On 16/06/13 14:00, Juraj Bednar wrote:
> Economy should be value-neutral (i.e. it should not matter if you
> are buying half a kilo of weed, a gun or aspirin) which I believe
> translates to network neutral for Bitcoin.

That's cool.

> We do not need to switch reference implementation to something
> else (that's too difficult, politically). We should do something
> else instead. Let's make it easy for miners to switch
> implementations and make sure they are not telling which one they
> use. Any protocol change would need to be put into all major
> implementations (thus removing "reference implementation"), because
> it would not matter what Gavin commits into his little tree, even
> if it's labeled reference, if miners refuse blocks it creates.
> They would need to balance threats from world's powers and fear of
> fork. I believe for Bitcoin, fear of forking is still higher.

That's what I've said for a while now. We need several different
competing interests who need to mutually collaborate to define the
standard.

We can look to history for the example of the web whereby IE
controlled the standard. Minority marketshare browsers would have to
follow IE changes otherwise their userbase would blame them for the
incompatibility. Think websites made for IE rendering incorrectly in
Opera, despite IE not adhering to the standard.

Right now there's tons of crap being added to the Bitcoin protocol,
and I'm in the minority of developers who wants to slow that down.
Part of the beauty for Bitcoin to me is that it's a small standard to
be compliant with the network (~15k lines of code). Anybody can read
the code and understand.

But people are judging extensions to the protocol without thinking
about the future - that you'll get an enormous standard that takes
huge capital, skill and time investments to understand. I created the
BIP process to slow this down.

Instead I'd like to see more focus on implementation. Lets create good
Bitcoin software and understand the engineering problems before we go
off lavishly extending the standard for every crazy feature that is
exciting about Bitcoin (many of them don't have use-cases yet or are
adequately served by existing features).

The other developers are implementation conservative (commits require
approval and discussion) but protocol liberal (not complying with
their spec https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0060 and protocol changes
being fasttracked without approval from everybody). I'm implementation
liberal (fast release schedule, focus on software side) but protocol
conservative (long life cycle between protocol changes).

> We can try and we should try, but I believe that who understands
> us is probably a hacker anyway. And who does not gets most of
> information from the media. We are not controlling the narrative,
> we are mainly setting a theme. That's a start, but it can end up
> worse than it started and we have no control about the result.

But it is happening.