All hail the vocal minority! I'm starting to wonder how much they get paid. Does that make me crazy too?  At the moment, the vast majority of the dev team (all?) get paid... nothing at all for working on bitcoin. We're fortunate to have the chance to pay Gavin to devote his full attention to bitcoin. Another developer might be securing permission to use a small part of his work week on bitcoin. Paypal, the US dollar, the Euro, etc. have collectively thousands of programmers to work on keeping it all secure. We have the world's first decentralized global currency, and we have... a few unpaid devs. This is where the Bitcoin Foundation can really help. |
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Is that really all it is? So … waiting for three confirmations always takes up to half an hour?
One confirmation takes, on average, 10 minutes. Sometimes it is faster, sometimes it is slower, as the network and probability constantly adjust. |
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This is incorrect.
Bitcoin client users vote by accepting or rejecting P2P network transactions to relay and include in blocks. Each bitcoin client validates the block chain independently. This is why bitcoin is decentralized.
Miners have power to include or exclude transactions in blocks. Thus, a super-powerful miner may DoS the network by excluding all transactions, but they cannot change the rules.
The collective will of the bitcoin clientbase dictates the rules for validating blocks and transactions.
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No, it doesn't simply wait a long time, it simply does not get relayed. Isn't that's more of a current implementation detail than a fundemental limitation? Is there anything in the protocol that would stop someone from starting a mining pool that only processed zero-fee transactions and allowed users who wished to perform them to directly connect to the pool instead of broadcasting on the network? Any miner may choose to include any valid transaction within a block. Zero-fee and non-standard transactions are valid transactions. What is relevant, though, is what this Five Questions blog post is telling users does not match with common user experience. Expectations must be set properly. "0.001% of the fee of any modern USD payment processor" would get the point across without misleading. |
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Transactions are incorporated into blocks, right?
Yes. Each transaction's hash is incorporated into a hash tree, whose root is stored in the block header. Every new transaction changes that merkle root. That means every transaction that is incorporated into a block will change the block's hash. So let's say a server has just an average speed processor which might take a week or more to generate a block. Does it stop incorporating transactions when it's begun a search for a conforming hash, or does it just keep throwing them in there and changing the nonce as well? Seems like it has to be the latter.
Remember that you don't "lose" any progress, or work, by hashing a different block header, with an updated merkle root. The probability of finding a hash is the same either way. |
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This is just legal approval to give developers salaries and raise funding for those salaries.
Yep, we are desperately in need of the most basic things... like paying the salary of the lead developer. Bitcoin is big enough that we can all get together and support things like that, I hope. |
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Bitcoins tend not to be very secure, says Richard Booth, a consultant at RSA, a cyber-security firm.
Big sigh. Though the paragraph does go on to mention bitcoin thefts, it fails to distinguish between the secure-and-unbroken currency and poorly secured wallets. |
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Well, very factually, I can send a zero fee transaction on the bitcoin network because I don't care if it's processed in three days. if I want priority service, I will add a small fee. Hence, the statement "bitcoin enables zero fee transactions" is factually correct albeit somewhat atypical.
No, it doesn't simply wait a long time, it simply does not get relayed. Further, you cannot add anything once the transaction has been sent. More importantly, service providers whose business model is based on exchange (processing transactions denominated in fiat via the bitcoin network and offering conversion rate hedging for risk averse merchants) will propose not only zero fee transactions to those merchants but even possibly negative commission rate i.e direct incentives for the merchants to get paid via the bitcoin network.
Negative rate? You are describing a hypothetical service layer on top of the bitcoin network that does not exist. |
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The current design (a loose-knit team of developers, unelected, who could very carefully and anonymously backdoor the software) is not ideal,
This sounds like an excellent opportunity for education  Why is the above not true? For the source code, we use git. Just like the bitcoin block chain, git is a chain of hashes. Each and every change is protected by a hash. Anyone following git in a decentralized fashion may see and verify all changes. Any "back door" is quite public. For the binaries, we use gitian, so that outside parties may independently verify dev team binaries precisely match their locally-built binaries. Bitcoin binaries from the dev team are not published until multiple sig matches appear. |
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most of the devs already support p2pool
Yep. General opinions on IRC and "in the hallway" (at conferences) are that p2pool is preferred over pools, because p2pool is decentralized. We appreciate pool operators -- bitcoin wouldn't be where it is without them -- but those tend to be centralized operations where the pool operator is in a much greater position of power over the network than most other users. Recall that Deepbit had over 50% network power, at recent times in bitcoin's history. The pool operators of the largest pools, I'd say, are even more powerful than Gavin or any other dev. We have to beg and plead, just to get things like P2SH deployed. p2pool is decentralized and does not place huge amounts of power into any one hand. If you mine... please try p2pool! |
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Some people believe it will inevitably be made illegal. From this point of view, having a central place to exert control is a weakness. Napster and Wikileaks are good examples of network information services that brought about unpopular laws. Bitcoin is another network information service that threatens concentrated power.
None of bitcoin's fundamentals have changed. Users continue to vote based on their choice of bitcoin client. If users suddenly dislike a commit from Gavin, they are free to choose another client. Just as they were yesterday. |
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exMULTI, Inc. is a registered, tax paying North Carolina corporation, solely dedicated to bitcoins. One person company, too. No shadow investors or mysterious step fathers involved, just me |
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I'm guessing the satoshi client or whatever people call it these days will now be copyrighted under the bitcoin Foundation? The Foundation is essentially the vehicle for the development of that client?
Bitcoin Foundation != dev team While I hope the Bitcoin Foundation will address critical immediate needs -- like paying Gavin to work on bitcoin -- fiddling with the copyrights does not seem within the claimed Linux Foundation model. The Linux kernel is copyrighted by the individual authors, not by the Linux Foundation. It seems logical the code would stay the same. After all, the code is not just the dev team, even... it is every contributor. And every code contributor wrote has written more than a couple lines of code has a copyright claim. Full disclosure: yes, I joined the foundation as a lifetime member. This is a pretty common misunderstanding of copyright law. Copyright can't be taken, it can only be given. Every fragment of every line of code has an author, and that author holds the copyright on that part (or their employer, for example, if they've made such an agreement). Some developers could assign their copyright to the foundation if they wanted to, but the foundation can't just take it. It also isn't available for a vote, for example, if the devs held a vote on assigning the rights to the foundation, their vote wouldn't be binding on anyone. 1) My post never claimed that it was possible for copyright to be "taken" 2) Existing practice and precedent on copyright is that just a line or two (i.e. one-line bug fix) might not be copyrightable. i.e. lawyers continue to disagree, but he-copyrights-just-that-one-line is not taken very seriously even by those lawyers who are paid to defend copyright. |
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I stand in support of the premise of the creation of the Bitcoin Foundation, and trust the intents of the individuals on its board. I disavow the OP's advice of "stay away" and disagree with the claims that it exists to annihilate the competition of its board members. I agree with the sentiment that there needs to be a foundation in order for government officials and executives to take Bitcoin seriously.
+1 OP is a bunch of conspiracy silliness. Though jimbobway and others are absolutely right that bitcoin is bigger than any foundation. And that's the way it should be! |
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Smart property would be a good way of enabling secure re-sale of electronic event tickets (to sports, concerts etc).
Exact-a-mundo ;p Smart property simply proves that you "own" a digital token, nothing more. So, as such, I think it is less like DRM that protects Apple's iTunes. Nothing is encrypted, you are simply proving ownership. The system that connects "proven ownership of digital token" to something useful is left open. It could be as simple as "if you hold this token, I will pay you bond interest" in the distributed bond case. |
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Erik is correct (kudos to Erik for his excellent post once again): bitcoin enables zero transaction fees because any fee applied by a bitcoin service provider must be backed by a real service not by regulatory capture.
No, it is simply factually incorrect. To send bitcoins on the bitcoin network in small amounts, a fee is required. Requires non-zero fee is precisely the opposite of "zero fees." Do not set up new bitcoin users to be disappointed, by selling them "zero fees!!" then letting them discover on their own that reality does not match hype. |
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I'm guessing the satoshi client or whatever people call it these days will now be copyrighted under the bitcoin Foundation? The Foundation is essentially the vehicle for the development of that client?
Bitcoin Foundation != dev team While I hope the Bitcoin Foundation will address critical immediate needs -- like paying Gavin to work on bitcoin -- fiddling with the copyrights does not seem within the claimed Linux Foundation model. The Linux kernel is copyrighted by the individual authors, not by the Linux Foundation. It seems logical the code would stay the same. After all, the code is not just the dev team, even... it is every contributor. And every code contributor wrote has written more than a couple lines of code has a copyright claim. Full disclosure: yes, I joined the foundation as a lifetime member. |
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The pragmatic solution is to support both GBT and stratum, in mining software. Perhaps, but implementing Stratum is a lot of work (at least on the miner end). Better for pools to support both IMO; at least that gives the miners a choice of whether they want to retain control or blindly hand it over to the poolop. That is the trade-off. GBT is far more compatible with existing software. Stratum is a wholly new protocol requiring wholly new transport implementation, but it gains some efficiency over HTTP. |
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