Bitcoin Development: Lack of Progress?

[TheFootMan]

You guys are all aware that:
Bitcoin 0.9 RC 2 has just been released
The Payment protocol BIP 70 has just been released (I actually used it with bitpay the other day).

I think releases maybe have slowed down a lot (?) but it's hardly the case that nothing is being done.

I'm aware. And it is great. Gavin has complained about lack of resources, I made some suggestions further up in this thread, nobody commented on it.

[acoindr]

The Payment protocol BIP 70 has just been released (I actually used it with bitpay the other day).

Cool  Wasn't aware of that.

[acoindr]

Gavin has complained about lack of resources, I made some suggestions further up in this thread, nobody commented on it.

Using coin fees to pay devs was the idea behind DevCoin I believe. I don't see much to that.

As for forum advertising I believe that goes to maintenance of the forum, and paying moderators. You're right there would be some concern about anyone formally paying devs having influential special interests. For that reason a crowd funding model is probably better. We just need to set something up.

[cdog]

Its not the lack of progress that bothers me, its the lack of fixes to existing, known problems and bugs.

[r0ach]

Are people just blind to the obvious?  Any big changes usually require hard forks, and they will want to get as much as possible into one when it has to be done.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardfork_Wishlist

[MPOE-PR]

Successful open source projects need a Benevolent Dictator for the life of the major code changes, otherwise you have chaos.

You completely misrepresent the point of the Bitcoin Scamdation. It strictly exists to get donations from suckers so Peter Vessenes can have enough liquidity to pretend like his "businesses" in Bitcoin are working. Back then he was still hoping he may be bought out, meanwhile MP put the kaibosh on that pipe dream.

Development is an afterthought at the very best.

[gravitate]

The bitcoin foundaiton are constantly flat out right? God didnt create the world in a day 

[acoindr]

Are people just blind to the obvious?  Any big changes usually require hard forks, and they will want to get as much as possible into one when it has to be done.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardfork_Wishlist

You're right. This is one of the things I forgot to mention in my "complexity" explanation. With Bitcoin different kinds of changes require different consideration for if and when they can even be implemented. As a currency, forks are not something you want to have at all ideally, so if they must be done it should be kept to a minimum. Due to the consensus nature of Bitcoin these type changes require extra ordinary planning and consideration.

[AnonyMint]

Successful open source projects need a Benevolent Dictator for the life of the major code changes, otherwise you have chaos.

You completely misrepresent the point of the Bitcoin Scamdation. It strictly exists to get donations...

Re-read my post. I was referring to an anonymous dictator developer, e.g. Satoshi, and I specifically said foundations are corruptible.

Successful open source projects need a Benevolent Dictator for the life of the major code changes, otherwise you have chaos.

When Satoshi left that was the end of major changes, as only he had the authority to push them through.

Project management is a difficult nut to crack. I would appreciate any advice from others on this. I mean the management of the business affairs and marketing. Putting this in the hands of a foundation seems to be corruptible.

Developers such as a myself are loath to deal with lots of extraneous time wasting details that don't pertain to the code.

[justusranvier]

Development is happening, but it's happening at Conformal.

Half the changelog of the 0.9 release are features ported over from btcd.

[r0ach]

Interoperability of multiple distributions that didn't even require a hard fork has gotta be a pain too.  Like when Dogecoin forked itself from having pools keep the last distribution instead of upgrading, because the newer one gave them more orphans.

That's a lot of pressure on basically one person to not destroy a 10 billion dollar enterprise lol.  I hope the CIA has trained Gavin well.

And please, no stupid people in this thread promoting Bitcoin as the sole currency of the future, we need multiple chains solely to hedge to be able avoid problems like this, if not for a billion other reasons.  Like a government easily being able to take over just one chain, or blackmail a developer, etc.  It's a lot harder to destroy 10 simultaneously.  Also, all it takes is for Gavin to screw up once and this entire ship goes down.  You sure you want frequent updates then?  Because that's the inverse of Gambler's ruin.

Multiple chains is the obvious future that *will* happen because people will demand the ability to hedge, and we currently depend on the technical ability of one human far too much.  Hopefully the whole transaction fee model works without Bitcoin being worth a billion dollars each when some of that money goes to other chains.  Something like $10k could even be the ceiling for Bitcoin due to having to divide market share by 5-10.