Bitcoin XT - Officially #REKT (also goes for BIP101 fraud)

[tl121]

and you know what? miners and nodes didn't support his fork. boo hoo. he proved just how decentralized bitcoin development is -- no one controls the code -- and even temporarily garnered some limited support for his fork. but it failed. and the idea that it could achieve 75% hashing power at this point is laughable. if nodes and miners do not support alternative versions, that is not evidence to say that "centralization of development" exists. it only says that unpopular versions are unpopular.

As to miners, the pool that I tried was DDoS'd and had to stop mining BIP101 blocks.  As to nodes the XT node that I was running was DDoS'd.  I am no longer running a full bitcoin node.

Do you believe that how bitcoin works should be controlled by terrorist attacks? Do you support "consensus" based on violence and fear?

[VeritasSapere]

Chain forks or "altforks" are indeed sometimes justified in order to avoid the danger of centralization of power that can develop within a Core development team.

you repeating these misnomers just makes you look foolish. Core developers don't have any power; that's the beauty of the open source decentralized protocol that they are developing. at any time, miners and nodes can throw their weight behind a different version, developed by anyone. they have zero power to control anyone's actions. you and other XT fanboys are just upset that miners and nodes do not support other versions. i suspect the reason that only a tiny minority of loud developers shares your view that "Core is centralized" is that developers by and large have a much more sophisticated understanding of the technical issues, and therefore don't see a "civil war" of sorts as necessary. they'd prefer to continue to collaborate effectively on the bitcoin project; it was clear for many, many months that Hearn became disinterested in collaboration since no one was receptive to his ideas. since bitcoin is open source and development is indeed decentralized, he took the liberty (as anyone can) to fork the code.

and you know what? miners and nodes didn't support his fork. boo hoo. he proved just how decentralized bitcoin development is -- no one controls the code -- and even temporarily garnered some limited support for his fork. but it failed. and the idea that it could achieve 75% hashing power at this point is laughable. if nodes and miners do not support alternative versions, that is not evidence to say that "centralization of development" exists. it only says that unpopular versions are unpopular.

if you believe that a significant portion of miners and nodes will support an alternative version, go develop it. not a developer? well, too bad. because crying about "centralization" when you've no idea what it means won't make the alternative versions you think are so important magically appear. and it certainly doesn't provide any evidence that there is "centralization of power within the Core development team."

I argued that centralization of power can develop within the Core development team, I have not argued that this is presently the case. I do argue however that having the ability to hard fork away from a core development team if we need to is an important mechanism of Bitcoin that allows Bitcoin to remain decentralized and truly free. Based upon what you have said here I would think that you would at least agree with this conception.

how can centralization of power develop, in this context? i argue that it cannot. there is no power. this greatly differs from the protocol-level discussion where the various parties hold some level of power to hold the others accountable (e.g. nodes have the power to enforce the protocol and render a miner's fork invalid). these incentive-induced checks and balances have absolutely fuck-all to do with developers. development is completely external to the protocol, and developers have zero power to enforce code on anyone. all this "centralization" talk in the context of development is a silly red herring to confuse simple-minded people who take the word at face-value without thinking about it.

bitcoin is not closed source. that's the only instance in which developers can hold any power over users, nodes and miners. otherwise the latter parties can simply audit the code and opt to run another version.

Centralization of power is prevented from developing in the Core development team, exactly because of this ability to hard fork away from the Core development team. It is this mechanism that ensures this aspect of Bitcoins freedom. Which is why intrinsically at least it is not wrong to hard fork away from the Core development team.

[figmentofmyass]

and you know what? miners and nodes didn't support his fork. boo hoo. he proved just how decentralized bitcoin development is -- no one controls the code -- and even temporarily garnered some limited support for his fork. but it failed. and the idea that it could achieve 75% hashing power at this point is laughable. if nodes and miners do not support alternative versions, that is not evidence to say that "centralization of development" exists. it only says that unpopular versions are unpopular.

As to miners, the pool that I tried was DDoS'd and had to stop mining BIP101 blocks.  As to nodes the XT node that I was running was DDoS'd.  I am no longer running a full bitcoin node.

Do you believe that how bitcoin works should be controlled by terrorist attacks? Do you support "consensus" based on violence and fear?

lol, what a non-argument. terrorism? anyone could mount a DDOS attack on the bitcoin network, regardless of which version (if any) it might target. how is this relevant in any way?

if nodes (wholesale) can't withstand a DDOS attack, bitcoin isn't very robust, is it? indeed, there are various optimizations that could and should be implemented to assist in withstanding DDOS. feel free to contribute code to assist.

if nodes can be DDOSed to the extent that overall node health (and decentralization) are threatened, that has fuck-all to do with "centralization of development." it simply means improvements to the protocol need be made.

if you'd like to run XT, you ought to push Gavin and Hearn (and whoever else may be contributing to XT) to make it far more resilient to DDOS than it is. they are the only ones to blame for its shortcomings. if XT is to be a replacement for Core, it is incumbent on XT developers to address these issues, and all issues that might threaten bitcoin's robustness. i would question whether they are capable of that, especially considering the bugs in XT's implementation.

[figmentofmyass]

I argued that centralization of power can develop within the Core development team

Centralization of power can not develop in the Core development team, exactly because of this ability to hard fork away from the Core development team. It is this mechanism that ensures this aspect of Bitcoins freedom. Which is why intrinsically at least it is not wrong to hard fork away from the Core development team.

on the bolded: oh. lol. glad we cleared that up. now if only Peter R could understand that, and stop spamming his pie charts in the face of reason.

the only context in which this "mechanism" need be mentioned at all is if bitcoin were closed source. that is an impossibility at this point.

no one said it was wrong to hard fork (that is very different from criticizing the merits of a particular hard fork). opponents of XT have been telling you guys to fork off for months now. that doesn't mean that when you keep on arguing for XT based on misinformation and fallacy, that we won't explain reality to you (and those who read these threads).

[VeritasSapere]

I argued that centralization of power can develop within the Core development team

Centralization of power is prevented from developing in the Core development team, exactly because of this ability to hard fork away from the Core development team. It is this mechanism that ensures this aspect of Bitcoins freedom. Which is why intrinsically at least it is not wrong to hard fork away from the Core development team.

on the bolded: oh. lol. glad we cleared that up. now if only Peter R could understand that, and stop spamming his pie charts in the face of reason.

the only context in which this "mechanism" need be mentioned at all is if bitcoin were closed source. that is an impossibility at this point.

no one said it was wrong to hard fork (that is very different from criticizing the merits of a particular hard fork). opponents of XT have been telling you guys to fork off for months now. that doesn't mean that when you keep on arguing for XT based on misinformation and fallacy, that we won't explain reality to you (and those who read these threads).

I think that Peter R makes good points.

I did adjust that last statement slightly in order to make it more consistent with what I am saying.

Well some people do argue that it is wrong to hard fork, especially away from the Core development team. Which is why I made these arguments in the first place. If enough people believed that it would be wrong to hard fork away from the core developer team then this would cause centralization of power, not because of technical or systemic reasons but because of social and cultural reasons, you could even say human reasons which are often flawed. It is true that the mechanism to prevent this exists within Bitcoin, however if not enough people properly understand this, then this mechanism can be rendered ineffective and cause problems which in effect could cause a disproportionate amount of influence and power centered around the Core development team. A technocracy if you will.

I am not arguing on misinformation and fallacy, if I am please point it out to me.

[figmentofmyass]

I argued that centralization of power can develop within the Core development team

Centralization of power can not develop in the Core development team, exactly because of this ability to hard fork away from the Core development team. It is this mechanism that ensures this aspect of Bitcoins freedom. Which is why intrinsically at least it is not wrong to hard fork away from the Core development team.

on the bolded: oh. lol. glad we cleared that up. now if only Peter R could understand that, and stop spamming his pie charts in the face of reason.

the only context in which this "mechanism" need be mentioned at all is if bitcoin were closed source. that is an impossibility at this point.

no one said it was wrong to hard fork (that is very different from criticizing the merits of a particular hard fork). opponents of XT have been telling you guys to fork off for months now. that doesn't mean that when you keep on arguing for XT based on misinformation and fallacy, that we won't explain reality to you (and those who read these threads).

I think that Peter R makes good points.

Well some people do argue that it is wrong to hard fork, especially away from the Core development team. Which is why I made these arguments in the first place. If enough people believed that it would be wrong to hard fork away from the core developer team then this would cause centralization of power, not because of technical or systemic reasons but because of social and cultural reasons, you could even say human reasons which are often flawed. It is true that the mechanism to prevent this exists within Bitcoin, however if not enough people properly understand this, then this mechanism can be rendered ineffective and cause problems which in effect could cause a disproportionate amount of influence and power centered around the Core development team. A technocracy if you will.

I am not arguing on misinformation and fallacy, if I am please point it out to me.

i've seen nothing compelling from Peter R. ever. but that's neither here nor there.

i haven't seen many people at all suggesting that "it is wrong to hard fork." could you point to any examples? in fact, i've seen quite the opposite from XT opponents. i'd love for you guys to fork now with a mining minority, so we can write the epilogue on this embarrassing chapter in bitcoin's history, when a group of developers tried to use populism to break consensus.

i've seen many suggesting that it is wrong to promote a contentious hard fork, because it threatens to break the consensus mechanism. that's a lot more risky than forking with a hashing minority. in the latter case, XT will just die as any invalid chain does (perhaps its life could be temporarily extended with checkpoints). in the former case, we would have multiple surviving blockchains.

the specific misinformation i was speaking of here was your assertion that "power" could be "centralized" among Core developers. that's patently false, as i pointed out. stop using it as a way to rationalize promoting implementations that lack merit. you repeatedly do this: when someone criticizes the merit of XT (for whatever reason -- node centralization, increased latencies, bandwidth/storage limitations, IP blacklists, etc) you concoct this falsehood that "supporting anything besides Core" is rational in order to "decentralize" development. ive made clear this does absolutely nothing to "decentralize" development; by definition, open source development is decentralized. so, in effect, you are using a patently false argument to baselessly argue in favor of XT. further, erroneously projecting "centralization" onto Core is no mistake, as it has a loaded connotation among bitcoiners. this is a pretty dishonest form of debate, hence "misinformation" and "fallacy."

if you fear that people don't properly understand that bitcoin is open source and will blindly follow any implementation they are told to, that doesn't amount to centralization of power. the developers still have no power to force anyone to do anything. peoples' ignorance does not change that. if i build myself a cage to live inside of, and convince myself that the Core developers "made me do it," it doesn't follow that the Core developers are imprisoning me. this is just a bizarre roundabout way of blaming developers for other peoples' ignorance. and it has no basis in logic.

an "open source" project implies vigilance by those who use it. if you want to spend your time passing out flyers about what "open source" means, so that people understand, good on you. but this has fuck-all to do with centralization.

now, we are talking about "centralization" in the context of "development of the Bitcoin codebase." if you want to argue that the process within the development of a specific version is centralized, you'd be correct. but that applies to Core and XT both -- as well as any code updates to any engineering project. if there is no centralized review process within specific versions, unaudited code could be released at any time, meaning that anyone could hijack any version at will (whether that means increasing the 21 million coin supply, or anything else)..... this, of course, has no bearing on anyone's ability to develop alternative versions, nor on the decentralization of the protocol.

[tl121]

if nodes (wholesale) can't withstand a DDOS attack, bitcoin isn't very robust, is it? indeed, there are various optimizations that could and should be implemented to assist in withstanding DDOS. feel free to contribute code to assist.

if nodes can be DDOSed to the extent that overall node health (and decentralization) are threatened, that has fuck-all to do with "centralization of development." it simply means improvements to the protocol need be made.

Tell it to my neighbors.  Their Internet service was taken down for several hours.  The criminals DDoS'd the entire ISP, not just my node.  If my node had been DDoS'd that would have been an annoyance,  but I would not have called it a terrorist attack if there had been no collateral damage.

I have talked to customers of my ISP who experienced the Internet outage.  They know nothing about Bitcoin and are not interested in it.  Their experience was collateral damage.  Not just Internet service but also telephone service was disrupted because of this criminal attack.  People could conceivably have died.  Wake up.  Grow up.

[muyuu]

if nodes (wholesale) can't withstand a DDOS attack, bitcoin isn't very robust, is it? indeed, there are various optimizations that could and should be implemented to assist in withstanding DDOS. feel free to contribute code to assist.

if nodes can be DDOSed to the extent that overall node health (and decentralization) are threatened, that has fuck-all to do with "centralization of development." it simply means improvements to the protocol need be made.

Tell it to my neighbors.  Their Internet service was taken down for several hours.  The criminals DDoS'd the entire ISP, not just my node.  If my node had been DDoS'd that would have been an annoyance,  but I would not have called it a terrorist attack if there had been no collateral damage.

I have talked to customers of my ISP who experienced the Internet outage.  They know nothing about Bitcoin and are not interested in it.  Their experience was collateral damage.  Not just Internet service but also telephone service was disrupted because of this criminal attack.  People could conceivably have died.  Wake up.  Grow up.

This is why we want Bitcoin nodes running in as many ISPs as humanly possible. Ideally on every ISP (although one wouldn't make it such a hard requirement that the system is unpractical).

In the end in a system with so many different constraints and where some of them are hard to measure or even agree to a target on, judgement calls need to be made.

[figmentofmyass]

if nodes (wholesale) can't withstand a DDOS attack, bitcoin isn't very robust, is it? indeed, there are various optimizations that could and should be implemented to assist in withstanding DDOS. feel free to contribute code to assist.

if nodes can be DDOSed to the extent that overall node health (and decentralization) are threatened, that has fuck-all to do with "centralization of development." it simply means improvements to the protocol need be made.

Tell it to my neighbors.  Their Internet service was taken down for several hours.  The criminals DDoS'd the entire ISP, not just my node.  If my node had been DDoS'd that would have been an annoyance,  but I would not have called it a terrorist attack if there had been no collateral damage.

I have talked to customers of my ISP who experienced the Internet outage.  They know nothing about Bitcoin and are not interested in it.  Their experience was collateral damage.  Not just Internet service but also telephone service was disrupted because of this criminal attack.  People could conceivably have died.  Wake up.  Grow up.

i'm at a loss for words, really. how is it that you can blame Core developers because some entity decided to coordinate a DDOS attack? i understand that it sucks to be DDOSed, but you're not saying anything relevant to the topic at hand. what does you (and your neighbors) getting DDOSed have to do with anything?

this is like me getting DDOSed and blaming the Chinese government because i have some idea in my head that they might benefit from disrupting stateside communications.

i'm not gonna tell it to your neighbors. your neighbors should tell it to their ISP. it's now Greg Maxwell and Peter Todd's fault that your ISP has insufficient infrastructure to deal with DDOS?

and what if Core nodes were the target, not XT? then, it's Gavin and Hearn's fault, right? and therefore XT is the problem, right? i believe that's the logic being used here.....

the next time your ISP goes down, are you really gonna keep spinning your wheels about how Core development is centralized? that's one of the most absurd arguments i've ever seen.

[tl121]

This is why we want Bitcoin nodes running in as many ISPs as humanly possible. Ideally on every ISP (although one wouldn't make it such a hard requirement that the system is unpractical).

In the end in a system with so many different constraints and where some of them are hard to measure or even agree to a target on, judgement calls need to be made.

I live in a rural valley supported by only one ISP.  They have 10 GHz connectivity to their upstream provider.  The DDoS attack completely saturated this connection.  Presumably with better software in the upstream provider's router the attack could have been confined and it would only have taken out my personal Internet service.  (I have had conversations with the head of my ISP's tech support, who positively confirmed what happened.)  I know who their provider is, but I don't know the make and model of the carrier grade router at the end of this fiber optic link. So I haven't investigated further to see what could be done.  Personally, I believe the lack of suitable defense is my ISP's upstream provider's fault, but for all I know their router vendor might not supply the necessary features, which would be trivial to implement, at least for a single attacked IP address.  Unfortunately, because of the sorry state of telecommunications monopoly in the US, my ISP's upstream provider is a very large telecommunications company and if they are not providing proper DDoS support to their smaller ISP customers, your good suggestion as to having many ISPs supporting full nodes would not necessarily help.

If you have any suggestions as to a future conversation I might have with my ISP, I would definitely appreciate your suggestions.  The people involved were overwhelmed by the magnitude of the DDoS attack that my XT node brought on. They had seen large DDoS attacks, but none of a size sufficient to totally overwhelm their network capacity before the attack on my bitcoin node.

If by some unlikely chance, you know of some way to track down and identify the miscreants, then that would be interesting too, but I'm not really sure I want to know the details, because they might provoke me to do something really stupid in retaliation.

[iCEBREAKER]

My original thread ended up moderated into the Altcoins sub, but I'm taking the content to the main forum anyway....

"Libertarian" bitcoiners are beginning to out themselves as XT/101 shills:

Because Libertarians and anarchists would never support a ridiculous, corporatist 1MBcap fee subsidy.
That's something for subsidiots.

Libertarians tend to be economically literate, and often astutely so.

Thus we know better than to indulge in the false efficiencies of larger blocks which shunt their intrinsic externalities off onto node operators.

[muyuu]

the next time your ISP goes down, are you really gonna keep spinning your wheels about how Core development is centralized? that's one of the most absurd arguments i've ever seen.

That didn't even occur to me, is that really what he's intending to mean? (I've skipped some of the nonsense). If so... holy shit.

If an ISP can easily go down for running Bitcoin, or XT, or Dogecoin, or whatever, then surely the lesson is that you cannot let nodes run in just a few different ISPs and expect a truly mission-critical level of reliability in the system as a whole.

P2P networks are strongly dependant on their "security in numbers" model, and in the diversity of these numbers because if they are all reduced to a single kind of localised attack - for instance a legal, jurisdictional attack - then effectively they are not many for the purposes of this attack.

Another point is that currently the block size is too big to allow effectively hiding nodes behind Tor or other IP-layer obfuscating system. The protocol requires too much traffic for that to be remotely feasible already with 500KB+ blocks and current generation home broadband, anywhere.

[tl121]

if nodes (wholesale) can't withstand a DDOS attack, bitcoin isn't very robust, is it? indeed, there are various optimizations that could and should be implemented to assist in withstanding DDOS. feel free to contribute code to assist.

if nodes can be DDOSed to the extent that overall node health (and decentralization) are threatened, that has fuck-all to do with "centralization of development." it simply means improvements to the protocol need be made.

Tell it to my neighbors.  Their Internet service was taken down for several hours.  The criminals DDoS'd the entire ISP, not just my node.  If my node had been DDoS'd that would have been an annoyance,  but I would not have called it a terrorist attack if there had been no collateral damage.

I have talked to customers of my ISP who experienced the Internet outage.  They know nothing about Bitcoin and are not interested in it.  Their experience was collateral damage.  Not just Internet service but also telephone service was disrupted because of this criminal attack.  People could conceivably have died.  Wake up.  Grow up.

i'm at a loss for words, really. how is it that you can blame Core developers because some entity decided to coordinate a DDOS attack? i understand that it sucks to be DDOSed, but you're not saying anything relevant to the topic at hand. what does you (and your neighbors) getting DDOSed have to do with anything?

this is like me getting DDOSed and blaming the Chinese government because i have some idea in my head that they might benefit from disrupting stateside communications.

i'm not gonna tell it to your neighbors. your neighbors should tell it to their ISP. it's now Greg Maxwell and Peter Todd's fault that your ISP has insufficient infrastructure to deal with DDOS?

and what if Core nodes were the target, not XT? then, it's Gavin and Hearn's fault, right? and therefore XT is the problem, right? i believe that's the logic being used here.....

the next time your ISP goes down, are you really gonna keep spinning your wheels about how Core development is centralized? that's one of the most absurd arguments i've ever seen.

You made the argument about popularity of software, based on node counts.  I pointed out that node counts were affected by terrorism.  Any intelligent person would see that node counts are not a reliable reflection of community support because of this situation.   Any intelligent person without an ulterior motive would not have replied the way you did.

[muyuu]

You made the argument about popularity of software, based on node counts.  I pointed out that node counts were affected by terrorism.  Any intelligent person would see that node counts are not a reliable reflection of community support because of this situation.   Any intelligent person without an ulterior motive would not have replied the way you did.

Hahaha terrorism.

Leaving the hilarity aside, node count was never reliable to begin with as anyone with a bit of time to set up a pseudonode can verify. Nodes are Sybil-vulnerable, like reddit votes.

This is why Bitcoin works, and it does on PoW. As far as PoW goes, 0 out of 1000. Zero. Nothing. Nada.

[iCEBREAKER]

Looks like poor ol Mike didn't get his way in his attempt to stonewall CLTV 

OH THE GLORIOUS SCHADENFREUDE!   

The CLTV pull marks the end of the line for the Gavinista putsch.  CSV will be its obituary.  Let the grave dancing (re)commence!

Not only did they fail to remake Bitcoin in the preferred Gmail schema of hearn@sigint.google.mil, they also failed to paralyze the progress of real, orthogonal scaling.

It's a total loss for Team Gavincoin, and a stunning victory for Team Satoshi.

[iCEBREAKER]

and you know what? miners and nodes didn't support his fork. boo hoo. he proved just how decentralized bitcoin development is -- no one controls the code -- and even temporarily garnered some limited support for his fork. but it failed. and the idea that it could achieve 75% hashing power at this point is laughable. if nodes and miners do not support alternative versions, that is not evidence to say that "centralization of development" exists. it only says that unpopular versions are unpopular.

As to miners, the pool that I tried was DDoS'd and had to stop mining BIP101 blocks.  As to nodes the XT node that I was running was DDoS'd.  I am no longer running a full bitcoin node.

Do you believe that how bitcoin works should be controlled by terrorist attacks? Do you support "consensus" based on violence and fear?

99% of people sufficiently privileged to run a full node have never experienced a single moment of "violence and fear" much less a "terrorist attack."

Please stop painting yourself with the victimology brush.  It's quite unseemly.

It is the pinnacle of hilarity that your stupid XT pool/node got hit with tungsten/platinum space rods dropped from orbit.

You expected what, a parade in your honor?  Glory?  Gratitude?

Humor is the difference between the expected and the actual.  So when you Gavinistas' "brave" attempted defections achieved nothing but anguish, the lulzometer got pegged at max output.

You really thought BTC's existing multi-billion-dollar socioeconomic consensus would just let you attack their system without consequences?

ZOMG, you are such an idiot.  You should sue your teachers and parents for raising a supremely clueless snowflake of unprecedented brittleness.

Of course the XT putsch got stomped into the ground.  Bitcoin would have failed long ago if a couple of hosers from Sand Hill Road and Ft. Meade could hijack the project.

If XT can't survive a bit of UDP funs, it is not anti-fragile and thus unworthy to ascend to Bitcoin's golden throne.

[muyuu]

Of course the XT putsch got stomped into the ground.  Bitcoin would have failed long ago if a couple of hosers from Sand Hill Road and Ft. Meade could hijack the project.

The ultimate source of laughing material these days is "Bitcoin-U" https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin_unlimited/comments/3jly8t/introducing_bitcoin_unlimited/
https://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoin_unlimited/comments/3kzt10/bitcoinu_software_implementation_plans/

EDIT: oh, and Gavin's Alliance 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3pxgof/psa_the_efforts_of_such_groups_as_the_orwellian/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3pzga5/andreas_antonopoulos_blockchain_alliance_is_a/

[iCEBREAKER]

if nodes (wholesale) can't withstand a DDOS attack, bitcoin isn't very robust, is it? indeed, there are various optimizations that could and should be implemented to assist in withstanding DDOS. feel free to contribute code to assist.

if nodes can be DDOSed to the extent that overall node health (and decentralization) are threatened, that has fuck-all to do with "centralization of development." it simply means improvements to the protocol need be made.

Tell it to my neighbors.  Their Internet service was taken down for several hours.  The criminals DDoS'd the entire ISP, not just my node.  If my node had been DDoS'd that would have been an annoyance,  but I would not have called it a terrorist attack if there had been no collateral damage.

I have talked to customers of my ISP who experienced the Internet outage.  They know nothing about Bitcoin and are not interested in it.  Their experience was collateral damage.  Not just Internet service but also telephone service was disrupted because of this criminal attack.  People could conceivably have died.  Wake up.  Grow up.

You are surprised that you can't freely attack Bitcoin's ~$4 BILLION socioeconomic consensus without incurring adverse consequences?  What a failure of parenting you represent.

Please explain to your neighbors the reason their internet was down is that you wanted to play at being some kind of big-shot decision maker, and "bravely" endeavored to use your common ISP as a platform to attack a highly successful experiment-in-progress that is supported by the most technologically advanced (and highly ideological) people on the planet.

I'm sure they will appreciate being dragged into your (elective, losing) political battles.

"Collateral damage?"

Temporary internet outage is not collateral damage.  Could you possibly feel any more sorry for yourself, and conceivably use words more emotionally provocative to express your overweening butthurt?

Next time, be a good neighbor and consider the consequences of your actions before making your community suffer for your trespasses.

At least use a VPN.   

[iCEBREAKER]

[irresponsible self-pity]

i'm at a loss for words, really. how is it that you can blame Core developers because some entity decided to coordinate a DDOS attack? i understand that it sucks to be DDOSed, but you're not saying anything relevant to the topic at hand. what does you (and your neighbors) getting DDOSed have to do with anything?

this is like me getting DDOSed and blaming the Chinese government because i have some idea in my head that they might benefit from disrupting stateside communications.

i'm not gonna tell it to your neighbors. your neighbors should tell it to their ISP. it's now Greg Maxwell and Peter Todd's fault that your ISP has insufficient infrastructure to deal with DDOS?

and what if Core nodes were the target, not XT? then, it's Gavin and Hearn's fault, right? and therefore XT is the problem, right? i believe that's the logic being used here.....

the next time your ISP goes down, are you really gonna keep spinning your wheels about how Core development is centralized? that's one of the most absurd arguments i've ever seen.

Yes, "the most absurd arguments [we've] ever seen" are par for the XT course.  

tl121's ISP wasn't randomly selected for DDOS.  It *ONLY* happened because tl121 asked, and indeed begged, for it.  He painted a target on his "rural valley's" back, then went into Quelle Horreur mode when someone decided to rise to his challenge.

This fucking n00b thinks he gets to decide the fate of Bitcoin (thereby overruling the existing majority's consensus), yet can't bother to use a VPN?  Jesus wept.  

[VeritasSapere]

I argued that centralization of power can develop within the Core development team

Centralization of power can not develop in the Core development team, exactly because of this ability to hard fork away from the Core development team. It is this mechanism that ensures this aspect of Bitcoins freedom. Which is why intrinsically at least it is not wrong to hard fork away from the Core development team.

on the bolded: oh. lol. glad we cleared that up. now if only Peter R could understand that, and stop spamming his pie charts in the face of reason.

the only context in which this "mechanism" need be mentioned at all is if bitcoin were closed source. that is an impossibility at this point.

no one said it was wrong to hard fork (that is very different from criticizing the merits of a particular hard fork). opponents of XT have been telling you guys to fork off for months now. that doesn't mean that when you keep on arguing for XT based on misinformation and fallacy, that we won't explain reality to you (and those who read these threads).

I think that Peter R makes good points.

Well some people do argue that it is wrong to hard fork, especially away from the Core development team. Which is why I made these arguments in the first place. If enough people believed that it would be wrong to hard fork away from the core developer team then this would cause centralization of power, not because of technical or systemic reasons but because of social and cultural reasons, you could even say human reasons which are often flawed. It is true that the mechanism to prevent this exists within Bitcoin, however if not enough people properly understand this, then this mechanism can be rendered ineffective and cause problems which in effect could cause a disproportionate amount of influence and power centered around the Core development team. A technocracy if you will.

I am not arguing on misinformation and fallacy, if I am please point it out to me.

I haven't seen many people at all suggesting that "it is wrong to hard fork." could you point to any examples?

There are many examples of this, I have been arguing this point since I have entered this discussion, most recently:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1207863.msg12729484#msg12729484

This person thinks that changing Bitcoin would kill Bitcoin, not exactly the same granted however it is the most recent post I remember and I am rather fond of my response, rather poetic wouldn't you say?

In fact, i've seen quite the opposite from XT opponents. i'd love for you guys to fork now with a mining minority, so we can write the epilogue on this embarrassing chapter in bitcoin's history, when a group of developers tried to use populism to break consensus.

That is a ridiculous thing to say, Bitcoin XT does break the consensus mechanism and I will repeat again that XT will only cause Bitcoin to fork if 75% consensus is reached.

i've seen many suggesting that it is wrong to promote a contentious hard fork, because it threatens to break the consensus mechanism. that's a lot more risky than forking with a hashing minority. in the latter case, XT will just die as any invalid chain does (perhaps its life could be temporarily extended with checkpoints). in the former case, we would have multiple surviving blockchains.

It is not wrong to support a contentious hard fork. In the same sense that it is not wrong to support a contentious political party. The definition of contentious being "causing or likely to cause an argument; controversial." Synonyms of contentious are controversial, disputable, debatable, disputed, contended, open to question/debate. I do not think that these things should be considered wrong to support, furthermore who decides what is considered contentious? If anything this is actually a good example of a mentality that does promote group think so to speak.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

The similarities with the Bitcoin community and group think are uncanny. You have actually inspired me to further research this, really take a look for yourself in the wiki article, even if this is not the case with the current blocksize debate this could very well cause other problems down the line, we do need to make important decisions collectively that will determine the future of Bitcoin after all.

the specific misinformation i was speaking of here was your assertion that "power" could be "centralized" among Core developers. that's patently false

That is not misinformation since "power" becoming to "centralized" among Core developers is a complex and nuanced multifaceted issue, even subjective. Therefore you can not say it is false as if it is some sort of fact, since we can not objectively measure or observe such things using scientific methods, this type of thinking is in the realm of the humanities. Which is why I felt like I could contribute to this discussion with my background in political philosophy, especially considering that most people in our community have technical backgrounds. You can of course say that you disagree, but that is different to saying that something is false.

stop using it as a way to rationalize promoting implementations that lack merit. you repeatedly do this: when someone criticizes the merit of XT (for whatever reason -- node centralization, increased latencies, bandwidth/storage limitations, IP blacklists, etc) you concoct this falsehood that "supporting anything besides Core" is rational in order to "decentralize" development.

This is not true, I have actually addressed these issues you mention and there are certainly pros and cons to increasing the blocksize, it is certainly not clear cut and it should indeed be a balancing act. I have also never said that I "support anything besides Core", to be clear this is not what I believe.

Ive made clear this does absolutely nothing to "decentralize" development; by definition, open source development is decentralized. so, in effect, you are using a patently false argument to baselessly argue in favor of XT.

Decentralization is not necessarily that easily measured, it is a spectrum after all. I have also never used decentralization of development as an argument in favor of XT. I support BIP101 because I think that increasing the blocksize according to the schedule in BIP101 is better then not increasing the blocksize at all. I do use decentralization of development and freedom as justifications for supporting BIP101 when confronted with the accusation that it is wrong for me to choose an alternative implementation because it is contentious.

further, erroneously projecting "centralization" onto Core is no mistake, as it has a loaded connotation among bitcoiners. this is a pretty dishonest form of debate, hence "misinformation" and "fallacy."

Because I am using a fairly subjective term like "centralization" which you think is erroneous. You think I am therefore "dishonestly" using "misinformation" and "fallacy". First of all it is obviously not misinformation as I explained before, secondly I do not see the fallacy, you should at least tell me what logical fallacy I am using or explain how what I am saying is a logical fallacy. I can give you an example, calling me dishonest is a case of ad hominem.

if you fear that people don't properly understand that bitcoin is open source and will blindly follow any implementation they are told to, that doesn't amount to centralization of power. the developers still have no power to force anyone to do anything. peoples' ignorance does not change that.

Peoples ignorance does change that. Modern democracies are a great example of this, their dysfunction is largely fueled by peoples apathy and ignorance.

if i build myself a cage to live inside of, and convince myself that the Core developers "made me do it," it doesn't follow that the Core developers are imprisoning me. this is just a bizarre roundabout way of blaming developers for other peoples' ignorance. and it has no basis in logic.

Many people today live in a cage that they do not know they can break out off, this is true for the present political system, even though it is based on their ignorance it still empowers the status quo.

In the same way if more people thought in the bizarre way that you described it would still give more "power" to the core development team even if just in the form of influence, which can be seen as a type of centralization of power.

an "open source" project implies vigilance by those who use it. if you want to spend your time passing out flyers about what "open source" means, so that people understand, good on you. but this has fuck-all to do with centralization.

Bitcoin is far more then just open source in regards to decentralization. The consensus mechanism allows for much more complex and robust decision making processes to take place, the possibilities of which we are only just starting to explore. This blocksize debate has allowed the politics of Bitcoin to mature, but I suspect we still have a long way to go before this social experiment runs its course.

now, we are talking about "centralization" in the context of "development of the Bitcoin codebase." if you want to argue that the process within the development of a specific version is centralized, you'd be correct. but that applies to Core and XT both -- as well as any code updates to any engineering project. if there is no centralized review process within specific versions, unaudited code could be released at any time

So you are saying that we need a centralized review process within specific versions which is therefore centralized, which applies to Core and XT, I can agree with that. However extending that logic I can say that two centralized review processes are more decentralized then just one. I can even go further and say that the more of these centralized review processes are started through more alternative implementations it would make development even more decentralized. I do not see how this logic can be flawed, in the same sense that two nodes are more decentralized then one, increasing the node count increased decentralization, the same is true for Bitcoin development.

if there is no centralized review process within specific versions, unaudited code could be released at any time, meaning that anyone could hijack any version at will (whether that means increasing the 21 million coin supply, or anything else)..... this, of course, has no bearing on anyone's ability to develop alternative versions, nor on the decentralization of the protocol.

Thinking that we should only have one of these centralized review process so that people can no longer "hijack" Bitcoin and make any changes is inconsistent with the principles of decentralization. It is also completely missing the point of the Bitcoin consensus mechanism to think that if we do not have a centralized review process that the supply of Bitcoin will be increased. Bitcoin is meant to be distributed, decision making collective, psychology and game theory align incentive. This is why we do not need a centralized review process, at least not in the form of a singular one since that is the very definition of centralization after all.

I support BIP101 however I do not favor it, If BIP100 where implemented I would support that instead.