In re Bitcoin Devs are idiots

[NegativeNancy]

I don't care and I don't want to hear stupid stories and even more stupid justification. This sort of incompetence is not acceptable for a half billion dollar thing.

If you earnestly believe this is the best you can do, leave.

That's not how it works. If you don't think it's acceptable, you either help fix the problem (something tells me you're not up to that) or YOU leave. If you think the devs are idiots, then I guess the biggest idiot is you, for investing in their work. Toodles.

[Severian]

Banks are playing another league. This is the pro league.

Banks only play that league because they have the guns and the force of law. Recognizing that thugs are good at what they do doesn't mean that it has to be admired or emulated.

[gyverlb]

Only coins moved in the last 3 or 4 hours are in any danger at all. And most likely those transactions will be completely confirmed soon when the miners all switch to 0.7 and the two chains converge.

Till now 12 blocks have passed. which is alot. Don't belittle the problem if I dined in mez grill 1 hours ago paying with Bitcoin. Then an hour later I double spent the coins with a v0.7 bitcoind.

Won't work. All the 0.7 bitcoind node would have seen your previous transaction and would reject the new one. And some people here call the bitcoin devs idiots? They don't even know how the network works.

[lophie]

Only coins moved in the last 3 or 4 hours are in any danger at all. And most likely those transactions will be completely confirmed soon when the miners all switch to 0.7 and the two chains converge.

Till now 12 blocks have passed. which is alot. Don't belittle the problem if I dined in mez grill 1 hours ago paying with Bitcoin. Then an hour later I double spent the coins with a v0.7 bitcoind.

Won't work. All the 0.7 bitcoind node would have seen your previous transaction and would reject the new one. And some people here call the bitcoin devs idiots? They don't even know how the network works.

Smaller window, still possible. and BTW freshmen in software engineering knows that you shouldn't push a change without proper inspection and testing. that is what the testnet is for. My knowledge doesn't matter. Even if I was a monkey. What they did in 0.8 is IDIOCY.

[gyverlb]

Smaller window, still possible. and BTW freshmen in software engineering knows that you shouldn't push a change without proper inspection and testing.

And true engineers in computer science know that no amount of inspection and testing is enough when you want something perfect. Lookup "formal verification" and see for yourself that nobody gives any guarantee in the software industry because it would be so damn costly.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Smaller window, still possible. and BTW freshmen in software engineering knows that you shouldn't push a change without proper inspection and testing. that is what the testnet is for. My knowledge doesn't matter. Even if I was a monkey. What they did in 0.8 is IDIOCY.

You do realize that the flaw was in 0.7 right.  Of course you tested this in v0.7 on testnet six months and posted a bug report right?  v0.7 has always had this flaw.  It wasn't detected or reported by anyone.

[MPOE-PR]

Smaller window, still possible. and BTW freshmen in software engineering knows that you shouldn't push a change without proper inspection and testing. that is what the testnet is for. My knowledge doesn't matter. Even if I was a monkey. What they did in 0.8 is IDIOCY.

You do realize that the flaw was in 0.7 right.  Of course you tested this in v0.7 on testnet six months and posted a bug report right?  v0.7 has always had this flaw.  It wasn't detected or reported by anyone.

And the REASON it was neither detected nor reported is that some idiots THOUGHT it was a good idea to come up with a magic number and limit everything to 250k.

Just as SOMEONE thought it was a good idea to run Bitcoin with a plaintext wallet for 2 years.

The difference between the former and the latter is that I didn't say anything then, because back then nobody of any consequence gave two shits about your little bullshit project here.

And in fact, you probably to this day think running the wallet plaintext was ok.

Reality check. Seriously.

[justusranvier]

The difference between the former and the latter is that I didn't say anything then, because back then nobody of any consequence gave two shits about your little bullshit project here.

Then do something about it. Your business depends on this infrastructure so since you're so big you should be able to spare some investment into fixing the problems, not just identifying them.

[conv3rsion]

Reality check. Seriously.

You know what, talk is fucking cheap. You can bitch all day, or you can put some resources into pushing forward this little experiment of ours. You think the code sucks, or that there are painfully obvious flaws like unencrypted wallet files that go unaddressed for way too long? Fix it.

It's completely open.

Stop bitching, and fix it.

[behindtext]

seems like a pretty clear-cut case of insufficient test coverage.

when testing code, it is especially important to test the corner cases. this sounds like one of those corners, even without looking at the details of the issue.

[markm]

seems like a pretty clear-cut case of insufficient test coverage.

when testing code, it is especially important to test the corner cases. this sounds like one of those corners, even without looking at the details of the issue.

Yeah but apparently bitcoin millionaires cannot afford to get test suites made so it kind of sits there waiting for hard working coders and developers to find some spare time to work on such things.

-MarkM-

[MPOE-PR]

seems like a pretty clear-cut case of insufficient test coverage.

when testing code, it is especially important to test the corner cases. this sounds like one of those corners, even without looking at the details of the issue.

Yeah but apparently bitcoin millionaires cannot afford to get test suites made so it kind of sits there waiting for hard working coders and developers to find some spare time to work on such things.

-MarkM-

15:49  gavinandresen ACTION resists the urge to talk about max block size??? must??? get??? work??? done...

Spare me the circlejerking. If there's time to be flaming Bitcoin users because they're not using Bitcoin "correctly" then there is time to stfu, swallow cox and work the testnet to the bone.

[lophie]

I was here and there on IRC and since the storm started to settle and I started to really look at things the way they are without the nervousness.

I would like to apologize to you all. Especially the devs, They did good and saved the day. thank you. And I am sorry for calling you idiots. You rock. Keep it up 

[Severian]

there is time to stfu, swallow cox and work the testnet to the bone.

So we can surmise that you didn't find this bug either because you were also busy talking?

[MPOE-PR]

there is time to stfu, swallow cox and work the testnet to the bone.

So we can surmise that you didn't find this bug either because you were also busy talking?

Yes, you can surmise exactly that. IT IS MY JOB. I AM DOING MY JOB.

Guess who isn't, and guess what that makes them.

[coqui33]

MPOE-PR: You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the hard fork was caused by something in 0.8. Not so. The block that 0.7 choked on was a valid block. The bug was lurking in 0.7 all along, and was merely uncovered by a 0.8 miner's block. You might as well blame the physician who taps your kneecap to check reflexes, for the bone cancer that he unexpectedly discovers there.

[Severian]

I AM DOING MY JOB.

Maybe you should just be quiet until the grownups fix your toy.

[Monster Tent]

Windows 8 hacked users forced to downgrade to Vista.   

[pera]

Yes, you can surmise exactly that. IT IS MY JOB. I AM DOING MY JOB.

Guess who isn't, and guess what that makes them.

Yeah, I know what you mean... your website have been down for weeks now

[gmaxwell]

Another way to state the real problem: There is no Bitcoin Protocol Spec, most semantics buried in the hairball of the C++ reference implementation

This was actually a good example of something a spec wouldn't help (though would still be good to have). The inconsistent behavior here arose out of 0.8 not faithfully implementing some implicit behavior in BDB. The behavior in question is not anywhere in the Bitcoin code itself, nor is it visible at the interface of BDB and Bitcoin.  If there were a spec it would make no mention of it— and yet the network would be broken all the same.

The key thing is that in a distributed consensus system the most important definition of right is "consistent", this is paramount to all other concerns. A spec is helpful to the extent that it makes it easier to achieve a bit identical consistent behavior in the validation of blocks across all nodes, but because the spec itself can't be executed a spec can never guarantee consistency, at least not in the real world. (well, unless the spec is code— which is effectively what we have, for worse or better)


(And seriously, shad0wbitz etc. Act like an adult here. Your comments are very uncool.)