The best and the worst

[jonald_fyookball]

Who do you think are the top 3 or 4 most valuable people to the bitcoin community and who do you think are ones that are the most destructive?

[1714910674]

1714910674

[1714910674]

1714910674

[1714910674]

1714910674

[1714910674]

1714910674

[professorXY]

I'm sure everyone can tell you valuable people to the bitcoin community, but I don't know any definite person that is destructive

[franky1]

best
bitcoin core developers
blockchain.info developers
legit bitcoin businesses

worst
altcoin script kiddies just making pump and dump coins purely to sell their useless alt, for useful bitcoin (selling ice to Eskimo's)
greedy mining pool owners ignoring transactions purely to grab fee subsidies
anonymous 3rd party bitcoin services (they end up scamming people)

[Massimo80]

I think most people will agree that Mark Karpeles is the rightful winner of the coveted "most damage caused to Bitcoin as a whole by a single person" award.

[RockHound]

I think most people will agree that Mark Karpeles is the rightful winner of the coveted "most damage caused to Bitcoin as a whole by a single person" award.

Might get slated for this, but I don't think Mark Karpeles is that bad of a person, though very quickly out of his depth true. He in fact did much good for the bitcoin community in 2010+. So here's my list;

The good:

i) Bitcoin Core development team (Stability)
ii) Silk road 1.0 & 2.0 Dredd Pirate Roberts (Establishment, sustainability)
iii) Megan Lords and Davi Barker (Bitcoin not Bombs, promotion of audited BTC charities)

The bad:

i) Thieves/Hackers (People/groups who steal BTC)
ii) Influential legislators, protection of fiat currency
iii) Speculation greed (51% hashing manipulation, trust me there are a lot of people who could afford to do this, if motivated)

[Massimo80]

Might get slated for this, but I don't think Mark Karpeles is that bad of a person

For the records, neither do I. But an epic fail can easily do as much damage as an epic act of villainy.

Anyway, the absolute worst for Bitcoin are speculators trying to use it as a tool to make (even) more money. Greedy people with lots of money can do serious damage to any business, but Bitcoin, being a new and revolutionary form of money, is especially prone to financial attacks, either by people trying to kill it or by people trying to profit from it.

[vpitcher07]

I think most people will agree that Mark Karpeles is the rightful winner of the coveted "most damage caused to Bitcoin as a whole by a single person" award.

Might get slated for this, but I don't think Mark Karpeles is that bad of a person, though very quickly out of his depth true. He in fact did much good for the bitcoin community in 2010+. So here's my list;

The good:

i) Bitcoin Core development team (Stability)
ii) Silk road 1.0 & 2.0 Dredd Pirate Roberts (Establishment, sustainability)
iii) Megan Lords and Davi Barker (Bitcoin not Bombs, promotion of audited BTC charities)

The bad:

i) Thieves/Hackers (People/groups who steal BTC)
ii) Influential legislators, protection of fiat currency
iii) Speculation greed (51% hashing manipulation, trust me they are a lot of people who could afford to do this, if motivated)

The silk road as good?? No, anyone who knows nothing about bitcoin knows about the silkroad and how it accepted bitcoin. It's bad PR.

[franky1]

Might get slated for this, but I don't think Mark Karpeles is that bad of a person

For the records, neither do I. But an epic fail can easily do as much damage as an epic act of villainy.

Anyway, the absolute worst for Bitcoin are speculators trying to use it as a tool to make (even) more money. Greedy people with lots of money can do serious damage to any business, but Bitcoin, being a new and revolutionary form of money, is especially prone to financial attacks, either by people trying to kill it or by people trying to profit from it.

speculators dont exactly destroy bitcoin. if they speculate and cause a price rise, that equals profits for the community. if they speculate the price down, that causes a nice buy-in oppertunity for new community members.

bitcoin protocol has decades to centuries of life ahead, the price variance does not impact this. even if the price suddenly dropped to a penny, you are sure as hell find a million people trying to buy as much bitcoin as they can, bringing the price right back up.

i would however say FUD spreaders, that are purely trying to sway people away from purchasing at any price are more damaging then speculators who just play the prices for profit.

and as for silkroad. although i do not condone their illegal activities. it has actually provided world wide press news and advertising to get people to ask the question "what is bitcoin", to which after they research bitcoin, they find out bitcoin is great for legit investments and value transfer and silk road is just hyped propaganda. thus they learn to separate the two whilst getting into bitcoin

[RockHound]

Well said Frank, I too do not condone illegal activities facilitated by Silk Road. However, I did list as a good agent because it effectively promotes SHA-256 technology and media/public awareness, as you mentioned.

@ vpitcher07 When I mention Silk Road, I mean other such sites as well eg Pandora, Sheep, etc.

Ebay too have made trading of particular items "contraband" during it's evolution. Back in the day you could used to buy items such as: Swords, Ivory, Tobacco, Fake/Stolen goods, Lock-picking devices  

Now I know the Silk Road is somewhat more hardcore and specializes in illegal goods. Maybe Ebay is not a suitable comparison, but Silk Road 2.0 did remove certain items which I am thankful for.

I am optimistic, Bitcoin's good will outweigh the bad.



 

[DannyHamilton]

Who do you think are the top 3 or 4 most valuable people to the bitcoin community and who do you think are ones that are the most destructive?

Most valuable?

Me, of course. What would you all do without me?  

Most destructive?

Satoshi Nakamoto.  He should have taken more time to fix the various issues in his program before he released it.  It would have resulted in a more robust and less annoying protocol.  Instead he rushed it out the door and we all have to live with the consequences. 

[Pony789]

Who do you think are the top 3 or 4 most valuable people to the bitcoin community and who do you think are ones that are the most destructive?

Most valuable?

Me, of course. What would you all do without me?  

Most destructive?

Satoshi Nakamoto.  He should have taken more time to fix the various issues in his program before he released it.  It would have resulted in a more robust and less annoying protocol.  Instead he rushed it out the door and we all have to live with the consequences. 

Would you mind explaining that part, and what kinds of issues are in your mind? Block time? Block size? PoS over PoW?

[telepatheic]

Would you mind explaining that part, and what kinds of issues are in your mind? Block time? Block size? PoS over PoW?

The main thing is a lack of standardisation, the protocol uses a mixture of big endian, little endian, fixed length integers and variable integers. Signatures are encoded using DER, public keys are not. Compressed and uncompressed keys can both be used so every Bitcoin address has a twin depending on which encoding is chosen. Bitcoin addresses support error detection but not error correction and pubKeyHashes are 160 bits in length where everything else is 256 bits in length. The transaction scripting and signing methods means transactions are malleable. OP_CHECKMULTISIG requires an extra null public key to work properly. Transaction sequence numbers don't work.

There are more problems than this but those are the main ones I can think off the top of my head. Also almost all altcoins (except maybe NXT) carry over these annoying inconsistencies instead of fixing them!

[Massimo80]

The main thing is a lack of standardisation, the protocol uses a mixture of big endian, little endian, fixed length integers and variable integers. Signatures are encoded using DER, public keys are not. Compressed and uncompressed keys can both be used so every Bitcoin address has a twin depending on which encoding is chosen. Bitcoin addresses support error detection but not error correction and pubKeyHashes are 160 bits in length where everything else is 256 bits in length. The transaction scripting and signing methods means transactions are malleable. OP_CHECKMULTISIG requires an extra null public key to work properly. Transaction sequence numbers don't work.

There are more problems than this but those are the main ones I can think off the top of my head. Also almost all altcoins (except maybe NXT) carry over these annoying inconsistencies instead of fixing them!

Couldn't have said it any better. Working with the raw protocol is a royal pain. And it's not going to be fixed anytime soon, since any change needs to keep compatibility.

[telepatheic]

Working with the raw protocol is a royal pain.

Agreed and the documentation is also relatively poor. To work out some protocol rules, you literally have to read through several files of bitcoind.

We are just starting a project called ConceptCoin which aims to make many improvements on bitcoin as a proof of concept.

[Massimo80]

Working with the raw protocol is a royal pain.

Agreed and the documentation is also relatively poor. To work out some protocol rules, you literally have to read through several files of bitcoind.

We are just starting a project called ConceptCoin which aims to make many improvements on bitcoin as a proof of concept.

Bitcoin will probably become the new TCP/IP... a system which works but could have been designed much better, has some serious limits, but over time has become the de facto standard for networking, and now no one can replace it with something better because everyone is stuck using it

[Bit_Happy]

I think most people will agree that Mark Karpeles is the rightful winner of the coveted "most damage caused to Bitcoin as a whole by a single person" award.

Gox has been a horrendous problem for over 3 years.
Certainly Mark did some good, but there would have been a different, eventually much better exchange without Gox.
Mark Karpeles and his MtBox have done the most damage.

[SherdonIke]

Who do you think are the top 3 or 4 most valuable people to the bitcoin community and who do you think are ones that are the most destructive?

Most valuable?

Me, of course. What would you all do without me?  

Most destructive?

Satoshi Nakamoto.  He should have taken more time to fix the various issues in his program before he released it.  It would have resulted in a more robust and less annoying protocol.  Instead he rushed it out the door and we all have to live with the consequences. 

never thought about Satoshi like the person who is most destructive for bitcoin. interesting and unusual opinion!

[AngelSky]

best
bitcoin core developers
blockchain.info developers
legit bitcoin businesses

worst
altcoin script kiddies just making pump and dump coins purely to sell their useless alt, for useful bitcoin (selling ice to Eskimo's)
greedy mining pool owners ignoring transactions purely to grab fee subsidies
anonymous 3rd party bitcoin services (they end up scamming people)

agree

[Cryptogirl82]

rot  in hell mark karpeles.

[elavenil]

MTGOX is the worst thing happen to bitcoin.