This is the main reason why I can't ever take bitcoin seriously - their community just seems to have so much unconstructive hatred towards anyone who ever says anything negative about bitcoin.
As the parent stated, they have intense hatred for anyone with a different opinion, even the very people who developed bitcoin.
A dysfunctional community indeed, and this extends to the leadership. This is my main reason for having divested a lot of money out of bitcoin. I still believe it will succeed in becoming an important part of the international payments infrastructure, but it will be in spite of its own community and it will likely take a lot longer because of it.
I do believe that for cryptocurrencies, it is bitcoin or bust, though. If bitcoin burns you won't be able to sell the world on another one. Also, I don't believe that the thing other cryptocurrencies are 'fixing' are improvements, but rather detriments. Bitcoin is attractive because of the fixed supply and the decentralized structure, Satoshi brilliantly got those right, even though they are at the same time some of the hurdles to its success.
Hal Finney, the very first recipient of a Bitcoin transaction claimed, quote:
"Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain. There needs to be a secondary level of payment systems which is lighter weight and more efficient." [1]
And Satoshi Nakamoto stated:
"Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn't scale." [...] "Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices." [2]
Did you have anyone else in mind? Perhaps Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen? It's a matter of historical record that these two believe gigablocks will assuredly cause Bitcoin P2P nodes to become confined to datacenters. Their gigablocker quotes follow:
Gavin Andresen: "there will be big companies spending lots of engineering dollars on their own highly optimized versions of bitcoin. I bet there will be alternative, secure-and-trusted, very-high-speed network connections between major bitcoin transaction processors. Maybe it will just be bitcoin transactions flying across the existing Visa/MasterCard/etc networks" [3]
Mike Hearn: "probably 2 or 3 racks of machines" [4]
Gavin Andresen: "No, it's completely distributed at the moment. That will begin to change as we scale up. I don't want to oversell BitCoin. As we scale up there will be bumps along the way. I'm confident of it. Why? For example, as the volume of transactions come up--right now, I can run BitCoin on my personal computer and communicate over my DSL line; and I get every single transaction that's happening everywhere in the world. As we scale up, that won't be possible any more. If there are millions of bitcoin transactions happening every second, that will be a great problem for BitCoin to have--means it is very popular, very trusted--but obviously I won't be able to run it on my own personal computer. It will take dedicated fleets of computers with high-speed network interfaces, and that kind of big iron to actually do all that transaction processing. I'm confident that will happen and that will evolve. But right now all the people trying to generate bitcoins on their own computers and who like the fact that they can be a self-contained unit, I think they may not be so happy if BitCoin gets really big and they can no longer do that."
Amir Taaki, author of libbitcoin and one of the most ardent early adopters of Bitcoin is further in strong disagreement with Gavin and Mike, and always has been! So this notion that the "original people" are being hated on, is just false. Read the libbitcoin manifesto [5], or the "Political Neutrality is a Myth" interview [6].
After Gavin and Mike's push for radically reshaping Bitcoin from a P2P currency into a DatacenterCoin failed (multiple times), this whole issue culminated in Gavin exclaiming that Craig Wright must be Satoshi Nakamoto, "beyond a reasonable doubt"! Which may have had at least something to do with the fact that Craig claimed to be running Bitcoin with 340GB blocks on his (also confirmed fake) "supercomputer". But of course the Craig and Gavin show had been meticulously timed to coincide with a major industry conference. Had it not been for astute cybersleuths cracking the case within minutes of it making the media rounds, we could've seen Gavin reclaim the throne with the help of an utter conman.
Yes, some people are ticked at these guys, as they should be. It's a remarkably (!!!) hostile environment that we've been dealing with for over 18 months, as the current lead developer Wlad so aptly puts it:
"Day in, day out, there is trolling, targeted attacks, shilling on social media targeted toward us. I don’t know of any other project like this. I’ve seen developer teams in MMOs under similar pressure from users; but possibly this is even worse. There, there are avid disagreements about how the game rules should be changed, here people get worked up about changes affecting a whole economic system. And the people attacking are, in many cases, not even users of the software." [7]
[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg342...
[2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg289...
[3] https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=3118.0
[4] https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&oldid=35...
[5] http://nakamotoinstitute.org/libbitcoin-manifesto/
[6] http://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoins-political-neutrality-...
[7] https://laanwj.github.io/2016/05/06/hostility-scams-and-movi...
> cause Bitcoin P2P nodes to become confined to datacenters.
Someone paid a Russian hacker to DDOS the Bitcoin Classic nodes, and what we learned from that was that the nodes in datacenters are the only ones which can't be trivially knocked off the internet. If you want resiliance, get nodes in as many datacenters of different sovereign jurisdictions as possible. The nodes running on home connections are an illusion.
(at least until home internet connections come with DDOS mitigation tools)
BTW, this too is a misconception: "and what we learned from that was that the nodes in datacenters are the only ones which can't be trivially knocked off the internet"
Right, because you didn't learn to run Tor hidden service nodes. You also didn't learn to proxy your connection over SSH. No, that would make too much sense. What you learned was that you had to physically relocate your node to a datacenter. Golf clap.
> If you want resiliance, get nodes in as many datacenters of different sovereign jurisdictions as possible. The nodes running on home connections are an illusion.
Welcome to 2013?
> Your suggestions don't stop the address published to the p2p network from being flooded.
bitcoind -?
-externalip=<ip>
Specify your own public address
-onion=<ip:port>
Use separate SOCKS5 proxy to reach peers via Tor hidden services
(default: -proxy)
-onlynet=<net>
Only connect to nodes in network <net> (ipv4, ipv6 or onion)For example, a physical "Bitcoin payment card" which can only be used with terminals sold by one vendor with bitcoins stored on the same vendor's servers. If that had taken off, it would quickly become nearly impossible to replace - and yet Bitcoiners thought this was the best thing ever, instead of applying critical thinking and realising it'd be possible to create a similar system but open to any vendor you'd like. As long as it's not the Government restricting your choice, it's not bad, right?
The Bitcoin eco-system is full of double-speak and immense cognitive dissonance. It's a weird community where people purport to be about decentralization, freedom, and security, when in reality the people support almost the exact opposite by preferring centralized services with almost no individual control or security. Most people don't even seem to notice that the FinTech services that are run in the Bitcoin space have essentially become as bad as the banks that Bitcoin sought to replace, and I don't mean bank as in "your own bank, Bitcoin (tm)" – more the kind that opportunistically exploits you for a profit because you have no better options.
Worst still: at least actual banks tend to have some amount of oversight in how they're run, with some level of recoverability if something goes wrong. With centralized, cryptocurrency FinTech the operator is essentially saying to a crowd of hackers how much semi-untraceable, pseudo-anonymous assets they have to irrevocably steal and since anyone can start a FinTech company based on blockchains -- we've even had some companies that were run by people barely out of high school. Truly, the fact that no one even questions this as a security model for FinTech in the Bitcoin space is absurd. But they don't: which is why its easy for me to predict at least 5 major FinTech hacks in the Bitcoin space for 2017. I'll update this post when they happen.
Also, there are sane people in Bitcoin. Check out the bitcoin category of Trilema.
The community isn't one person.