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Comment by tga_d | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why you think bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency, things like digicash existed since the early 90s. In any case, did you even read the post? The author explicitly describes the failings of bitcoin's political processes. His concerns weren't some hypothetical issues of ideology, they were concrete examples of how those who control bitcoin are preventing it from growing in a very technical sense, and refuse to engage in any sort of compromise because it's not within their (business) interests.

edit: To clarify, I'm not trying to say I agree or disagree with the author, as I don't know anywhere near enough about the bitcoin community to say either way. I'm merely pointing out that the OP was talking past the author's points, not addressing them. (In particular, they built a strawman against governance and political solutions.)

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Ok, I'll add some modifiers: BitCoin is the first global peer-to-peer distributed cryptocurrency actually in use.

And yes, I did read it.

Step A is realizing that the political processes aren't working, and Step B is figuring out a way to make them work. Step B is not throwing up your hands and quitting.

Mike Hearn has been doing all the quite politicking, technical writing, code prototyping, message board and mailing list discussion, and etc that you would expect a mature OSS project to require to do a technically contentious change. He lost the argument, decisively, but not for lack of trying reasonable steps. This is not Step A nor Step B. This is not even Step F ("fork the codebase and network with the idea of forcing Bitcoin Core to accept a new ground truth"), which he and collaborators tried unsuccessfully. Quitting is Step Q.

It may be helpful in evaluating the above to note that I'm an open and notorious critic of Bitcoin and believe efforts to save it are poorly advised, but I'll happily function as a world-readable notary to say "Yep he really did try doing that; I watched it happen."

Either way it will be left to people other than Hearn to decide. I admire Hearn for his very many hours spent on this seemingly intractable problem, and I understand his frustration. I just think it's premature to declare this undertaking a failure.

XT may still be the go-to option when scale and transaction bandwidth actually starts being an existential problem.

You'll find that people rarely react as urgently as they need to until the problem starts making their wallet lighter. But for the last year Bitcoin has increased both in popularity and price. And even at their slowest, actual settlement times of transferring monetary value on the BitCoin network are still lifetimes faster than clearances on ACH or other traditional financial networks, which means Bitcoin still has a competitive advantage over the traditional financial system. When that competitive advantage starts going away, I have an intuition that the block size will suddenly increase. I don't know for sure, but I have a feeling.

Given that XT was met with outright censorship, DDoS attacks, and other unethical and criminal behavior, I don't see what else you'd expect him to do.

And yet I can still go to Bitcoin XT repository, download it and run it if I wish: https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt

That's the genius of it all. Even the governing body doesn't prevent people from running the existing patches. As soon as the impasse becomes an existential threat, we already have a solution, and anyone who wants to run it can run it. Downloading and running the new Bitcoin is kind of like voting.

If you want to be DDOSed, sure.

XT was intentionally designed to split the Bitcoin transaction history into two rapidly-diverging versions - the XT and official chains - each with enough support to continue to exist for some time. This would have killed Bitcoin - and I mean actually killed it, complete with plummeting exchange rate and termination of trading and acceptance all over the place, not just caused a disgruntled ex-developer to write blog posts about how it was dead. Even supporters of larger blocks were largely unwilling to support it for this reason.

This was a deliberate design decision. Mike Hearn didn't think he was going to get widespread support, so he set the threshold for it to fork Bitcoin at 75% of the last 1000 blocks indicating support, which actually means it would activate with less than 75% support from miners due to variance and the fact that he was retesting the condition every block until it succeeded. Potentially quite a lot less, if I remember correctly, maybe even a minority.

And yet, miners still had the choice whether or not to run XT.

If enough did so, then isn't that a vote?

If Bitcoin can't survive without centralized control over miner software, isn't that a sign of broken decentralization?

Enough miners did not in fact do so, and the "centralized control over miner software" was anything but - bitcoin.org pulled links to the one or two services that used XT because there was a huge amount of demand from Bitcoin users to do so, and they were making the same demands of everyone else. Also, part of the problem was that the threshold for enough miners was intentionally set dangerously low. If it had succeeded then I'd say it would be a sign that Bitcoin was fundamentally broken and couldn't survive without centralized control, but it didn't.

*Bitcoin, no capital 'c'

bit-coin

> things like digicash existed since the early 90s

Really? Were they actually usable/used? How/when/where?

His concrete examples are of problems, but not of "those who control bitcoin preventing it from growing". The block size debate is ongoing and the work on it is widespread. Just a few days ago Bitcoin Classic was announced with wide miner support.

Bitcoin doesn't move fast and break things-- and that's one of its strengths, not a weakness.

Also, its inherently democratic- those with the hashing power , and thus the most on the line, determine its future. IT's in their best interests to find solutions-- in a considered way.

I don't see that this system has broken down at this point.

People can do things that serve their best interests in the short term but happen to hurt other people. Additionally, short term value is highly emphasized over long term value when most people make decisions. Just because the people with the most bitcoin mining power have the majority vote doesn't by default make their decisions good for the unrepresented miners in the short term, or even their own selves in the long term.

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