs to be resolved asap in a way that a similar situation is not possible in the future, at least not with the same individuals. And as far as Luke and his followers starting their own blockchain, I'm rolling on the floor laughing at that notion. Not only will Eligius be the only significant pool to join that attempt, Eligius will lose a significant amount of its hash power if Luke decides to go on a "war path" over this.

That would depend on how much better it would work. It only takes 3 pools to take over.

1+  this is exactly right.  miners like myself will leave Eligius in an instant otherwise they will lose their entire investment in Bitcoin.

That's your solution right there then.

Not quite correct.  The pools are comprised of voluntary membership, that can leave at any time.  If there is any kind of split, those pool operators cannot count upon maintaining their leveraged position longer than it takes for the news to spread across the community.  At most, a pool operator would have three days before the majority of his membership heard about the split, and then decided for themselves whether or not they agreed with their chosen pool's direction.  To be a pool operator is a position of temporary power.

3 days?  I think not.  The vast majority are not on these forums every day and don't have their ear to the ground.  Pools might lose a max of 20% of their hashing power by the end of 3 days.

I also bet a lot of miners are zombies on botnets, where changing the pool might be infeasible (e.g. hardcoded), inconvenient (requiring testing and deploying a new payload to work with a new pool), or risky for the botnet owner (in terms of being detected or losing control over his zombies).  To the extent this is true, this would slow it even more.

There is a reason Satoshi throws his weight behind Gavin, we might or might not know that reason.  I support Gavin.

Also, would be nice if we as a community can see how this plays out via webcam in a TV interview format.

Where is Bruce Wagner on this one?  This is great material for TV!

I agree. I don't know the merits of each BIP, but if I was to judge based on personality alone, then Luke would have to go.

On the other side, I wish you would take more time before implementing new features.

For what it's worth, when I sent Gavin that video to watch, I did not send it to him with Luke in mind.

It was more of an ironic self-deprecating statement because I'd assumed everyone had already seen it; and, having not actually contributed public code to bitcoind itself, was trying to convey that my objections to the adoption of either BIP16/17 weren't worth more than that of just a solo-miner (who can code) in terms of actual progress on the project.

The short timelines involved are just very uncomfortable for me given the "millions" of dollars of assets at stake here.

Bitcoin is no longer an experiment.

+1

Bruce was convicted of fraud, he likes prostitutes, and his show is painfully slow.  Let's leave him out of this. 

Thank you for that extremely relevant bit of information. That certainly disqualifies him from technical / project management discussion.

Wow, some fresh air is welcome, wise words reeses

I'm not sure I agree that these discuss cryptography.  They use cryptography indirectly, but so does my bank (on their website, SSL) when they introduce a new debit card or rewards program, which don't require reference to Mallory or Eve either (unless they are the models showing the vacations you can redeem the points for).  BIP 16 and 17 aren't proposed cryptographic changes and don't discuss mathematical problems, so expectation of a mathematical proof doesn't make any sense.

No one is more qualified as a peer than the developers and users of Bitcoin, any more than we should expect a mechanical engineer with a PhD and expertise building bridges should know more about fixing Acuras than the guy with a community college associates and 10 years experience at the Acura dealership.

Can't we hire respectable white hats to do a professional audit (with pledges)?

I would help fund this. 

Good idea. Who wants to volunteer to do the fundraising and organize this, and let me know how I can help?

You guys don't think Gavin is sufficiently qualified? Interesting. I would say you were incorrect, but sure more eyes can't hurt.

I am so bad at detecting sarcasm on these boards.

You do know there is no such thing as a respectable white hat?

Don't take my word for it, a good reference can be found if you google the whiteh8 teachings of PHC and the chronicles of el8.

Cause ain't no such things as half-way crooks.

It's not a matter of qualification. It's a complex, novel project with extreme needs in terms of security. It needs to go through the scrutiny of many experts for a long time.

Zero sarcasm on my side. There are "good hackers" aka white hats.
I don't know whether "Gavin is sufficiently qualified", or if there is such a thing. An extra eye is always good.

In any case, I'm sorry but I don't have time to organize this myself - this was just a suggestion.

The real reason is that they might be approaching stage 4 in their conflict (http://www.mediate.com/articles/jordan.cfm - german Wikipedia is better, but the english one has no article (yet))

I'd love to have a freeze of features for the bitcoin standard (not the bitcoin client!) until there are at least 2-3 other well developed implementations.

Just take a look at miners: First there were just few CPU mining programs, then GPU miners emerged, and current mining programs automatically even adjust fanspeed(!) to keep your card at a steady temperature. Similar with pool software: after some months with horribly inefficient php software, on one end bitcoind was patched to crank out more getworks, but on the other end also new pool software was developed that could talk to multiple bitcoinds, cache getworks, work more reliably with the long polling issue and so on - current pools are running on hardware that would have died with 1/10th the miners before.

Bitcoind itself however seems to be just one single software with no real competitors (yes, I know about bitcoinj) where many people complain a bit about this or that but noone dares/wants to implement their own version. Transactions are already now complex enough to implement, that it seems noone so far even dares to do another implementation.
I really don't want the current bitcoind to become the "Linux Kernel" that is so overly complex, that there's no freakin' way to implement it differently without designing something completely different.

What is really needed here, is some competition, so Gavin or other developers can discuss protocol changes with actually other developers who are on the same level, not having an issue of leadership in his own team. All that currently is happening makes it even harder for others to write their own client - already now you need quite a deep understanding of cryptography to even understand adresses etc., and transactions already now are a quite different beast.

TL,DR:
Before making the "Satoshi" bitcoind more complex or adding to the standard, create/foster alternative clients and some healthy competition in the "bitcoind" market!

2nd

I disagree. After p2sh gets implemented, I think there are no big changes on the horizon. And I doubt these protocol changes (how many did we have last year?) would seriously delay other implementations.
We have to make as much of our time as possible, now that the hype has settled for a while. Stalling development (protocol) would do no good.

To me P2SH still sounds like a very specific extension targeted at only one client implementation. There are other ways how more secure wallets could be done, that wouldn't require any change of protocol (creating importable transactions offline for example - import the transaction at a connected node and it gets executed).

I'd rather have 6 months with "nonstandard" transactions in the blockchain and see some feature complete clients implementing these, than standardizing them first in a specific way with (seemingly) only one implementation in mind. As far as I understood, both BIP 16 and 17 would already be available today as nonstandard transaction. I'd rather keep it that way and focus on having completely new written bitcoinds than fighting over what gets implemented in the reference implementation, which means it also becomes the standard as noone can challenge this currently.

The web required 10 years to become adopted. I think this gives a good idea how long it'll take Bitcoin. There is plenty of time to get it right. If this stuff gets released this year or even next year, it is just fine.

Nice post.
Spring festavle makes me long behind.  :-[

Just thought I should note this post was written by Gavin himself...
If he doesn't consider himself to be qualified for the job, it's IMO quite silly to argue over it.

FWIW, I am also not qualified for this.

I don't think the analogy quite applies as is. First of all, compared to the Internet, Bitcoin is a sub-technology that is based on technologies, both software and hardware, that have required significant investments to reach the level of development and infrastructure where they're at today. Developing Bitcoin is cheaper because a lot of what Bitcoin does is built on top of existing infrastructure. This doesn't mean that it won't take a long time to develop Bitcoin, it sure does, but technologies such as Bitcoin could explode easier because there is less of an investment barrier involved.

Second of all, there is already competition to Bitcoin and we can expect this competition to radically increase in the next 24 months. The Internet didn't have this competition. Not only are we competing against other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is also competing against major payment providers that are working on mobile wallets and all kinds of stuff that makes payments fast and convenient. I believe those technologies and the currency itself would still be inferior to Bitcoin but from a marketing perspective that focuses on regular consumers Bitcoin does NOT have a decade to develop stuff, it's under tremendous competitive pressure from many directions.

I give Bitcoin 6 months, 12 months at most before we will see it suffer and decline from lack of development. This is if we let it stall, of course. It doesn't mean that we should be hasty with serious upgrades, but P2SH is not being hasty. It has been in development and discussion for many months and Gavin has got the best solution anyone has been able to come up with so far. Even I will be looking at Bitcoin's competitors with much more interest if enabling P2SH fails in March. I'm quite sure a lot of other people will do the same.

We are not living in the 90's anymore, development of a sub-technology such as Bitcoin must be faster than that of the entire Web. Otherwise our competitors will eat us alive.

First rule of volunteer projects.  If person A comes up with idea X, then person A implements idea X.  Otherwise the project gets a lot of people with a lot of ideas and very little work done.

I was considering re-implementing parts of it, re-using some code from the original client, but there's some scarily nasty quirks Bitcoin has involving duplicate coinbase transactions that make that a frankly terrifying idea right now.

I was comparing to the Web, not the Internet, for a reason. There was plenty of competition for both. Compuserve and AOL to name just 2. The Web killed them both. Not because it was technically superior. Because it enabled business in ways proprietary systems can't.

The proposals enable business, that's why they are important. But it shouldn't be rushed.


I am not suggesting to halt development. There is plenty to do. The GUI could still use a lot of improvement, for instance. The command line is still essential for making a backup of a running system, for instance. Blockchain pruning may be another issue - most stuff in the blockchain is garbage.

But this is about a standard and if we have a broken standard, then the competitors will eat us alive. With Chardonay!



Your wallet does not need to be on-line. Create wallets and a lot of accounts on an off-line computer and put the wallet (the private key, actually) into a safe. That should solve your problem

Multiple computers don't help. When the intruder has one, she can wireshark into the rest.

[EDIT]: There is no reason to believe that any other electronic payment would be safer if your computer has a rootkit. Only cash and Bitcoin can help there.

No, but VNC, NetBios, under some circumstances even SSH can. Or whatever else you use to communicate commands. Or simple screen or keyboard capture.

I did not understand the BIPs as security feature. I think the first thing in mind is some kind of escrow by the Bitcoin Net and by extension, some sort of scriptable contract. Safeguarding against a partly compromised network does not seem effective to me. And I don't think Gavin or Luke had that in mind. But maybe they can clear that.

I reject this rule. A corollary from your rule is "If person A doesn't have time to implement idea X, person A should shut up and not talk about idea X".

See the How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People video at 32:00.  "Put up or shut up."  I was taught this rule creating stages at a community theater.  I had what I thought was a great idea.  I brought up this great idea but I had no interest in actually working on it because it is a big project.  It is disrespectful to other people's time.

So a good rule is:

If person A comes up with idea X, then person A should try to implements idea X.  If person A doesn't have time to implement idea X, person A should shut up and not talk about idea X.

I see a lot of this on this forum.


OK go do it.

I only know LukeDashJR from his incessant mel gibson-esque radical religious trolling on IRC and btc-e, and semi hilarious DMCA of ScamCoin.

Gavin I only know from well thought out posts and transparency in Bitcoin's development. I could care less what they look like, both have easily available pics you can find in the interspheres. It is slightly disturbing Gavin doesn't have a neckbeard and is a dev but clearly he knows what he's doing so it's all good

Luvin' all of you and wishing for an amicable solution to all parties since both Luke and Gavin are definitely going to continue to be a part of this community due to their investment in time and resources, blood, sweat, tears...

Frankly, I don't think Bitcoin can spare ANY talent that is willing to put their fingers to work trying to make it better. Bitcoin definitely has competition and the statement which has stuck with me the most is "Bitcoin's greatest weakness is that it will become a forgotten project".

If Luke can continue to communicate in a manner as he has done in this thread, then I think he will show great promise as a developer-level Bitcoin contributor.


So glad to know you all.

-p

I don't think Luke-jr should be kicked out. But his actions & words definitely need to be exposed, so that people don't just blindly trust him and realize that he may not actually be working for our benefit.

Some problems I see with him:

- He filed a DMCA takedown notice on Solidcoin. While I never used Solidcoin and heard bad things about it, I think it's wrong. Bitcoin is strong because it minimally relies on government, and we shouldn't increase it's dependence on government.

- He attacked Coiled Coin (some sort of 51% attack). This shows he's not open to new ideas & competition in cryptocurrency that can help us achieve the goals we want to achieve with Bitcoin.

- He's not a freedom lover. He's pro government. He's hypocritical. He simply asserts he's right without explanation. Some examples:

(07:12:40 PM) luke-jr: this idiot is overlooking the fact that Bitcoin was designed with the "banking model" in the long run

(09:56:10 AM) onelineproof: just want to throw in that I also disagree with sending DMCA notices. We are the Bitcoin community. We must not be reliant on the government to solve our problems.
(09:57:50 AM) luke-jr: onelineproof: I am pro-government.
(09:58:26 AM) onelineproof: ok but we should be able to operate independently of government. Thats one of the main points of bitcoin.
(09:58:58 AM) luke-jr: onelineproof: SolidCoin is not Bitcoin

(03:59:22 PM) olp: bitcoin is beyond laws, we dont need laws to keep bitcoin working
(03:59:37 PM) luke-jr: olp: fail

(03:57:20 PM) bluefirecorp: If I performed a 51% attack on bitcoin, and totally crashed the econmy, I wouldn't owe anyone anything.
(03:57:29 PM) bluefirecorp: Everyone knows the risks of using bitcoins.
(03:57:53 PM) luke-jr: bluefirecorp: I beg to differ. if you actually did a 51% attack, you'd have committed fraud

From: http://luke.dashjr.org/ :
Some content on my personal web directory (this site) is for my personal use only, and may not be legally distributable to other parties. I actively try to keep these properly secured so others cannot download them, but it is possible this might not work for whatever reason. If you are able to download anything that I shouldn't be distributing, please contact me and I will gladly make sure access to it is restricted properly. By downloading anything from my personal web directory here, you assume responsibility for ensuring the copy is in compliance with the laws of your jurisdiction, my jurisdiction (Florida, USA), and my server's jurisdiction (Pennsylvania, USA). If you do not agree to these terms, you are not authorized to access this website. Accessing this website implies you have accepted this agreement as a binding contract.

From https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=57437.80 :
(Quote from: Luke-Jr on January 29, 2012, 07:34:39 PM)
No, Bitcoin is about a decentralized currency. Anything more is subjective. "Absolute freedom" is absolute evil. Bitcoin provides a useful monetary system for the Tonal number system, which is my primary reason for involvement.

- He's violent:

(09:04:50 PM) jjjrmy_: luke-jr: just leave your gun in the car
(09:04:58 PM) luke-jr: jjjrmy_: why?
(09:05:05 PM) jjjrmy_: luke-jr: there is no need to bring it into a bar!
(09:05:11 PM) luke-jr: jjjrmy_: there could be
(09:05:19 PM) jjjrmy_: luke-jr: such as?
(09:05:27 PM) luke-jr: jjjrmy_: such as if someone goes nuts and starts shooting
(09:05:42 PM) luke-jr: heck, a bar is one of the *last* places I'd want to be unarmed

Let me know if there's anything else I should add. I think transparency is key to Bitcoin's success.

UPDATES:

- He doesn't care about privacy

(~ Feb 17 2012)

(09:43:07 PM) echelon: ugh, why are all these sites that accept btc blocking tor!?
(09:43:20 PM) luke-jr: echelon: because you're not supposed to be anonymous
(09:44:04 PM) echelon: so what's the point of accepting bitcoins then?
(09:44:09 PM) echelon: it kind of defeats the purpose
(09:44:48 PM) luke-jr: echelon: the purpose is that it's inflationary and can't be reversed
(09:45:27 PM) echelon: i launder my bitcoin
(09:45:44 PM) luke-jr: echelon: laundry is illegal

This has absolutely nothing to do with BIP 16 vs BIP 17.

This is not transparency. This is a smear campaign.

You make several assumptions here:

- that one shouldn't use the laws in place just because one doesn't like them. I agree with Luke that copyright and copyleft should be enforced by law. He had his code unlawfully misappropriated. It's completely necessary for Open Source to have licences enforced. Ask Stallman.
- he thinks a 51% attack is fraud. This is somehow bad for you.  Well, it's an opinion. Has zero relevance to the project as we want to avoid this possibility anyway.
- that having a gun is violent and that it's somehow relevant to the project. He has a concealed gun and carries it. This is legal in several states.

1)
What is wrong in being "pro-government", whatever that means? We are a community and are free to think whatever we want.

Also, while we are on that subject, are you an anarchist? Do you really think that government has no function and a world would be a better place without goverments? Then I suggest you read up on some history like feudal ages or even earlier. If you would remove goverment, that shit would happen all over again.

Why do people think that bitcoin is supposed to replace governments????



2)

This is just silly. You seem to live in a wonderful world where everything people say in chats is 100 percent true, they are always dead-serious and things they way always portray their exact personalities.
</sarcasm>



About the DMCA note.
While you may or may not think it was "right" or "wrong", whatever that is, you seem to be thinking that he filed it because he didn't like solidcoin or because it was "a rival" to bitcoin. When in reality the note was about taking bitcoin's source code, which is governed by the MIT license, use it in an own project and violate that license. The DMCA note was fully legitimate.



This can't be said in a more right way. People that don't understand this are little girls riding on pink poneys in a magical world of total ignorance.

I suggest you read up on what anarchism means.

However, I agree that there is nothing there that tells me not to trust Luke, he looks pretty coherent.

I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting a government to exist. I do think there are some things that government should do. And I do think that both government and Bitcoin should exist in the same time & place. What I said is that (with all else equal) a Bitcoin system that can function independently of what government system we live in is better than a Bitcoin system that depends on specific government enforced laws to function. Isn't that obvious? For example: If Bitcoin depended on some specific copyright law to function effectively and in Somalia there is no such copyright law, then Bitcoin won't function so well in Somalia.


If you see the full conversation, you will see that it's more likely real (real locations and bar name mentioned). But ya, it's not 100% sure of course.


Let me give you an example to explain why I think it's important to post these kinds of things.

Suppose Luke-jr is working as an agent for the US government. His mission: Cause Bitcoin to be more effectively controlled by the government. He can accomplish this by becoming a top Bitcoin developer and gaining reputation and trust from the Bitcoin community. He can then use this trust to make subtle changes to the Bitcoin protocol that favour government control. He can also use this trust to make statements on the forums and IRC rooms that brainwash people into taking up pro US government stances.

I obviously don't have enough evidence for this, but I'm sure it's likely that there some government agents in the Bitcoin community. Also, Luke-jr can simply be a person with no government ties and still somehow leveraging his reputation as a top developer to steer the Bitcoin community in the wrong direction. Who knows? I'm just sharing with you (the Bitcoin community) what I believe are red flags that should trigger more caution when trusting Luke-jr.

And yes, this doesn't have much to do with BIP 16 vs BIP 17, but so what? If you look at Gavin's first post you should see that the topic is "poisonous people in open source projects & luke-jr as such a person".

This is exactly why we shouldn't look at popularity/reputation/trust within the community but look at the code and its merits. This is why I think popularity contests succeeding over merit put the whole system in question. Very especially when they are about changes in the blockchain.

Your stance is absolutely contradictory if you look at it this way. "Government agents" would be much smarter at "social engineering" than Luke who seems not to give a fuck about his "image" - much less so than Gavin for instance.

Any government "trojan horse" would do a much better job at not being vocal about the stances Luke's vocal about.

Unfortunately, it looks like BIP 16 is going to prevail simply because of personal nonsense. Gavin is the only developer who actually objects to BIP 17.

Gavin is the only developer who objects to BIP 17 while you are the only developer who objects to BIP 16. The situation was a stalemate and the truth is that Gavin's opinion weighs more because he is the lead developer and has been trusted by both Satoshi and the whole community for a long time.

I don't think the personal stuff directed at you specifically means that much to be honest, it could have been anyone else in your place and Gavin still wins. It's how it's supposed to be, projects need a project leader. When there is a stalemate, project leader casts the deciding vote.

Now I think the best plan is to make sure BIP 16 is implemented as smoothly as possible. We need more than 55% of the network to be totally safe, at 55% there is still too high of a risk that there could be issues. It's basically up to Tycho now, most other pools are supporting BIP 16 as of now and he will basically decide when we have a go for enabling it.

Someone should let him know that this:


is totally useless and has never stood up in court when challenged. I'm surprised people still even put that up.

+1

+1

I think at least you need to show that the visitor clicked on a checkbox to agree.

And they'd have to do that before being able to see any of your content?

Personal 'nonsense' is what makes and breaks great projects / companies. Communication is the variable that defines developer scalability. Without it, an idea simply becomes a team of one, and that does not scale. For the linux kernel, Linus has publicly selected code based on how much he can trust and rely on the developers who will be maintaining that code into the future. As well, accomplished managers at companies often times will fire one of their most talented developers if they have "lone coder" syndrome, and later look back to say it was an important move for their success. For developers trying to get an idea adopted, there is a recommended path: Get other people on board.

Quoting some random person from here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/pfwqq/iama_request_gavin_andresen_lead_developer_of_the/

Queus (asking Gavin Andresen):

If the future of bitcoin depends on "one leader" then it can hardly be any more centralised. I suggest not to move in this direction.

And sign their name. And even then it will likely fail, since anyone can sign your name.

Should Guido van Rossum call himself the lead developer of the Official Python language interpreter, and not the Python programming language? And Linus as well for the Official Mainline Linux Kernel instead of for the Linux Kernel? That seems very silly to me.

Guido Van Rossum is actually not the lead developer of the interpreter. It's been Barry Warsaw for a long time though IIRC it's lead by a group of people now. Guido INVENTED Python and pretty much leads its direction. He does very little actual development of any Python interpreter at the moment.

Linus developed the original Linux kernel and first "distro" and now he's lead maintainer of the Linux Kernel. He doesn't get to decide on the direction of Linux at this point. The community does. At this point, Ubuntu and Linux Mint have the most weight in directing Linux. Linus' decisions affect basically performance, security and compatibility. Debian, for instance, can run pretty much exactly the same on a BSD kernel, save for performance, security, compatibility and package support differences.

So no, I don't think your comparisons hold here.

Even if Gavin was Satoshi, it'd still be a completely different thing. We have bitcoind, bitcoin the official client, bitcoin the official blockchain and bitcoin the protocol. The latter two claim to have their main strength in not being centralised, according to the original paper. The last one is what really shapes "bitcoin the cryptocurrency."

Given the relationship between these elements, having a ruler of it all would equate it to Van Rossum getting to decide what can Python be used for or Linus deciding what can you install in your Linux machine. Invalid by definition.

I think this is an excellent idea.

What happened here? I got a notification but the post isn't there anymore.

Yeah, show me an anarchistical community that was stable enough to invent quantum mechancs or microprocessors or the internet...
I mean, you've got to love anarchy for advancing our society from tribal hunter-gatherer to the information age, right?
And history is written by the anarchist line running through the development of human society, right?

I don't know how to bring it to you but anarchy by itself cannot be sustained outside a well-rooted centralized system without breaking apart into pure violence. Anarchy, when push come to shove, means every man on his own.
I mean, all is rosy and peachy if the big rooted centralized system provides the anarchists with resources.
But what happens if you are hungry and noone wants to give you food and there is no government to force them to?
Well, as an anarchist you take the right in your own hands and take the damn food.
See the problem?

You clearly are not paranoia enough, so i fixed it for you..

Nevermind those anarchistic city-states of Greece that spawned much of western philosophy and even the beloved democracy.  Or anarchistic post 500 AD England that developed our modern civil court system.  Or post 900AD Iceland, with it's vastly more efficient private protection systems, and violence levels on the order of those in America today.

I suppose if you ignore all the cases where anarchy was actually tried, and seemed to function spectacularly, you could totally claim that anarchy never worked anywhere™.  Of course, the reality is anarchy spawned most of the societal norms adopted by even governments today.  Allowing a multitude of social institutions to compete and iteratively improve raised the bar on their level of service so much that any institutions that claimed power had to adopt most of their rules discovered and formalized in anarchistic civilizations.

good day sir please join our bitcoin cyberinfrastructure community for the arts and humanities...Ira

Greek city states didn't have governance on country scale, but they usually were centrally organized. Either ruled by a single person or by a small group of people.


Now, if you could provide some actual proof for these developments...
Most of the basis for our social norms were already written as history in the bible.
Even the egyptians had advanced social norms more than 5000 years ago.
So please tell us what social norms were invented by british anarchists in 500 AD that were unknown to other bigger previous civilizations.
It's not that i want to exclude anarchy, it just didn't play a very important role in creating these big societies that merged into the world market. There were no examples of large anarchies. If it is large it canot be purely an anarchy.
The whole point of getting centrally organized is to get past the limitations of anarchy.

Anarchy never managed to create a big stable complex society. All examples of anarchy deal with small numbers of people.
Governance emerges when such groups start to interact and fail to solve their conflicts.

So of course anarchy is the first and easiest way to organize yourself. But it has limits and does not scale.