How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People

[herzmeister]

[RaggedMonk]

Where is Bruce Wagner on this one?  This is great material for TV!

Bruce was convicted of fraud, he likes prostitutes, and his show is painfully slow.  Let's leave him out of this. 

[anu]

he likes prostitutes

Thank you for that extremely relevant bit of information. That certainly disqualifies him from technical / project management discussion.

[paraipan]

Wow, some fresh air is welcome, wise words reeses

[casascius]

BIP16/17 discuss cryptography which is a very technical field with a strong tradition.  There are specific terms and phrases used in this field, many coined by Schneier in Applied Cryptography.  Neither of these proposals follow this terminology. (Where are Eve and Mallory?)  Neither of these proposals is academically rigorous.  Unless there are addenda or appendices, I don't see a mathematical proof beyond "reference implementation."

I'm not sure I agree that these discuss cryptography.  They use cryptography indirectly, but so does my bank (on their website, SSL) when they introduce a new debit card or rewards program, which don't require reference to Mallory or Eve either (unless they are the models showing the vacations you can redeem the points for).  BIP 16 and 17 aren't proposed cryptographic changes and don't discuss mathematical problems, so expectation of a mathematical proof doesn't make any sense.

No one is more qualified as a peer than the developers and users of Bitcoin, any more than we should expect a mechanical engineer with a PhD and expertise building bridges should know more about fixing Acuras than the guy with a community college associates and 10 years experience at the Acura dealership.

[ripper234]

This cannot be decided on personal issues.  The BIPs affecting the block chain must be rigorously documented and subjected to qualified peer review.  Precedent should be referenced and relevant.

This is the only useful thing you said, and unfortunately we have had a grand total of
zero qualified reviews of either of the BIPs: neither Gavin nor the lunatic qualify
in that regard.

As a matter of fact, bitcoin would _greatly_ benefit from having actual professional
cryptographers doing not only BIP reviews, but also trying to devise actual attacks
against the whole system.

Can't we hire respectable white hats to do a professional audit (with pledges)?

[RaggedMonk]

This cannot be decided on personal issues.  The BIPs affecting the block chain must be rigorously documented and subjected to qualified peer review.  Precedent should be referenced and relevant.

This is the only useful thing you said, and unfortunately we have had a grand total of
zero qualified reviews of either of the BIPs: neither Gavin nor the lunatic qualify
in that regard.

As a matter of fact, bitcoin would _greatly_ benefit from having actual professional
cryptographers doing not only BIP reviews, but also trying to devise actual attacks
against the whole system.

Can't we hire respectable white hats to do a professional audit (with pledges)?

I would help fund this. 

[Gavin Andresen]

Can't we hire respectable white hats to do a professional audit (with pledges)?

Good idea. Who wants to volunteer to do the fundraising and organize this, and let me know how I can help?

[rjk]

Can't we hire respectable white hats to do a professional audit (with pledges)?

Good idea. Who wants to volunteer to do the fundraising and organize this, and let me know how I can help?

You guys don't think Gavin is sufficiently qualified? Interesting. I would say you were incorrect, but sure more eyes can't hurt.

[DannyM]

Can't we hire respectable white hats to do a professional audit (with pledges)?

I am so bad at detecting sarcasm on these boards.

You do know there is no such thing as a respectable white hat?

Don't take my word for it, a good reference can be found if you google the whiteh8 teachings of PHC and the chronicles of el8.

Cause ain't no such things as half-way crooks.

[muyuu]

Can't we hire respectable white hats to do a professional audit (with pledges)?

Good idea. Who wants to volunteer to do the fundraising and organize this, and let me know how I can help?

You guys don't think Gavin is sufficiently qualified? Interesting. I would say you were incorrect, but sure more eyes can't hurt.

It's not a matter of qualification. It's a complex, novel project with extreme needs in terms of security. It needs to go through the scrutiny of many experts for a long time.

[ripper234]

Can't we hire respectable white hats to do a professional audit (with pledges)?

I am so bad at detecting sarcasm on these boards.

You do know there is no such thing as a respectable white hat?

Don't take my word for it, a good reference can be found if you google the whiteh8 teachings of PHC and the chronicles of el8.

Cause ain't no such things as half-way crooks.

Zero sarcasm on my side. There are "good hackers" aka white hats.
I don't know whether "Gavin is sufficiently qualified", or if there is such a thing. An extra eye is always good.

In any case, I'm sorry but I don't have time to organize this myself - this was just a suggestion.

[Sukrim]

edit: to the people treating this as a popularity contest please STFU

There's a reason Gavin posted this one to the Bitcoin Discussion section, and not to the Technical discussion section.

The real reason is that they might be approaching stage 4 in their conflict (http://www.mediate.com/articles/jordan.cfm - german Wikipedia is better, but the english one has no article (yet))

I'd love to have a freeze of features for the bitcoin standard (not the bitcoin client!) until there are at least 2-3 other well developed implementations.

Just take a look at miners: First there were just few CPU mining programs, then GPU miners emerged, and current mining programs automatically even adjust fanspeed(!) to keep your card at a steady temperature. Similar with pool software: after some months with horribly inefficient php software, on one end bitcoind was patched to crank out more getworks, but on the other end also new pool software was developed that could talk to multiple bitcoinds, cache getworks, work more reliably with the long polling issue and so on - current pools are running on hardware that would have died with 1/10th the miners before.

Bitcoind itself however seems to be just one single software with no real competitors (yes, I know about bitcoinj) where many people complain a bit about this or that but noone dares/wants to implement their own version. Transactions are already now complex enough to implement, that it seems noone so far even dares to do another implementation.
I really don't want the current bitcoind to become the "Linux Kernel" that is so overly complex, that there's no freakin' way to implement it differently without designing something completely different.

What is really needed here, is some competition, so Gavin or other developers can discuss protocol changes with actually other developers who are on the same level, not having an issue of leadership in his own team. All that currently is happening makes it even harder for others to write their own client - already now you need quite a deep understanding of cryptography to even understand adresses etc., and transactions already now are a quite different beast.

TL,DR:
Before making the "Satoshi" bitcoind more complex or adding to the standard, create/foster alternative clients and some healthy competition in the "bitcoind" market!

[anu]

I'd love to have a freeze of features for the bitcoin standard (not the bitcoin client!) until there are at least 2-3 other well developed implementations.

2nd

[BitcoinBug]

I'd love to have a freeze of features for the bitcoin standard (not the bitcoin client!) until there are at least 2-3 other well developed implementations.

2nd

I disagree. After p2sh gets implemented, I think there are no big changes on the horizon. And I doubt these protocol changes (how many did we have last year?) would seriously delay other implementations.
We have to make as much of our time as possible, now that the hype has settled for a while. Stalling development (protocol) would do no good.

[Sukrim]

To me P2SH still sounds like a very specific extension targeted at only one client implementation. There are other ways how more secure wallets could be done, that wouldn't require any change of protocol (creating importable transactions offline for example - import the transaction at a connected node and it gets executed).

I'd rather have 6 months with "nonstandard" transactions in the blockchain and see some feature complete clients implementing these, than standardizing them first in a specific way with (seemingly) only one implementation in mind. As far as I understood, both BIP 16 and 17 would already be available today as nonstandard transaction. I'd rather keep it that way and focus on having completely new written bitcoinds than fighting over what gets implemented in the reference implementation, which means it also becomes the standard as noone can challenge this currently.

[anu]

I'd love to have a freeze of features for the bitcoin standard (not the bitcoin client!) until there are at least 2-3 other well developed implementations.

2nd

I disagree. After p2sh gets implemented, I think there are no big changes on the horizon. And I doubt these protocol changes (how many did we have last year?) would seriously delay other implementations.
We have to make as much of our time as possible, now that the hype has settled for a while. Stalling development (protocol) would do no good.

The web required 10 years to become adopted. I think this gives a good idea how long it'll take Bitcoin. There is plenty of time to get it right. If this stuff gets released this year or even next year, it is just fine.

[finway]

Nice post.
Spring festavle makes me long behind. 

[Luke-Jr]

Just thought I should note this post was written by Gavin himself...

Can't we hire respectable white hats to do a professional audit (with pledges)?

Good idea. Who wants to volunteer to do the fundraising and organize this, and let me know how I can help?

If he doesn't consider himself to be qualified for the job, it's IMO quite silly to argue over it.

FWIW, I am also not qualified for this.

[Technomage]

The web required 10 years to become adopted. I think this gives a good idea how long it'll take Bitcoin. There is plenty of time to get it right. If this stuff gets released this year or even next year, it is just fine.

I don't think the analogy quite applies as is. First of all, compared to the Internet, Bitcoin is a sub-technology that is based on technologies, both software and hardware, that have required significant investments to reach the level of development and infrastructure where they're at today. Developing Bitcoin is cheaper because a lot of what Bitcoin does is built on top of existing infrastructure. This doesn't mean that it won't take a long time to develop Bitcoin, it sure does, but technologies such as Bitcoin could explode easier because there is less of an investment barrier involved.

Second of all, there is already competition to Bitcoin and we can expect this competition to radically increase in the next 24 months. The Internet didn't have this competition. Not only are we competing against other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is also competing against major payment providers that are working on mobile wallets and all kinds of stuff that makes payments fast and convenient. I believe those technologies and the currency itself would still be inferior to Bitcoin but from a marketing perspective that focuses on regular consumers Bitcoin does NOT have a decade to develop stuff, it's under tremendous competitive pressure from many directions.

I give Bitcoin 6 months, 12 months at most before we will see it suffer and decline from lack of development. This is if we let it stall, of course. It doesn't mean that we should be hasty with serious upgrades, but P2SH is not being hasty. It has been in development and discussion for many months and Gavin has got the best solution anyone has been able to come up with so far. Even I will be looking at Bitcoin's competitors with much more interest if enabling P2SH fails in March. I'm quite sure a lot of other people will do the same.

We are not living in the 90's anymore, development of a sub-technology such as Bitcoin must be faster than that of the entire Web. Otherwise our competitors will eat us alive.