Bitcoin Forum

I can't help but think that some of the uncertainty surrounding the attempted implementation of BIP 16 and BIP 17 is causing the price to be suppressed. Quite frankly, I am surprised this has not been brought up in the speculation thread. It is quite possible we will see a blockchain split on this day. It should re-converge but this raises some doubts about if Bitcoin will remain what the community wants it to. Many people do not understand the implications so I feel that implementing it right now is not a good idea.

Some people are spreading FUDs, but actually nothing bad is going to happen in any case.


Not likely. And if so, nothing happen. Bitcoin network is designed to "repair" from blockchain splits by self. Also nobody wants to be on blockchain branch, there's pretty good incentive to go with the majority of the miners.


Common people don't need to understand it. Actually the discussion should be much more technical, but thanks to many misunderstandings it was turned into political mess. I hope people will calm down and will discuss more like human beings and will keep discussion more factual.

I see only one risk which can affect bitcoin price. It's that bitcoin developers will be seen as a group of untrustworthy sociopaths which are unable to talk each to other. And it's not related to BIP16/17, it's more general issue.

So I am guessing you voted yes? I said it should re-converge but many people are worried about it. My thoughts are that many people will wait it out on the sidelines in cash until the dust settles.

Personally, I suspect the price of Bitcoin is tied to the amount of media coverage related to Bitcoin because of the seemingly strong positive correlation between media coverage and Bitcoin price.

I don't see BIP 16/17 having a significant impact on Bitcoin prices unless implementation somehow has a negative impact on the network, which I don't predict.

I am supporting Tycho on his stance but the network should survive regardless. It is the fear of a problem with implementation I think might be suppressing the price.

http://blockchain.info/p2sh - yes, I'm voting for BIP16, because it was general consensus until the mess about BIP16/17 started. So far it looks like BIP16 voting don't reach >50% until 1.Feb, so we will see what will be next progress. I'm affraid that BIP wars distracted bitcoiners to pick ANY solution because they're affraid that something strange will happen, which will only slow down p2sh implementation.

I meant yes on the poll. I am going to reset the poll with a better asked question. It should be if the fear about the potential impact of bip 16/17 is holding back prices and I think people may be confused.

Oh, sorry. I voted "no", I don't think this war affects price in any direction. It is mostly a storm in the cup of tea. Some p2sh solution *will* be implemented, now the question is *when*. Then proper implementation of p2sh in clients can affect price in positive direction.

Poll clarified and reset. Please place your votes again.

The lack of multisig is holding back prices.  I can't recommend bitcoin to Windows users without serious security caveats.  That is the only impact, but I'd rather have it done right than rushed.  That said, from my limited understanding (programmer, but not intimate with bitcoin code), BIP 16 offers some advantages that I feel outweigh the issues with adding additional validation to a subset of scripts.

Once we have multi-sig and GUI support for it*, we can finally market bitcoin as truly secure, and it will have a possitive impact on the price.

* The gui guides you to a multi-sig setup by default (pc+phone+paper backup).

Amen brother..

I think BIP 16/17 has a double impact on the market.

1. It's part of the short-mid term hope for a price increase. Once it's implemented properly and exposed by various clients and APIs, it will help the marketability and usability greatly, thus increasing price.

2. The way it's handled projects a lot of FUD (mostly unjustified). People are afraid of chain splits, of the proposal being stuck, of developers fighting each other ... this causes a negative price pressure.

Personally I'm bullish as usual. I trust in Gavin's leadership, and I actually think that while it's possible that the voting process/announcement could have been handled better (e.g. published a lot more before voting began) ... the actual vote process is a super strong indicator of how strong Bitcoin is. It's a $45,000,000 economy that's truly controlled by the community. I'm pleased Gavin can't just force BIP 16 without consulting people, and that he has to build a consensus of 55%-60% miners. This is true decentralizing.

I'm for BIP16 btw, simply because I trust Gavin and other BIP 16 supporters (e.g. slush), and haven't heard a good argument against it. From a far, it seems like a religious argument on what's a "prettier design", and I loath religious arguments (Oh, I'm sure each side is sure that his arguments are correct, and his way is the truly better way). If BIP 16 is our best chance to push multi-sig forward in the near future, let's do that already, and let the devs follow on to other important issues like chain pruning (what else is on the immediate roadmap? (http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/what-are-the-next-major-planned-features-after-p2sh)).

My 2 bitcents.

Have been looking at Litecoin, an interesting bitcoin alternative. (just in case)

If most everyone cant find a reason to not mine at deepbit, and to not use Mtgox..

Litecoin will fail.. plain and simple..

Dont waste your time

Yes, but how else can I own 100,000 shares of something...   ;D

I have no idea what BIP16 is? Has it been tested before??

tested for months now.
and beware, there might be a bip18, too.

i also hope the devs will unite again and push this rather sooner than delaying this again for 6 months.

This is such FUD from the Bitcoin developers. "Tested for months now", oh really? What about public support for it, maybe that has gone on for "months now"? I hope the devs push that as late as possible, after the public has had a chance to vocalize about the damage this will do to the decentralization and union of Bitcoin.

How exactly could it damage the decentralization? I think it's slightly improving it, as there are more and more supporters of P2Pool...

I have no fear regarding P2SH, it's the best feature to ever be added into Bitcoin. It's a very significant improvement and I hope it gets done. What does lower my confidence is that the whole issue was made into a public debate. Stuff like that shouldn't be public debates, developers should handle it themselves. Asking regular people about very intricate stuff related to the way these implementations are coded is useless. This lowers my trust in the whole development of Bitcoin, I just hope they make up their minds and get P2SH implemented at some point. Bitcoin will be overrun by competitors eventually if this is not added.

One shouldn't fear a blockchain split over this. P2SH will only be applied once 55% of hashing power is behind it and apparently Tycho of Deepbit is only adding his pool after there is already over 50% which means that there probably would be somewhere around 80% of hashing power behind this change before it's applied. So the blockchain split would be a small one and very temporary.

What people should worry about is how this affects the development of Bitcoin if it's not added. My personal hope is that they simply play hardball against Luke-Jr and force BIP 16. The second possibility is that we wait, possibly months or years, for a solution that everyone can agree on. Third option is that they go forward with BIP 17 but I think that's unlikely at best.

+1

Agreed.

This cannot be stressed enough.

Making bitcoin better understood by enough people, or failing to do so. That will be the main factor to bitcoin's future medium/long term.

Just thought I would point this out. There was an unexpected bug found that was dropping transaction fees from the block rewards. He is 'pretty confident' that he has found them all and I hope he is right. I am sure he is doing everything he can to make it as bug free as possible but it is obvious that more testing should be done before implementation.

Also this^

Yeah, it's called "unit tests" and both BIP 16 and 17 have them. At this time BIP 16 passes more tests but I think BIP 17 is a good solution too. The whole thing has attracted too much public view just because one developer doesn't agree. I wonder what would Satoshi have done.

In other projects I love such as Python and Blender, there's a "benevolent dictator for life" (BDFL) that has the last word. People trust them because they led their projects sanely for years. I'm really amazed with both Python and Blender. Guido van Rossum and Tom Roosendaal are my idols. Hm... both are dutch. Is there a dutch coder among bitcoin devs?

Gavin discovered the bugs after BIP was being implemented by several pools. Finding bugs after something is implemented in a financial system  is not a good thing. The fact that Gavin can make a bot to steal BIP17 transactions so easily should be a concern for everyone. This is not a matter of developers not agreeing but a matter of security. A big deal should have been made about this a lot sooner.

A good BDFL would have tested it enough before. They have much more patience and prefer long term maintainability over one-time patches, no matter how good they seem to be. Neither Gavin nor Luke-Jr have this reputation right now, I'm afraid... Anyway it's a good sign Bitcoin can't be changed too easily. I personally will be confident on any solution that also works in alternate bitcoin implementations (remember OP_EVAL raised alarms in a different implementation).

Any potential crisis now averted. Log edited for brevity.

Can you explain to me what theymos' proposal is?

Sure. Here's genjix's take: Cathartic Progress (http://bitcoinmedia.com/cathartic-progress/)

Although that point seems moot now that Deepbit is coming over:

My concern is that anonymous votes could be faked or hacked. I do like his proposal other than that however.

I still don't see why we need to hack the protocol to support multisig at all.

Bitcoin uses ECDSA, where the public key is a known point multiplied by an integer private key. Generating a multisig address is as simple as generating two independent addresses, the second using the first one's public key as the known point. Such a combined address can be supported by today's clients, while only being accessible to someone who knows both private keys.

This fight between BIP16 and BIP17 isn't just a barn-painting argument, it's a barn-painting argument over a barn that's already painted.

Except that doesn't help because then you need both private keys on the same machine to spend them.  If your machine is compromised, it will wait until you try and spend, then steal your coins as soon as it has both keys.

It's about the delay of deploying

Interesting.

Not going to get in to the fundamentals of the argument, more interested in the fundamentals of the price and how the current discussions will impact market confidence in the value of bitcoin if even over the short term.

Now's a rare chance to see how Technical analysis will reflect the fundamentals.

 ;D