Calling out the Bitcoin Foundation Scam.

[eldentyrell]

What do you think this article actually means?  It doesn't mean what Coindesk wrote, it means he's scared to be responsible for something that might decide the fate of the entire planet lol.

http://www.coindesk.com/gavin-andresen-bitcoin-companies-support-open-source/

So more Bitcoin companies should be involved in development? It's funny that Conformal Systems did exactly that, and gets no recognition from Gavin or any of the other core developers for their contributions.

Unlike BitPay which made a big deal of supporting the community via Jeff Garzik's 2000 LOC, Conformal put the development of their actual business on hold for a year while they wrote a clean slate reimplementation of the reference implementation as an open source donation to the community.

Justus,

I agree with you in spirit, but you should be a bit more up-front about the fact that Conformal's bitcoind implementation is written in the "Go" language.

There's nothing wrong with that, but there also isn't much demand outside of Conformal for a bitcoin client written in Go.  If one of their major motivations was to contribute to the bitcoin community they would have chosen a language that more bitcoiners know and therefore can contribute in.  In other words, their contribution is primarily to the Go community here, not the bitcoin community.  That's okay.

FWIW, I write my "serious" code in Coq, which is a hell of a lot more obscure than Go… glass houses, stones, etc.

[1714022630]

1714022630

[1714022630]

1714022630

[1714022630]

1714022630

[1714022630]

1714022630

[1714022630]

1714022630

[1714022630]

1714022630

[JusticeForYou]

You're still hot. Funny how that works on the internets.


Never joined the foundation. Said I would when they offer a Substantial Scholarship to an accredited school tho...

I wouldn't go so far as calling it a 'scam.'

Paying to join the local golf club usually just ends up with you paying for tee times at a reduced rate.

[tvbcof]

You're still hot. Funny how that works on the internets.
...

Funny thing about Bitcoiners and Fox News watchers is that they both seem to have a thing for trannies.  The latter were all hot and bothered for Ann 'the man' Coulter back in the day.  Go figure.

[JusticeForYou]

You're still hot. Funny how that works on the internets.
...

Funny thing about Bitcoiners and Fox News watchers is that they both seem to have a thing for trannies.  The latter were all hot and bothered for Ann 'the man' Coulter back in the day.  Go figure.

LOL, What's FaceBooks gender count now? 50+  

I see no gender on the inter webs. So she's hot.



Edit: Except that randy guy, dude change your avatar.

[QuestionAuthority]

You're still hot. Funny how that works on the internets.
...

Funny thing about Bitcoiners and Fox News watchers is that they both seem to have a thing for trannies.  The latter were all hot and bothered for Ann 'the man' Coulter back in the day.  Go figure.

Chicks with Dicks + Bitcoin!

It's like Peanut Butter and Jelly baby. LOL

[tayfun73]

Some interesting reading here >  http://two-bit-idiot.tumblr.com/post/78609330103/the-btc-foundations-power-struggle

[tvbcof]

Some interesting reading here >  http://two-bit-idiot.tumblr.com/post/78609330103/the-btc-foundations-power-struggle

Well fuck-o-rolan, how many times is ~vess going to 'step down'?  IIRC he 'stepped down' a year ago during the Coinlab/Mt.Gox fiasco.  Down from 'executive director' to 'chairman of the board.'

Looks to me like ~vess IS the Bitcoin Foundation.  He was there from day one and I expect he'll be there until the end.  I also don't expect him to cough up the $5M in Gox funds that Coinlab appropriated so Mt. Gox creditors will probably be eating that to.  And I certainly don't expect that he/tBF is going to give Mt Gox back the 5000 BTC they put in to get the Bitcoin Foundation started.  OTOH, it would be good PR so if tBF has got money coming out their ears, or if ~vess stands to lose the $5M to the Feds anyway, maybe the Gox victims will see a little of it.  Not holding my breath for that one though.

[justusranvier]

I agree with you in spirit, but you should be a bit more up-front about the fact that Conformal's bitcoind implementation is written in the "Go" language.

There's nothing wrong with that, but there also isn't much demand outside of Conformal for a bitcoin client written in Go.  If one of their major motivations was to contribute to the bitcoin community they would have chosen a language that more bitcoiners know and therefore can contribute in.  In other words, their contribution is primarily to the Go community here, not the bitcoin community.

You're going to have a hard time convincing me that the Go language is a problem based on the number of non-Go programmers I've heard say, "wow, I can actually understand their code."

Having a codebase that's approachable and well-architected is a great contribution even if nobody else ever writes any Bitcoin code in Go.

Even if that weren't the case, your post implies that the Bitcoin community is the development community. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Btcd gives non-developer users the ability to contribute to the network by running a full node without also requiring them to store m (users) * n (devices) copies of the blockchain. That's huge usability improvement in its own right.

[davec]

Justus,

I agree with you in spirit, but you should be a bit more up-front about the fact that Conformal's bitcoind implementation is written in the "Go" language.

There's nothing wrong with that, but there also isn't much demand outside of Conformal for a bitcoin client written in Go.  If one of their major motivations was to contribute to the bitcoin community they would have chosen a language that more bitcoiners know and therefore can contribute in.  In other words, their contribution is primarily to the Go community here, not the bitcoin community.  That's okay.

FWIW, I write my "serious" code in Coq, which is a hell of a lot more obscure than Go… glass houses, stones, etc.

I can't disagree with you more.  I'll talk about Go here in a moment, but the first thing I want to get out of the way is the fact that many improvements to the architecture made by btcd are now being incorporated back into bitcoind.  So, I'm not sure how you could claim that btcd has not contributed to the Bitcoin community.  That is patently false.  On the contrary, we are quite proud that our contributions have been improving the ecosystem.

For example, the btcd codebase created btcctl as a standalone RPC client, rather than shoving it into the daemon, months ago.  Just now, in the upcoming 0.9.0 release, bitcoind is following suit with bitcoin-cli which incidentally is almost an exact clone of btcctl.

Second, we made a blog post back in the beginning of Oct 2013 about btcd's architecture along with the benefits of separating the wallet from the core daemon (https://blog.conformal.com/btcd-not-your-moms-bitcoin-daemon/).  It would appear that at least some of core bitcoind devs agree as just after our announcement, plans were announced to do the same thing for bitcoind.  If you haven't noticed, recently bitcoind has been working to separate the chain bits via the -disablewallet option.  Once again, that idea is directly from the improvements made to the fundamental architecture by btcd which has already had this functionality for 6 months.

Those are just a couple of examples.  If you spend some time cross referencing the release notes for 0.9.0 with architectural improvements made in btcd, you will find more instances of our contributions influencing bitcoind in a positive way.  This goes both ways.

On the point of Go, it is not at all an obscure language.  It is rapidly rising in popularity as noted on many language popularity tracking sites.  Anyone who is familiar with C/C++ can pick Go extremely quickly.  Interestingly enough, we frequently hear from people that weren't familiar with Go at all say they have a far easier time reading, understanding, and reasoning about the btcd code as compared to the bitcoind code.  I would urge you to take a look for yourself rather than take my (or their) word for it though.


Perhaps most importantly, the modular design of btcd makes it easier for businesses to build services.  For example, if you want to create a transaction script with the bitcoind codebase, you'd probably end up doing what everyone else has done and hand roll them as it's not easy to access only that functionality from the bitcoind code.  On the other hand, creating a script that has canonical encoding which pays to an address (whether it's a pubkey, pubkey hash, or a script hash) with the btcd codebase is as simple as:

import "github.com/conformal/btcscript"
script, err := btcscript.PayToAddrScript(addr)
if err != nil { /* handle it */ }

[moni3z]

I agree with you in spirit, but you should be a bit more up-front about the fact that Conformal's bitcoind implementation is written in the "Go" language.

There's nothing wrong with that, but there also isn't much demand outside of Conformal for a bitcoin client written in Go.  If one of their major motivations was to contribute to the bitcoin community they would have chosen a language that more bitcoiners know and therefore can contribute in.  In other words, their contribution is primarily to the Go community here, not the bitcoin community.

You're going to have a hard time convincing me that the Go language is a problem based on the number of non-Go programmers I've heard say, "wow, I can actually understand their code."

Having a codebase that's approachable and well-architected is a great contribution even if nobody else ever writes any Bitcoin code in Go.

Even if that weren't the case, your post implies that the Bitcoin community is the development community. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Btcd gives non-developer users the ability to contribute to the network by running a full node without also requiring them to store m (users) * n (devices) copies of the blockchain. That's huge usability improvement in its own right.

Go encourages readability, portability and standardization, so I expect there will be a lot of future development with Btcd. I run Btcd testing on GAE for all sorts of backend mobile dev stuff it's awesome. Of course they weren't given any money because the foundation solely exists for a select few Bitcoin corps to collaborate with each other in order to establish a monopoly

[MPOE-PR]

Justus,

I agree with you in spirit, but you should be a bit more up-front about the fact that Conformal's bitcoind implementation is written in the "Go" language.

There's nothing wrong with that, but there also isn't much demand outside of Conformal for a bitcoin client written in Go.  If one of their major motivations was to contribute to the bitcoin community they would have chosen a language that more bitcoiners know and therefore can contribute in.  In other words, their contribution is primarily to the Go community here, not the bitcoin community.  That's okay.

FWIW, I write my "serious" code in Coq, which is a hell of a lot more obscure than Go… glass houses, stones, etc.

This is nonsense, I mean by the same token you've not written this message to the Bitcoin community, since it's written in English.

As long as it's written it's written, let they who don't know the language learn it.

Some interesting reading here >  http://two-bit-idiot.tumblr.com/post/78609330103/the-btc-foundations-power-struggle

Well fuck-o-rolan, how many times is ~vess going to 'step down'?  IIRC he 'stepped down' a year ago during the Coinlab/Mt.Gox fiasco.  Down from 'executive director' to 'chairman of the board.'

Looks to me like ~vess IS the Bitcoin Foundation.  He was there from day one and I expect he'll be there until the end.  I also don't expect him to cough up the $5M in Gox funds that Coinlab appropriated so Mt. Gox creditors will probably be eating that to.  And I certainly don't expect that he/tBF is going to give Mt Gox back the 5000 BTC they put in to get the Bitcoin Foundation started.  OTOH, it would be good PR so if tBF has got money coming out their ears, or if ~vess stands to lose the $5M to the Feds anyway, maybe the Gox victims will see a little of it.  Not holding my breath for that one though.

I find it funny how that Ver sockpuppet (aptly named, btw, he IS a two bit idiot) keeps trying to piggyback the discussion/spindoctor the whole thing.

And by funny I mean disgusting to the point of disbelief.

[cryptodevil]

OP, how about you come to us with a solution instead of a problem?

Fiat finance is populated by assholes in jobs they're not qualified to do effectively, being paid vast amounts by other assholes who are board-members of companies that survive by being told what to do by highly-paid management consultants.

As for crypto-currency, we are legion, but we are fringe and we are fucked without people willing to strap on a tie and speak corporate bullshit to persuade people who are afraid of losing their privileged positions by making decisions from left-field, that they should adopt Bitcoin as a means of payment or trade.

You don't have to like anyone from TBF, but you do have to offer up some sort of alternative solution to how we get boots on the ground in places that aren't simply coffee-shops and groovy online retailers with a liberal bent, if you want anybody to get behind your protestations.

[MPOE-PR]

OP, how about you come to us with a solution instead of a problem?

How about you shut the fuck up and get lost? Twelve post "we" indeed, get a load of that.

[raskul]

OP, how about you come to us with a solution instead of a problem?

because OP has not a clue. Once she gets over her PMT, she may be a bit more polite, but until then....
with all the social skills of a skunk in a perfume factory.

[cryptodevil]

Twelve post "we" indeed, get a load of that.

Oh, and there was me thinking that Bitcoin is meant to be owned by, well, everybody who uses it.

Apparently seniority based on your posting count at this forum is the rule. My bad.

BTW, telling people to just STFU when they raise a valid a point is real fucking mature. Well done OP, a masterful thread, superbly crafted with your reasoned assertions and rebuttals.

[raskul]

You may be new here, don't know who I am, what I do...

delusions of grandeur. 

[DiabolusLoki]

OP, how about you come to us with a solution instead of a problem?

How about you shut the fuck up and get lost? Twelve post "we" indeed, get a load of that.

Change ya tampon already bitch.

[DobZombie]

Whilst I don't agree with the almost autistic way MPOE-PR broaches subjects, I do agree that The Bitcoin Foundation is a sham.

I don't believe it's a scam tho.  I believe it's a way for rich pricks to pat themselves on the back and pretend they are doing good.

Instead of a foundation, why don't we just pay somebody a full time wage to fly all over the world and spruik Bitcoin.  If they had experience in marketing, economics, and a basic knowledge of law.

Shit, I'd donate to something like that.

[zumzero]

OP, how about you come to us with a solution instead of a problem?

How about you shut the fuck up and get lost? Twelve post "we" indeed, get a load of that.

Take your pills and calm down you sociopath.  You are the biggest scammer around.

[marcotheminer]

Im agreeing with you on all your points, scam or at least unethical!