Bitcoin Forum

I am sure this was discussed a lot but I still don't understand.

I know the code is open and anyone can read it etc.

But for instance let's say I have an improvement to the code. It will only be accepted if the known developers will allow it - which means they have some control over it.

this is from wiki: (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Bitcoin_is_not_decentralized_because_the_developers_can_dictate_the_software.27s_behavior)

"Though the developers of the original Bitcoin client still exert influence over the Bitcoin community, their power to arbitrarily modify the protocol is very limited."

So even wiki admits, that the developers do have some control over it!

wiki continues:
"Since the release of Bitcoin v0.3, changes to the protocol have been minor and always in agreement with community consensus."

what is exactly this "community consensus"? who are these people? I don't remember anyone asking me if I agree for each modification they are doing to the code. Ain't I part of the community?

The truth is that all I do is download bitcoin QT and hope for the best, while there are 100 or 1000 (or any other small amount) of people
who makes the decisions for us all.

So I am asking:
1)how can one say that bitcoin is totally decentralized?
2)Where there are people there is corruption, Aren't we suppose to be worried that this limited group of people will ruin the protocol?
3)Can someone explain in a nutshell what can the developers change and what they can't change in the protocol?







 

The devs cannot force anyone to upgrade their software.

So it is entirely up to the users (and especially the miners) as to whether to accept an upgrade that might "alter the rules".

Any big change would cause a "fork" (meaning that txs might become invalid for a part of the network and therefore would split the network in two).

the only thing you need is to convince people that your code is better than the original one. It is easier of course for main developers because people trust them but it does not mean you can't try to do something else.

Well , the big pool operators and devs managed to convince the users last time there was a fork , of course , without using "force".
Or , wasn't it like that?

Indeed it wasn't "forced" - basically all the pools had to "downgrade" until a solution was found (no-one was forced but the major pools all agreed that it was the best way to proceed and did so).

And the solution was decided by.... common we both experienced it , you certainly know where i'm pointing
If you don't agree that a few people decided for the the others (smells like a f* government) i'll bring the argument of the minimum fee , was there a vote , a consensus? I

And surely you'd have to agree that "falling back to the previous version" was the correct way to handle things (personally I think that the fork issue was handled very effectively).

Of course , and i never said it wasn't but , the point is that a group made those decisions , and that the next time they could make the wrong one.

Also , i'm aware that there is no way that they could have organized a vote from the entire community , and i don't see it happening in the future ,  so the devs will have to make the decision that they consider the best , but that sounds just like a central government on paper , right?

niothor, thanks for explaining my point!

The question to answer is whether "there is a better way" to handle such a problem?

It might and It might not be ,  but just because there is no alternate solution to it , we shouldn't assume it is flawless.
I myself don't see a solution for it right now , and until this moment I am happy how things went , but this doesn't matter things will be like that forever.

You know , when all forms of government changed or arise they all looked so good on paper and they indeed were so in the beginning, just to fail miserably in the end. Time will tell.

Using the software is voting for the changes. Participating in a pool is voting for the pools actions.

The developers may make the changes, but those changes are public and reviewed by others. Not everybody has to review every change. The point is that everybody could review every change. And if there is something wrong in that change that person can point it out, "waking up" others to review/confirm.

Asking to explain a complex matter in a way a 5 year old could understand it is either trolling or just being lazy.

Think as Bitcoin like a internet protocoll. Everybody use the HTTP, but noone is forced too. You can use another one, if you like. You can use your own eletric socket.

Maybe a good analogy is language and the publisher dictionaries. When the publisher will offer an updated version where "one" means "two", does that chance the meaning of the word "one", when everybody disagrees? No. The publisher can just make minor changes with community consensus.

Hope, that helps. I was struggeling with that topic for a while, too ;)

explain it like your 5..

normally money is stored in a computer located in one place, the bank you first registered your identity information to.
although you can view your balance at many banks and ATM's and withdraw from them. your money is stored in one computer and simply sends balance or accepted withdraw requests from your bank to the destined ATM. the ATM does not store the balances of any/all bank accounts. this is called centralised.

however bitcoin has no single computer of storage, everyone using bitcoin has a copy of your balance, along with everyone elses balance.

imagine it like a special ATM in your house that DOES has a copy of everyones banking details on it and all the ATM's talk to eachother without a bank at the center. and they are all secured using a very very long password so that you cant take other peoples money and they cannot take yours without knowing this password.

using this long password you can do what you want with your money and the ATM's talk to each other so that they all get an updated copy of everyones balance. it does take about 10 minutes to confirm to the majority of ATM's that your balance change is correct and not an error/duplicate transaction.

if you made your own alterations to your ATM. and told everyone on this forum, advertised it on TV and everyone seen that your ATM was actually better then the satoshi dev team's version then just by telling people where to get hold of your version would make you become the dominant ATM being used. (if they chose to that is)

it is a freedom of choice for anyone to make, there is no power to prevent any user from not using the satoshi version, your version or any other persona version. its all about individuals choice. there is no leader to decide for you.

you may however find some smart people that see problems with your ATM and explain it to the community whom may not realise such problems exist.

this is the beauty of open source and decentralisation.

@franky1,porcupine87

Thanks! I understand what you both wrote.
But the fact is that there must be a lot of people understanding the code thoroughly to keep it truly decentralized.

Most people (me included) just download the software and use it.

If for example there were only 10 people on earth who understands the protocol and the rest didn't know anything, they could have easily unite and screw us all. they would say that they have improved the protocol and the rest would simply follow.

My conclusion from this thread is that the only way to make/keep bitcoin decentralized is to have sufficient amount of people who understands the protocol and can warn the community if the known developers tries to hurt it.

Like everything else in our world ( and especially our monetary system), it all depends on education.

it seems we already have a central organization called bitcoin foundation  ;D
Bitcoin protocol is not like http , we store money in blockchain , it's our property . So all bitcoin users have right to vote on every little changes of Bitcoin protocol .

Who understand's the internet who uses it? People who have a big stack in Bitcoin understand it or pay people to understand it. No worry.

So how exactly did they force anyone to change software?

I removed my comment coz it was already discussed upthread.

Well yes - it was exactly that which I had mentioned - and clearly no-one forced anyone - the pools agreed that the best solution was to go back to the rules of the previous version (the most sensible way it could have been resolved).

2 words : Liberty Reserve.

You don't recall all the complaints about SD and people running out of disk space?

It they did nothing about it then I am 100% sure you would be complaining about that now.

Being decentralized in concept doesn't mean that centralization is impossible, simply that it is not essential.
Decentralized model also doesn't imply that the changes to its structure are sound.
These changes may favor centralization (think single-celled organisms evolving into multi-celled organisms).
Does this help?

Well - a good retort (and I know you like to argue) - I think that the model of wasting blockchain space did need to be stopped but for sure maybe it hasn't worked perfectly. As far as "taking down the capitalist" I think that Bitcoin gambling sites are still doing very well.

It is probably a good move, but can't you sense this is a dictatorship?

If they were dedicated to fixing the blockchain they would have more than one dev working on it ;) Peter is the only one working on the problem. But now Gavin is focusing on his this payment protocol. We are in beta and he is adding more protocols to a beta, and the protocol is already broken. It requires a centralized CA. So if you can call bitcoin decentralized then go for it, but it isn't and I don't call it decentralized anymore when I explain it people. I call it p2p that is the correct term for it.

It was *agreed* to by all the major pools - so I fail to see how that is a dictatorship (unless you include all the major pools as being the dictators).

My understanding (correct me if I am wrong) is that the payment protocol is less than 1000 LoC (so not a huge undertaking) and that it has been designed so that another system (instead of the CA one) can be easily put in place.

I am not a Foundation member nor am I any sort of sycophant of any of the devs but I don't think that they have "lost the plot" at this stage (although I do think that scalability is probably the main thing they should be focused on now).

Its decentralized because it is the only way to prevent one (or a few) to take control. Its kind of like a forced democracy I guess.
The majority has to agree to any changes in order for those changes to work, basically.

Nobody in the network should agree to downgrade or upgrade without considering the changes.
Strictly speaking, the community as a whole is the foundation, and should be the ones to accept or reject a change.

Very much how the current situation is.

Fixed that for u.

see: COIN_DUST.


in my view, it has diverged from the initial intentions of the project.  Various groups latched on, the 'mining' industry, various services groups, ,etc.  It's looking more and more like a traditional payment network every day.  This is why I'm not interested in working on the core Bitcoin.  In order to manage the ever growing volume of transactions, they will need to compromise more and more of the initial Satoshi architecture goals.  Proof of Work is a failure.

as the COIN_DUST incident shows, the developers have the power to introduce changes to the default code to actually discriminate against certain transactions.  In my view, this change was warranted(and generally well intended) because people were abusing the block chain.  It also showed however that the developers do wear badges here and the playing field is not level.

and the problem is that we have hashing monopolies.  Is this really money for the people?  No, it isn't.

this is why I invented Confidence Chains.  Doesn't require mining but it is distributed/p2p.

It may help you to think of it like the Internet. Would you say the Internet is centralized? That one country completely controls it?

Of course not. The Internet is also decentralized.

Now, is does happen that the U.S. has a large measure of control and influence over the Internet, mostly because it's the country that created the Internet. The U.S. is home to the DNS root servers and ICANN, the organization that administers Top Level Domains (TLDs) like .com, .co.uk, etc. Since people are good with remembering names, but bad with remembering numbers like IP addresses, shutting down or corrupting domain name service would largely make the Internet unusable for most of the world.

That sounds like the Internet is centralized, but it's not. The U.S. maintains an influential role because it's quite capable and has been doing a pretty good job. If everyone is happy there is no need to change. However, the Internet is an idea, just like Bitcoin is an idea. Should the U.S. abuse or otherwise deserve to be stripped of its current role the rest of the world would probably ensure that happened, because fundamentally the Internet is simply about connecting computers globally; that belongs to everyone innately.

So you can see how there can be still be pseudo-leaders of something fundamentally meant to be decentralized. Bitcoin works very similarly.

Note: if I recall there has been some discussion about reworking the setup of the root servers. Also, this is all from the top of my head, so anyone with technical corrections please jump in.

everyone here seems to be complaining that Gavin A and his team are ignoring requests from the community.

this is because its his program and he is getting paid by members of the foundation, so he will ocourse do as they say.

the good thing about bitcoin is that anyone can take for example 0.6 of the QT client. (before the SD patch) and remove the transaction fee demand prompt, add in just the features they want. and release that as a their own program.

YOU do not have to rely on Gavin A's team. if you dont like a patch then get a coder to unpatch it, but leaving in the latest bug fixes..

people can then check the source code is legit, and spread the word and everyone is free to use the modified version by this new person.

the problem is much bigger than what you describe.

http://www.wired.com/images/article/full/2007/10/nsa_2005_traffic_flows_630px.jpg

NSA's Lucky Break: How the U.S. Became Switchboard to the World
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2007/10/domestic_taps


Bitcoin is not really decentralized anymore.  It's a system increasingly owned by a number of commerical enterprises.  Even IBM seems to be poking around these days.  Remember IBM is the primary technology support for all the big financial firms, including the ones that got the trillions in bailout money.  It's a clear sign of the current state of this particular corner of the field.

if we want some system that requires a foundation where the kind of people who put 'High School Class President' on their resume email you about running for office then I think it's fair to say that this thing is no longer decentralized.

But it is decentralized. If it's not where is the owner/control?

Sounds interesting. Both mining and the POW hack always bothered me.
Ideally, everything should be decided, accepted and rejected by the network

there will be some upcoming releases soon.  I don't talk TOO much about it, because too many people on here monkey whatever claims I make, distracting away from what I'm doing and greatly distorting the facts.  It's turning out to be a huge problem.

you can find the initial whitepaper here: http://www.altchain.org

This I actually agree with, and do have some concern about. As major telecoms merge control over the pipes (or tubes if you prefer) becomes increasingly centralized. There was recently one big U.K. based merger I believe.

Still, my main point is not exactly about the infrastructure itself, but rather the idea of the Internet. If people don't like the companies (or countries) that increasingly have some measure of control or influence over how the Internet functions they will route around, and nobody can stop them. Bitcoin works the same way.

I already found this
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/bitcoinx/oAERXr17zII

but I'll check that site out.

sure, the internet is becoming one huge American Intertube.

the same general threats exist with Bitcoin.  The typical way these things pan out is that centralization happens, the initial protocols suddenly cannot manage the capacity, then they say 'were gonna fix it!' and they take away the decentralization.  Then they start churning out technologies with flashy features that are committed to these new protocols.  Thus going back to a decentralized situation becomes extremely difficult and expensive for the average person.

These trends emerge in a number of areas of telecom.  For instance here in The Land Of The Free(tm) we had a big fuss about 'Network Neutrality' which was a highly politicized debate between the telecoms who wanted to create something like a toll-based information highway, and a few advocates here and there who wanted to keep things accessible for everyone.  If you ever watched PBS or Public Access TV you know where these sorts of populist movements end up(although I do sometimes like PBS when theyre not running Jerry Lewis telethons).

for my mind the language analogy was the most fitting. But this is also why I like the idea of having good alt-coins going, in case power gets too crazy, the people can just shift to another coin.

Suppose I give you 10,000 Testnet Bitcoins for a pizza.  You and I both think this is a great idea, the exchange is made, I get my pizza, you get your (worthless) Testnet Bitcoins.

Other people pick up on this and start exchanging Testnet Bitcoins.  Testnet Bitcoins gain value.  They start exchanging for real Bitcoins, for USD, for North Korean Yuan, for gold and silver and litecoins and crapcoins and stocks.  And pizzas.

The Bitcoin developers do not want Testnet Bitcoins to gain any monetary value.  In the past they have reset the testnet with a new genesis block to avoid this.  The current testnet is actually testnet3 because of those.

Suppose the Bitcoin developers get wind that Testnet Bitcoins are rising in value, and take action to prevent it.  They reset the testnet, create a new genesis block, make changes in the client to start a new chain off of the new testnet genesis block, there's a newly released client, and we have a testnet4.

But - suppose you and I and many other people really like our pizza, and we really like exchanging Testnet3 Bitcoins for pizza and other things.  Maybe we are irrational.  Or maybe we are enlightened.  Regardless, we really want to continue the economy we have built up on the Bitcoin Testnet, and the decision the developers have made would reverse all that.

So, we continue to use the original client, the one that still runs off Testnet3.  We ignore Testnet4.  We don't use the new Bitcoin client.  Eventually some of us take the Bitcoin code and release a new Testnet3-only client.  The testnet3 economy continues, thanks to our decentralized action.  We are not at the mercy of the developers at all - we can do whatever we want, whether other people like it or not.

That's decentralization.

Ok , so it appears that we might have the answer to our question sooner that expected , I'm sure you've already read about Coinvalidation,
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=332918.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=332918.0)

I thinks this is already a major test , community versus some of the members with power or influence around the foundation.

Keep thinking that ;)

It's true. That is what makes it decentralised. We can run our own. Indeed with testnet, we can keep using the new bitcoin software, just recompiling with the testnet3 genesis block if necessary.

Bitcoin is not decentralized anymore since it went to ASICs

How many manufacturers of ASICs are there? <-- Control them, you control Bitcoin!
They let a few trickle out to keep the illusion that anyone can own one.
Just see who Yifu/Avalon now works for and their goals.

Litecoin is decentralized because anyone can mine with off the self PC parts. Litecoin was designed to keep FPGAs/ASICs out of the game, and keep the printing press in the hands of the people.

Prior to ASICs, I was not mining Bitcoin.  Now I own ASICs and am hashing away.  At least from my point of view that means less centralization of Bitcoin.  I would assume lots more small players like myself have been able to get into Bitcoin thanks to ASICs, but maybe I'm wrong.

Hashing with a couple of GH/s is not the same as hashing with 51% of the network hashrate.
Commercial farms & mining pools (virtually a necessity for private miners) are much more likely to grab that 51% today than they ever were.

And the solution to that is the same as it always was.

OK, Johnny.  See this nickel?  Well on the computer there are pretend nickels...

Wait, come back!  This is really interesting!  You can ride your bike later...