Adam Back's email to Mike and Gavin

[tokeweed]

Anyone who is pro-blacklisting pretty much in my mind doesn't really care about bitcoin.
Blacklisting coins or "working" with governments to "freeze" certain addresses or coins, pretty much renders bitcoin useless.
I thought Satoshi created this "experiment" so that governing bodies can not regulate or control our money?
What happened to all that? What about being your own bank?

Blacklisting coins opens a pandora's box that I think is unimaginable and quite sad for bitcoin's future.

Yes maybe, but as you say the box is open.  If bitcoins are regulated and fail, then litecoins will take over.  If those fail then maybe monero, dash, or (cough) doge will take over.  It is a tidal wave and it cant be stopped no matter how many fingers you poke into the holes in the dam.

Good point, even if they make bitcoin into the regulated, blacklisted, paypal of crypto it would be suicide considering all the alternatives that people could use to circumvent the "law".

maybe the dreaded AOL era is near bitcoin and the next coin will become everything bitcoin wasn't. Unfuckwithable

That's what supposed to happen.  One big reason why most of us deny it is because we are invested in it.

[Kprawn]

This part was the most interresting for me --> " Neither you nor Gavin have any particular authority here to speak on behalf of Bitcoin (eg you acknowledge in your podcast that Wladimir is
dev lead, and you and Gavin are both well aware of the 4 year established change management consensus decision making model where all of the technical reviewers have to come to agreement before
changes go in for security reasons explained above).  I know Gavin has a "Chief Scientist" title from the Bitcoin Foundation, but sadly that organisation is not held in as much regard as it once was, due to
various irregularities and controversies, and as I understand it no longer employs any developers, due to lack of funds.  Gavin is now employed by MIT's DCI project as a researcher in some capacity.  As
you know Wladimir is doing the development lead role now, and it seems part of your personal frustration you said was because he did not agree with your views.  Neither you nor Gavin have been particularly
involved in bitcoin lately, even Gavin, for 1.5 years or so. "

Why are we talking about people, who are not actively involved in Bitcoin? They are busy with their own projects and are having a lion share of the attention. 

It's pure power play at the moment... 

[QuestionAuthority]

I didn't realize Adam Back was so entrenched in Bitcoin. I thought his involvement stopped at HashCash. Satoshi, Hal and Ray developed and tested Bitcoin then Gavin took it over. It's fascinating that he doesn't approve and believes Gavin is forcing the change through regardless. Now that the Chinese mining cartel has approved the change to 8 I guess that's what will happen. I'm completely baffled as to why Gavin feels the need to unilaterally control the direction of Bitcoin. Is there a hidden paycheck in it for him that I don't see?

[slaveforanunnak1]

I didn't realize Adam Back was so entrenched in Bitcoin. I thought his involvement stopped at HashCash. Satoshi, Hal and Ray developed and tested Bitcoin then Gavin took it over. It's fascinating that he doesn't approve and believes Gavin is forcing the change through regardless. Now that the Chinese mining cartel has approved the change to 8 I guess that's what will happen. I'm completely baffled as to why Gavin feels the need to unilaterally control the direction of Bitcoin. Is there a hidden paycheck in it for him that I don't see?

I would venture a guess, yes.

[tvbcof]

I didn't realize Adam Back was so entrenched in Bitcoin. I thought his involvement stopped at HashCash. Satoshi, Hal and Ray developed and tested Bitcoin then Gavin took it over. It's fascinating that he doesn't approve and believes Gavin is forcing the change through regardless. Now that the Chinese mining cartel has approved the change to 8 I guess that's what will happen. I'm completely baffled as to why Gavin feels the need to unilaterally control the direction of Bitcoin. Is there a hidden paycheck in it for him that I don't see?

Somewhere I read that Back was aware of Bitcoin but busy with other stuff and didn't get significantly involved until relatively later.  Perhaps this was from the time maybe half a year ago when he was active on cypherdoc's gold thread but I don't remember for sure.

As for Gavin, it still seems like the strongest hypothesis (barely) that he simply sees Bitcoin's future being most bright, or at least (Western?) humanity best served if the government and their chosen regulators have more-or-less the same degree of control over Bitcoin as they do over other monetary solutions.

Relateldy, perhaps he sees that a realistic path to 'reasonable' control by TPTB will bring in a rush of VC money and hodlers can get rich.  To say the truth I've never really sensed that Gavin is all that interested in getting rich (except in one minor incident perhaps) but such perceptions are hard to be very confident about.  I'm quite certain that just this hope animates a great many of the participants in the ecosystem however.

[toknormal]

Here's how to arbitrate on the correct decision in this debate:

============================
If payment channels and sidechains didn't exist and if no prospect of them ever existed, how easy would it be to find a consensus over the blocksize revision ?
============================

...that is the question.

People are making a VERY BIG MISTAKE (IMHO) if they bring the wider ecosystem into the equation when weighing up the merits of a blockchain capacity increase. At a systems analysis level, by doing that you're creating a coupling and a dependency on a meta infrastructure that was never part of the original design objectives of a cryptocurrency.

Sure, you could create quite a nicely layered financial system (and no doubt, such a meta infrastructure will emerge eventually), but you then no longer have a blockchain for all. We'll be back to needing Visa and the banks to use it because they'll be the owners of said 'meta infrastructure' which will in no way, shape or form be decentralised.

So if you think the blockchain can stand on its own 2 feet for the next 10 years at a 1 Mb blocksize - sure, defend the status quo. If you don't then support the capacity change, but don't support the status quo because you think that other systems can "front-the load". That logic amounts to:

 • bad systems analysis in de-prioritising the original design objectives (single-tier financial network) in favour of new ones (multi-tier)

 • bad engineering (compromising functional redundancy in favour of strategic commercial priorities)

 • bad politics (re-centralising at a meta-infrastructure level what was decentralised at the blockchain level)

[ebliever]

For a letter intended to be publicly disclosed, that was extremely poorly written and laxly proofed.  It's rambling, repetitive, hyperbolic and (IMO) unnecessarily incendiary.  None of these aspects help the author's case.

I read the entire thing and have rather the opposite impression. It is long, and firmly worded, but the risks are real. The repetition is for emphasis, because apparently Gavin and Mike have not be as responsive as they ought to be. I've gotten much more concerned with how they are trying to handle this apart from the consensus model that has served Bitcoin fairly well thus far.

[BitUsher]

Hearn certainly sends mixed messages when it comes to decentralization in general.  

Adam Back does include one positive note regarding XT and Hearn's behavior which I can agree with. It certainly has lit a fire and is encouraging other developers to find other solutions and place this as a priority. I don't know if this is his ultimate goal instead of going the normal route of submitting a BIP first instead of having Gavin submit it later but it certainly is working and more proposals are coming forward rather quickly.

[LiteCoinGuy]

i hope gavin will not commit suicide when he reads all that FUD here  

but in case you want to know what he/they are doing:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1092343.0

[JackH]

XT is an altcoin, do NOT use it.

[TrianglePythagoras]

XT is an altcoin,

For now...

[QuestionAuthority]

I didn't realize Adam Back was so entrenched in Bitcoin. I thought his involvement stopped at HashCash. Satoshi, Hal and Ray developed and tested Bitcoin then Gavin took it over. It's fascinating that he doesn't approve and believes Gavin is forcing the change through regardless. Now that the Chinese mining cartel has approved the change to 8 I guess that's what will happen. I'm completely baffled as to why Gavin feels the need to unilaterally control the direction of Bitcoin. Is there a hidden paycheck in it for him that I don't see?

Somewhere I read that Back was aware of Bitcoin but busy with other stuff and didn't get significantly involved until relatively later.  Perhaps this was from the time maybe half a year ago when he was active on cypherdoc's gold thread but I don't remember for sure.

As for Gavin, it still seems like the strongest hypothesis (barely) that he simply sees Bitcoin's future being most bright, or at least (Western?) humanity best served if the government and their chosen regulators have more-or-less the same degree of control over Bitcoin as they do over other monetary solutions.

Relateldy, perhaps he sees that a realistic path to 'reasonable' control by TPTB will bring in a rush of VC money and hodlers can get rich.  To say the truth I've never really sensed that Gavin is all that interested in getting rich (except in one minor incident perhaps) but such perceptions are hard to be very confident about.  I'm quite certain that just this hope animates a great many of the participants in the ecosystem however.

I remember S3052 getting into a debate with him over some nuance because, of course, S3052 considers himself a speculation genius even when he's wrong. I didn't think it was in the "I smell a trap" thread but somewhere else. I just though he was messing around on the forum for a while because I've only seen him in the dev & stench section once or twice.

I think you're superimposing your desire for bitcoins future direction on Gavin. He is definitely more than a little interested in money. Before TBF he threatened to stop working on Bitcoin once because he needed a check. While all the other devs volunteer their time and earn their daily bread on other projects Gavin wants to get paid. He earned a couple hundred thousand dollars a year from TBF when they had money. Since that cow ran dry I think he's partnered himself up with some company that's offering him a payday for continued development in the "right" direction. I fully expect to see him announce his new job at some Bitcoin startup soon.

[BitUsher]

XT is an altcoin, do NOT use it.

XT doesn't even have the Hard fork code added as of yet and even if it did it wouldn't be considered an ALT until after the hard fork.

"So...

... maybe there's a misunderstanding on what I'm actually working on. I'm coding a hard-fork that will only fork:

    -After March 1, 2016
    -If 75% of hashing power is producing up-version blocks
    -AND after some brave miner decides to actually produce a >1MB block.

It will be very difficult for anybody to lose money. Even if we assume that some stubborn minority of miners decides not to upgrade (in spite of Bitcoin Core warning them first that the chain consists mostly of blocks with up-version version number, and then warning them that there is an alternative invalid higher-work chain), those miners will be the only people who will lose money. Ordinary, SVP-using users will follow the longest chain, and since at least 75% of hashing power will be on the bigger-block chain, there is no chance of them losing money. The big-block-rejecting-chain will very, very quickly be left behind and ignored.

There will NOT be two active chains, that is just FUD. Anybody running old code will have to willfully ignore the warnings to upgrade to stay on the old chain, and the incentives are so strong to follow the majority I can't imagine the 1MB chain persisting for any significant length of time.

--------

I'm happy to tweak the parameters. The code I'm writing regression tests for right now is:

    -8MB max block size (chinese miners were unhappy with 20 for not-entirely-clear reasons)
    -Earliest fork date 11 Jan 2016 (miners and others want sooner rather than later)
    -Activation when 750 of last 1,000 blocks are up-version (version 0x20000004 to be compatible with sipa's new versioning bits scheme)
    -2 week 'grace period' after 75% threshold reached before first >1MB block allowed to be mined
    -8MB cap doubles every two years (so 16MB in 2018, etc: unless there is a soft fork before then because 16MB is too much)

The code for all that is starting to get right on the edge of "too complicated for consensus," but the individual pieces are all straightforward. I'll write a BIP when I'm done with the code, and, as I've said repeatedly, I'm not stuck to any particular set of parameters."


https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/39ziy6/eli5_what_will_happen_if_there_is_a_hard_fork/cs7xe9o

Gavin seems to be more reasonable than Mike on this topic and it will be great to see the Formal BIP submitted along with Garzik's BIP 100 and other soon to be pitched proposals. While I think 8MB is entirely reasonable one immediate problem I find with Gavin's plan is with incorporating an automatic doubling of the limit every 2 years which may encourage us to take the easy way out and allow blocks to naturally grow without any urgency to implement other solutions like the lightning network. Peter Todd does make some valid criticisms and we should be careful not to continue to kick the can down the road. 8MB is likely needed however to buy us some time to test other proposals and fix transaction malleability. 

[jeannemadrigal2]

Here's how to arbitrate on the correct decision in this debate:

============================
If payment channels and sidechains didn't exist and if no prospect of them ever existed, how easy would it be to find a consensus over the blocksize revision ?
============================

...that is the question.

People are making a VERY BIG MISTAKE (IMHO) if they bring the wider ecosystem into the equation when weighing up the merits of a blockchain capacity increase. At a systems analysis level, by doing that you're creating a coupling and a dependency on a meta infrastructure that was never part of the original design objectives of a cryptocurrency.

Sure, you could create quite a nicely layered financial system (and no doubt, such a meta infrastructure will emerge eventually), but you then no longer have a blockchain for all. We'll be back to needing Visa and the banks to use it because they'll be the owners of said 'meta infrastructure' which will in no way, shape or form be decentralised.

So if you think the blockchain can stand on its own 2 feet for the next 10 years at a 1 Mb blocksize - sure, defend the status quo. If you don't then support the capacity change, but don't support the status quo because you think that other systems can "front-the load". That logic amounts to:

 • bad systems analysis in de-prioritising the original design objectives (single-tier financial network) in favour of new ones (multi-tier)

 • bad engineering (compromising functional redundancy in favour of strategic commercial priorities)

 • bad politics (re-centralising at a meta-infrastructure level what was decentralised at the blockchain level)

Yes I agree 100%.  If there was not the blockstream conflict of interest then I don't even think there would be a conversation about increased block size, people would just do it because it makes sense, it is needed, and it is stupid not to do it.

[AtheistAKASaneBrain]

https://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg08276.html

Mike & Gavin are desperate to get the full control of the source code by XT fork, so that they can implement address blacklisting to make the regulatory bodies happy. They will most likely be financially benefited to do that. In fact, it is a long term agenda of Hearn & company...

Ref: Freezing BitCoin addresses by regulating miners

If they try to fuck us up big time like that, wouldnt all we would need to do is to abandon the fork and continue with Core or someone else's fork that is legit? the problem of course would be if they bribe big time miners to stay in XT..

[BitUsher]

Yes I agree 100%.  If there was not the blockstream conflict of interest then I don't even think there would be a conversation about increased block size, people would just do it because it makes sense, it is needed, and it is stupid not to do it.

From watching Mike Hearn's interview I believe he is grossly oversimplifying the other developers objections. It is also a bit insulting to suggest that there is a conflict of interest with the blockstream group as sidechains don't address the scalability problems and these same devs were discussing some of the same objections way before blockstream was created.

It may be interesting to hear some of Nick Szabo's concerns with the blocksize increase as well as he is well versed in economics and game theory and is one of the top candidates for being Satoshi:

https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/611259452402987008

[slaveforanunnak1]

Yes I agree 100%.  If there was not the blockstream conflict of interest then I don't even think there would be a conversation about increased block size, people would just do it because it makes sense, it is needed, and it is stupid not to do it.

From watching Mike Hearn's interview I believe he is grossly oversimplifying the other developers objections. It is also a bit insulting to suggest that there is a conflict of interest with the blockstream group as sidechains don't address the scalability problems and these same devs were discussing some of the same objections way before blockstream was created.

It may be interesting to hear some of Nick Szabo's concerns with the blocksize increase as well as he is well versed in economics and game theory and is one of the top candidates for being Satoshi:

https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/611259452402987008

I agree! I wish satoshi would use his p2p account to say somthing right about "I'm not dorian"

[toknormal]

It is also a bit insulting to suggest that there is a conflict of interest with the blockstream group as sidechains don't address the scalability problems

How can you say "sidechains don't address the scalability problems" when you don't even know what sidechain technologies are on the drawing board ?

And what is the point of sidechains anyway if they don't address the scaleability problems amongst others ?

The whole idea of them is to experiment with variations and innovations that would otherwise go into bitcoin but which are potentially too radical to hardfork without maturing for a period outside the native blockchain.

It surely follows - conversely - therefore, that if a blocksize change can help bitcoin scale, it can do the same for a sidechain.

[TECSHARE]

It is also a bit insulting to suggest that there is a conflict of interest with the blockstream group as sidechains don't address the scalability problems

How can you say "sidechains don't address the scalability problems" when you don't even know what sidechain technologies are on the drawing board ?

And what is the point of sidechains anyway if they don't address the scaleability problems amongst others ?

The whole idea of them is to experiment with variations and innovations that would otherwise go into bitcoin but which are potentially too radical to hardfork without maturing for a period outside the native blockchain.

It surely follows - conversely - therefore, that if a blocksize change can help bitcoin scale, it can do the same for a sidechain.

Bitcoin, as the cryptocoin flagship, should not be used as the testing grounds for all these new blockchain technologies, that is what alts are for. If these technologies work on a smaller more expendable coin only THEN should it be implemented into BTC. Bitcoin IS the establishment now, which means it is not as lean and fast as it was when it began. There are too many industries depending on it which may be negatively affected with such experimentation regardless if it was the right choice or not. Alternatively this also solves most of the issues of this debate when done this way, because if it is successful elsewhere then people naturally will support it being added to BTC.

[TPTB_need_war]

maybe the dreaded AOL era is near bitcoin and the next coin will become everything bitcoin wasn't. Unfuckwithable

My recent post history says I know with very high probability that is the case. ETA 3 - 6 months.