You have an interesting but IMO unrealistic view of the world (despite being much smarter than nearly any *boss* I had ever worked for they had they never asked nor accepted my advice about pretty much anything related to their business and that includes at least one company that I helped make rich).

In reality bosses don't care about the opinions of their technical staff - they actually care more about what their friends in high places think (because in general that is far more important to their success and possibly even their very survival if you are working in a corrupt environment).

Actually I do know something about the reality of rich Chinese that might be the "boss" of a Bitcoin mining company.

Most importantly they have a shitload of money and "guanxi" in order to get the mine set up with cheap electricity and no political issues. The technical know how is just people they employ and the business decisions are not at all "sourced from the technical employees".

Are you seriously telling me that the CEOs of power/telco/whatever companies would ask their engineers about advice for their business decisions (to make an analogy)?

To a fair extent that should work, however, it should be realised that as Bitcoin mining has become more and more commercialised the "bosses" of said mining operations understand less and less about what it is that they are working with (i.e. they are becoming just "business men" that don't understand the tech at all).

Yes - I think something like 90% would stop the hastiness and actually force people to work together (rather than to try and "take over").

Having read various posts from Mike Hearn about supporting "black-lists" (or "red-lists" or whatever) and also the ridiculous effort put into adding support for x801 certs (that seemingly no-one is even using) I don't really think that Gavin and Mike have any credibility to "run the project".

Presumably both of them already have enough money to retire - I'd plead with them to think about just doing that and letting those that actually want to do the hard work get on with just that.

I think the only thing that has "forced" things is Gavin and Mike trying to "rush things". If they didn't jump up and down claiming that Bitcoin was going to die then there wouldn't have been such a rush that has meant that other proposals are being ignored.

Really I don't see that people are using Bitcoin more and more (in fact I no longer use it for any regular spending at all and not one of my friends or family uses it at all) so the whole argument about Bitcoin running out of block space for txs seems rather odd to me (and Sergio's suggestion of using 5 minute blocks actually makes more sense than nearly anything else I've read).

All the "panic" was due to the "stress tests" of a bunch of spam txs that actually didn't stop me (or most other people) doing BTC txs anyway.

From what I have read recently miners can express their support for one of the BIPs in each block - this seems like a reasonable approach to me (although in one topic about this I read that miners might actually be confused as to what they are supposed to put in their block so that is perhaps the fault of the devs for not clearly communicating how they should do this).

Actually IMO the problem that is not being realised is that we don't need "one blockchain".

Once people can get over that idea then true decentralisation can start to take place (and yes that is a hint at what the CIYAM project is about).

The biggest concern I have is that maybe 75% is not putting the bar high enough - if we really end up with two competing forks (and from what I have read the 75% doesn't need to hold so the XT fork would keep going even if the support had dropped below 50%) then that could really cause problems (some forum members have been talking about getting pools to "pretend to support" XT so they can sell their coins twice).

Initially I had assumed that Gavin was not going to do anything so hastily and had assumed that rational minds would be led towards consensus by reason but unfortunately it does seem that now that is no longer the case.

There have already been issues in the past with soft forks and an accidental hard fork so I don't think it is actually very responsible for people to play political games with this.

Personally I don't see we actually have an impasse (but it does appear that Gavin and Mike are trying to push this agenda) as there are BIPs from the Bitcoin Core devs about increasing the block size.

About the only good thing that has come of all this block size debate has been that the price of BTC has been going up and down making it a great time for day-trading.

Yes - I think I would (he says feeling that he has just walked into a spring loaded trap).

That being said we do have the voting power of miners and of peers and IMO that should be used to determine the future (and I don't think 75% is enough of a majority for a hard fork which I was rather disappointed to discover XT has decided to use when initial communications had indicated that a 95% majority would be required).

To clarify the confusion - it should not be up to the "general population" to make a vote but up to those who actually are the key participants (in particular the miners).

I don't think we need a "personality" to govern the development (my preference would always be for a "figurehead" rather than a "benevolent dictator") but maybe we do need some more clearer ways of solving the consensus of development.

Again I don't see the need to rush this and allow Gavin and Mike to simply "take over control" because somehow we should trust them.

If that were the case we'd have solved climate change through the election of politicians with well thought out technical solutions years ago.

A popular solution has absolutely nothing to do with being "sensible" or even "viable" for that matter.

To be honest it sounds like a "popularity contest" rather than a well thought out technical solution to a problem (this has been my thinking about this whole issue ever since XT embarked on the alarmist idea that Bitcoin is going to die and that they are going to fork it by "convincing others" that they should follow them).

I'm yet to be convinced that Bitcoin is broken to the point that we need to suddenly rush in the change and abandon the core devs in the process.

Also in the middle of the "stress test" I actually sent BTC amounts with no fee and with no problem (as the UTXOs were well aged the txs confirmed very quickly) so the "panic" seems rather out of proportion to the reality.

The term "smart contract" I believe was first coined by Nick Szabo and although I'm not sure if he intended that to mean a general computer language anything that does provide a Turing complete language by definition supports smart contracts.

Think of it this way - AT and Ethereum are both low-level languages that support the use of higher level languages which make it possible to create smart contracts (the smart contract being the program).

A platform that provided a set of smart contracts but didn't provide a programming language to be able to extend them or add new ones really wouldn't be so useful.

Well - if you are referring to a "programming language" you should understand that AT is a "virtual CPU". So it is not a high-level language but is a "machine code" (and it should be noted that Ethereum is also not a high-level language but is a VM which is an approach that I think was far less elegant).

So - if you accept that things like RISC chips are "Turing complete" then it should be obvious that AT is (I even gave you the link to a "single instruction virtual CPU" that is "Turing complete" to show just how simple it is to achieve this).

If you don't accept that CPUs (and thus "virtual CPUs") are "Turing complete" then clearly we have nothing further to discuss.

Please point out exactly (technically) what is wrong as well as imprecise as just saying that something is *wrong as well as imprecise* doesn't make it so.

The AT machine code supports jumping, subroutines, stacks, conditional logic and memory and this is enough to be able to run "any program" in the sense that you could write a C++ compiler with the AT "virtual CPU" as its platform (I assume you are not going to deny that C++ is "Turing complete") and in fact that is one of the potential projects being considered (although we do not have millions of dollars in funding to pay for such work at this stage).

If you haven't read so please check this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_instruction_set_computer and you'll learn that it is so "easy to be Turing complete" that even a "single op code" machine can be so. Basically Bitcoin's Script was intentionally built to not be "Turing complete" as it is actually harder to do that (is has several special checks to make sure it can't accidentally end up looping and numerous op codes were actually removed due to their potential to cause trouble).

There is no "special magic sauce" required in order to be "Turing complete" but just the ability to have conditional logic, variables and loops (all of which AT has).

If you think that a mathematical proof of being "Turing complete" is needed then please show me where Ethereum have provided this and I'll get a math guy to write an equivalent document for AT.

When you read the specs of any CPU it doesn't come with a mathematical proof about being "Turing complete" but instead looks just like the specification that was created for AT (i.e. documenting the instruction set and other key features such as word size, etc.).

So how on earth can we ever create "Turing complete" programs if we are using compilers and interpreters that are running on "Turing incomplete" CPUs?

Yes.


Well - if consensus between the core devs over one of those BIPs were to happen maybe there would be another choice (it appears to me as though it is XT that is trying to force the issue here).

From what I have read there are already BIPs (at least two) that cover increasing block sizes for Bitcoin Core so I don't know why you say "only Bitcoin XT" has proposed this (and in fact the first BIP about this was from the Bitcoin Core devs rather than from Gavin and Mike).

Well - childish or not - G. Maxwell has indicated just that (he will stop working on Bitcoin if XT takes over) and I don't think he is the only core dev to have indicated such.

Also calling people names (such as "childish") hardly helps the situation (but is the kind of thing someone wanting to "troll" would bring in).

True - but we know their are many people working on Bitcoin Core - how many are working on Bitcoin XT (and how many have indicated they'll move to that should their fork take over)?