Gavin to Satoshi, 2010 -- "SOMEBODY will try to mess up the network (...)"

[pereira4]

I don't believe a second, compatible implementation of Bitcoin will ever be a good idea.  So much of the design depends on all nodes getting exactly identical results in lockstep that a second implementation would be a menace to the network.  The MIT license is compatible with all other licenses and commercial uses, so there is no need to rewrite it from a licensing standpoint.

Good idea or not, SOMEBODY will try to mess up the network (or co-opt it for their own use) sooner or later.  They'll either hack the existing code or write their own version, and will be a menace to the network.

I admire the flexibility of the scripts-in-a-transaction scheme, but my evil little mind immediately starts to think of ways I might abuse it.  I could encode all sorts of interesting information in the TxOut script, and if non-hacked clients validated-and-then-ignored those transactions it would be a useful covert broadcast communication channel.

That's a cool feature until it gets popular and somebody decides it would be fun to flood the payment network with millions of transactions to transfer the latest Lady Gaga video to all their friends...

A second version would be a massive development and maintenance hassle for me.  It's hard enough maintaining backward compatibility while upgrading the network without a second version locking things in.  If the second version screwed up, the user experience would reflect badly on both, although it would at least reinforce to users the importance of staying with the official version.  If someone was getting ready to fork a second version, I would have to air a lot of disclaimers about the risks of using a minority version.  This is a design where the majority version wins if there's any disagreement, and that can be pretty ugly for the minority version and I'd rather not go into it, and I don't have to as long as there's only one version.

I know, most developers don't like their software forked, but I have real technical reasons in this case.

I admire the flexibility of the scripts-in-a-transaction scheme, but my evil little mind immediately starts to think of ways I might abuse it.  I could encode all sorts of interesting information in the TxOut script, and if non-hacked clients validated-and-then-ignored those transactions it would be a useful covert broadcast communication channel.

That's a cool feature until it gets popular and somebody decides it would be fun to flood the payment network with millions of transactions to transfer the latest Lady Gaga video to all their friends...

That's one of the reasons for transaction fees.  There are other things we can do if necessary.

How long have you been working on this design Satoshi?  It seems very well thought out, not the kind of thing you just sit down and code up without doing a lot of brainstorming and discussion on it first.  Everyone has the obvious questions looking for holes in it but it is holding up well

Since 2007.  At some point I became convinced there was a way to do this without any trust required at all and couldn't resist to keep thinking about it.  Much more of the work was designing than coding.

Fortunately, so far all the issues raised have been things I previously considered and planned for.

Well well well, what do we have there? Look at this amazing piece of history.

Gavin Andressen, back when he was reasonable, pointing out how people would try to flood the network with trash.

Then satoshi, pointing out how basically BU would be a disaster.

How times change. Now a post-CIA Gavin is pushing this BU trash and supporting Jihan Wu and the rest of idiots flooding the network with garbage to try to force the BU nonsense as a solution.

Gavin and BUcoiners exposed again by Gavin and satoshi himself.

Here's further exposing of Gavin in pre-CIA times, talking about the evils that he is now promoting, and pointing out how merchants and nodes control bitcoin, not Jihan Wu's monopoly:

I very much doubt that any one entity will ever have 50% of the computational power. The botnet operators will bow to the whims of the community because it's the community that ultimately gives bitcoins value. What good is a giant load of bitcoins if you don't have anyone willing to give you something in exchange for them?

Eventually the largest merchants and money exchangers will control what is "standard" bitcoin.

Take the "50-coiners" scenario, and imagine that they manage to get 75% of the CPU power on their side.

But imagine that the biggest merchants and money exchangers are more conservative, and are in the 25% minority.  I think they will be-- I don't think they'll be the ones in the business of generating coins (they'll be busy selling products or doing the exchange thing).

What happens?

Well, the block chain splits.  Transactions using coins minted before the split will get added to both block chains, and accepted by everybody.

Transactions involving "50-coins" (generated after the split) will be accepted on the 50-coin chain, rejected on the 25-coin chain.  And vice-versa.

"50-coiners" would quickly find out that they couldn't get rid of their newly minted money because who wants bitcoins that are rejected by the biggest money exchangers or merchants?

If the big merchants and money exchangers disagreed, I bet you'd see Bitcoin clients that ONLY accepted pre-split coins and did no coin generation (since those transactions would be accepted by everybody).  If it was never resolved, I think the number of Bitcoins at the time of the split would become "the number of Bitcoins, period,"  because most people will not want to use money that is accepted some places and not others.

Replace "50-coiners" with BUcoiners and 25-coin with Core. There you have it.

Check the tweets here too:

https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/how-bitcoin-unlimited-btu-will-be-erased-169977ecb3bb#.8lzo1psxc

Get ready to dump BUcoin and double your BTC stack if the unfortunate event happens.

[1715204761]

1715204761

[jonald_fyookball]

What does BU have to do with the TxOut script referenced in your quote?

Nothing.

Do you even know what you're talking about?

[AngryDwarf]

It's an interesting conversation. But back then I presume Satoshi was designer, miner, node, user, developer (judge jury and executioner all in one). I am lead to believe he would be putting in blocksize increasing code when needed. But this isn't happening.

[pereira4]

What does BU have to do with the TxOut script referenced in your quote?

Nothing.

Do you even know what you're talking about?

It was 100% probability that you or franky1 would make the first reply (shitpost). I hope Roger Ver-y Poor is paying you well.

You of course choose to ignore the fact that satoshi basically said fees are there for a reason, and how the idea of a secondary software is stupid.

Keep dreaming, BU is already dead, so is Jihan Wu and anyone that tries to fuck around too much.

[AngryDwarf]

Look up incentive section in the white paper. Block rewards are the initial incentive, followed by fee competition between miners (to keep fees low).
No mention of creating artificial scarcity in the blockchain to start a fee war between users, or did I miss it?

[jonald_fyookball]

What does BU have to do with the TxOut script referenced in your quote?

Nothing.

Do you even know what you're talking about?

It was 100% probability that you or franky1 would make the first reply (shitpost). I hope Roger Ver-y Poor is paying you well.

You of course choose to ignore the fact that satoshi basically said fees are there for a reason, and how the idea of a secondary software is stupid.

Keep dreaming, BU is already dead, so is Jihan Wu and anyone that tries to fuck around too much.

so basically.... no.... you don't know what you're talking about.

Nothing in the protocol changes about fees under BU.  They will operate as they've operated for years.

Gavin has always had a different opinion from Satoshi on multiple implementations and we've had those
for years as well.  Don't forget: even now, the 25% of the hashing power that comes from BU is already
putting blocks in the chain even if the blocksize is under 1mb for the moment.

[Lauda]

This statement has become quite ironic, hasn't it?

[Carlton Banks]

Don't forget: even now, the 25% of the hashing power that comes from BU is already
putting blocks in the chain even if the blocksize is under 1mb for the moment

BU will have 100% of it's own hashrate, when it actually becomes a coin. It might happen sooner than anyone expects


Bitcoiners hold all the cards jonald, i.e. the nodes. It would be so incredibly easy to force BU to fork away from Bitcoin, and all you're achieving is building the support for making that happen. Thanks for helping

[franky1]

LOL

well if everyone just stuck with "core"
there are still many versions

0.8-0.14
all with different lines of code settings and rules(i would mention 0.1-0.7 but then the rules really do get funky... thank you sipa for the levelDB bug)

some have mining settings in them to only make blocks of 0.75mb
some have fee priority. some have different relay fee limits
some have good some have bad fee estimation functions

but oh wait.. you will backtrack and defend different versions suddenly. but then argue all you worry about truly is that its not created by king maxwell.

do you know why satoshi disappeared. because everyone 'depended' on satoshi as king.. and he wanted it to be an open source project with no king.

P.S if your stance is only core should be on the network then admit your a centralist, get it over with

[dinofelis]

Bitcoiners hold all the cards jonald, i.e. the nodes.

Don't over estimate the importance of full node wallets that are not related to mining.  In as much as they may be an indicator of the preferences of the user that runs it, and hence, the choices he might make in the market if there was a hard fork, full nodes that are not related to mining have very little technical importance, and have almost no influence on the block chain, which is built by miners and their nodes.  Yes, nodes help somewhat in improving the traffic over the P2P network, but this is not a necessity.  At its bare minimum, the bitcoin network would almost be the same if all users connected with light wallets to the full nodes of their preferred miners ; exchanges will of course run all kinds of nodes because they want to have people trade all possible kinds of forks.  So exchanges will not "impose" any fork.
The only real reason to run a full node, is that you want to verify *for yourself* that the block chain one is selling to you, is the "right" one according to the rule set that you've decided to implement in the software you're running.  And as such, you're also helping to transmit this chain to other full nodes.  But they don't need you, they can connect directly to the miner node of their preferences.  You don't need other full nodes: you can also connect to the miner of your preferences.  The P2P aspect of the bitcoin network is nice, but not needed: the "servers" are the miners and a node is in fact nothing more than a client, reading its stuff from the server.  The P2P network helps to get the traffic to your place, but that's it.  The producer/server of block chains are the miners, and they all have a full copy of course on their nodes.  That's all you need.  And if you want to send a transaction, you can also send it directly to one of the nodes of a miner of your preferences.  Miners of same preferences have also all reasons to get direct node connections, to get their blocks as soon as possible amongst themselves, and not waste time on orphaned blocks.

So "nodes voting" doesn't mean more than firefox "voting" over the contents of a web server.  It won't influence the contents on the web server.  But of course, it gives an idea of what the user wants, and that's important... in the market, if there is a hard fork.
But that's all.  The importance of full nodes is very much over estimated.

[FiendCoin]

BU supporters are something else, one has to wonder if they are paid shills? I just can't understand how any rational person can be pro BU? If you want to be anti-core, fine, I understand the conspiracy theories. How about find a another solution. Don't throw in with the Chinese just to spite core, that's lunacy.

[7788bitcoin]

I guess no matter whether BU or Segwit wins, at the end of the day, there will still be "SOMEBODY" trying to mess up the bitcoin network. Just that both camps are trying to solve the blocksize issue using different approaches... Even if Segwit gets activated, the core still need to increase the block size eventually.

[dinofelis]

I guess no matter whether BU or Segwit wins

The way I understand crypto, none will win.

[tvbcof]

BU supporters are something else, one has to wonder if they are paid shills? I just can't understand how any rational person can be pro BU? If you want to be anti-core, fine, I understand the conspiracy theories. How about find a another solution. Don't throw in with the Chinese just to spite core, that's lunacy.

One feature that a lot of the 'surprise adversaries' of Bitcoin seem to have is that they seem to have a history of brushes with the law at some point.  Mosty post-Bitcoin.  Ver, Voorhees, and Dr. LoweLife (cypherdoc) are the examples I can think of off the top of my head.  The 'conspiracy theory' here, of course, is that they made a deal.

That may or may not apply to the ankle-bitter types who continue to work trolltalk.  Some of them may have made a dime on Bitcoin and fucked up with TPTB.  Others were probably just offered a slightly more profitable arrangement than your typical ad-footer-spammer.  And a few particularly dull ones may genuinely believe that BU is something other than a simple bloat attack on the Bitcoin system I suppose.

My best guess on Andresen is in his soul simply a normie who loves big brother and the status quo.  I think he was in to early to have been implanted by the deep state.

[AliceWonderMiscreations]

BU supporters are something else, one has to wonder if they are paid shills? I just can't understand how any rational person can be pro BU? If you want to be anti-core, fine, I understand the conspiracy theories. How about find a another solution. Don't throw in with the Chinese just to spite core, that's lunacy.

It breaks my heart to see "the Chinese" used so often as an excuse.

What the fuck have they done, other than being born in a country in Asia?

I was hoping our species was evolving past that kind of bigotry.

If there is collusion between them to hurt bitcoin then show what that collusion is, and judge them based upon that collusion. Don't judge them based upon their nationality, that's called bigotry.

[Lauda]

BU will have 100% of it's own hashrate, when it actually becomes a coin. It might happen sooner than anyone expects

Minor correction: BTU, not BU.

thank you sipa for the levelDB bug)

You can't let that go, can you? Why don't you mention the bug that made bitcoin.com mine an invalid block?

P.S if your stance is only core should be on the network then admit your a centralist, get it over with

Nope, Knots should also be on the network. BU should not.

Don't over estimate the importance of full node wallets that are not related to mining. 

Ironically, you're underestimating the importance of having a decentralized & strong network of full nodes.

[AngryDwarf]

P.S if your stance is only core should be on the network then admit your a centralist, get it over with

Nope, Knots should also be on the network. BU should not.

Why should be Bitcoin Knots be allowed on the network as well as Bitcoin Core? Is because of the human developer behind it rather than the protocol? If bitcoin survived Satoshi leaving the project, it can survive anyone else leaving the project.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1330770.msg18139006#msg18139006

[dinofelis]

Don't over estimate the importance of full node wallets that are not related to mining.  

Ironically, you're underestimating the importance of having a decentralized & strong network of full nodes.

That is like saying that having more people running firefox looking at your web pages makes your server distributed.

Non mining nodes don't contribute anything (or almost anything) to the "decentralized" nature of the network.  And the simple proof for that is that it is extremely easy to "Sybil attack" this amount of nodes.  One can easily fire up 100 000 nodes on Amazon and swamp the entire network.  

It is exactly because of this *unimportance* of non mining nodes, that Proof of Work exists.  Of course, in Satoshi's paper you will read about the importance of many nodes, but that is because for Satoshi, nodes and miners were the same.  All nodes were miners.  THEN of course, it is important.  But non-mining nodes don't contribute (almost) ANYTHING to the decentralization of the coin.  The ONLY thing they do contribute, is communication paths, so that no censoring of communication between the user wallet and the miner can take place.  But with direct connections between miners (who have to be interconnected to not get their blocks orphaned) and every user wallet, no intermediate nodes play any role (apart if the internet were censored and they provide extra pathways).

If the amount of nodes indicated anything about the decentralisation of bitcoin, proof of work would not have been necessary.  It is because it is meaningless, that one needs to introduce it.  

This is a simple aspect of the dynamics of crypto currencies: nodes that don't "vote" (no proof of stake), that do not "mine" and that are only communication hubs that can be bypassed between user wallets and miners, are useless if the direct internet connections are good enough between wallets and miners.  However, full nodes ARE important for their owners, so that they can check FOR THEMSELVES that what their wallet sees, comes from the right block chain and that nobody is talking shit to their wallet.  But it is the only use.

This funny little fact is of course full force denied by people wanting to keep small blocks for other reasons and claim that it would bring "centralization" because there would be less hapless PCs running on the network, downloading the block chain from the miners.  But the "servers of block chain" are the miner related nodes.  And whether more or less "firefox" browers (non-mining nodes) are downloading them doesn't matter.

I run an (empty) bitcoin node at home.  I could fire up 20 of them.  What difference would that make ?  I can switch off my node.  What difference would that make ?  I can run a core 0.14 and a BU node on the same machine (which I will probably do soon).  What does that even mean ?

[franky1]

BU will have 100% of it's own hashrate, when it actually becomes a coin. It might happen sooner than anyone expects

Minor correction: BTU, not BU.

BTU.. the reddit script buzzword competition.. along with "ad-hom" "bucoin" "conservative" and the other obvious buzzwords blockstreamers have to use in their scripts.. the buzzword game is getting obvious

thank you sipa for the levelDB bug)

You can't let that go, can you? Why don't you mention the bug that made bitcoin.com mine an invalid block?

the ONE that got rejected in 3 seconds and was of no drama or consequence..
how about the many made by non BU on a more than weekly bases
https://blockchain.info/orphaned-blocks

lol love how you exaggerate one but underplay the thousands when in reality they are all the same... rejected in seconds and of no long term consequence

P.S if your stance is only core should be on the network then admit your a centralist, get it over with

Nope, Knots should also be on the network. BU should not.

oh Knots...because its Luke JR... (blockstream contractor)... too obvious

Don't over estimate the importance of full node wallets that are not related to mining.  

Ironically, you're underestimating the importance of having a decentralized & strong network of full nodes.

how can you have decentralised network if everything is blockstream.
atleast admit the truth. 'distributed' does not mean decentralised.

a bank with 95,000 bank branches around the world does not make a bank decentralised. it just makes it distributed.

[dinofelis]

how can you have decentralised network if everything is blockstream.
atleast admit the truth. 'distributed' does not mean decentralised.

a bank with 95,000 bank branches around the world does not make a bank decentralised. it just makes it distributed.

Indeed.  Although we may be thinking about slightly different aspects.  Non-mining nodes are indeed a form of distributed proxy server of the block chain(s), but the real sources of those chains are the miners.  The distributedness of the network (many nodes) make for an easier downloading, communication and so on, but as long as the principal servers are "up and running", their proxies (the non-mining nodes) are only that: proxy servers.  They copy the block chain of their flavour from their principal server, and help speed up its download.  They also help sending transactions up the chain to their principal "miner" server, but those wanting their transactions to get there, can just as well send it directly.

Again, the amount of non-mining nodes is essentially immaterial - apart for their owners, who use it to verify for themselves the chain they want to use (in as much as one is available by miners), and do not want to depend on unverified third-party information.