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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11775504

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

There's also the fact that everything is still, at the core, pure javascript. For example you can't print("string" * 10) or even iterate over a dictionary.

I'm not saying this to put down the project - I am very interested in it - but it cannot parse pure python, and that isn't the goal of the project.

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/rapydscript-ng/

There is a small group who seem really good at spreading a message of "Bitcoin is about to collapse". They are doing this either because they control a lot of competing currency (Ethereum), or because they think it will help adoption of their Bitcoin fork.

The reality is, 95% of Bitcoiners are very happy with the team working on the protocol, and the market seems happy too (the price has gone up +68% over the last 6 months.)

But you absolutely should not take some random internet person's word for it. You'll have to invest large amounts of time reading bitcointalk, reddit and the like to make a sound decision. Luckily it's pretty fascinating reading. In time when Bitcoin's future is clearer, it will either be worth much more, or nearly nothing. But I think you can get great insight into where it is going by following it closely today.

This may not sound like much, but also keep in mind eight months ago it was 20MB, with an eventual jump into the GB range, that they were pushing for. Also, recently they are talking about removing any limit altogether.

This change seems small but the consequences would not be, since it limits who can run a full client and centralizes control to those who can (companies, not individuals).

There are better ways to achieve the same goal and keep the decentralization, but they are not so simple, and need to be fully tested before rolling out. One exciting thing in the pipeline, is a caching layer that sits on top of bitcoin, which allows instant, true microtransactions. In the short term there's "segwit" which also brings all sorts of other advantages.

If you want to promote Ethereum, you can do so on /r/ethereum/.

I am sure promoting dog ownership over cats is frowned upon by /r/cats readers, too.

There are already competing implementations like btcd written in Go. That's not the issue.

This post is from a developer who is part of a small group in the bitcoin world, who want to change the rules of the protocol. Anyone that did not follow those rule changes would see a different ledger.

That's not something that should be done in bitcoin - changes this big should be very hard to pull off, and require consensus of all parties. Most are strongly against these changes because it does not really do much, makes the network more centralized, and mainly because there are much better options to reach the same goal (that are being worked on right now).

Basically the only thing you see on /r/bitcoin for the last 10 months is discussion on this issue, constantly.

Yeah, people who say "Developer Joe blow is a fraud, download the superior Bitcoin classic" get their posts removed. That's moderation. (And it is moderation that actually didn't happen for many months before things got so out of control.)

Reddit hides posts that score -5 or lower. So, the moderators changed the CSS to show all posts (even < -5 posts) as an anti-censorship tool. The reddit.com administrators are aware of this.

As for sorting by Controversial - same concept. The pro-fork brigades would force popular posts to the bottom, now the moderators use the built-in Reddit sort tool to make those appear higher up, in threads where vote manipulation happens.

Because reddit lets anyone create an account in about 3 seconds, it is easy to game and control what gets seen and what does not. Hacker news does the right thing by not giving everyone a downvote button on the first day.

A clue that it is not genuine, is simply that nobody cares this much about a small technical change to a protocol. Yet these constant, daily, aggressive attacks against the developers have been going on for at least 10 months now.

All anyone has to do is read the pro-fork subreddit, /r/btc, and see how toxic and hostile they seem. It does not seem genuine and I cannot imagine anyone spending so much time writing the same things over and over for nearly a year.

It reminds me of the “Putin troll army” story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_brigades

This is simply not true. The only rule on the /r/bitcoin Reddit is not to promote these network fork attempts. This is not just alternative software, it is software that follows DIFFERENT rules from the main bitcoin software and would follow a different ledger history if a fork happened.

In fact talking about this topic, criticisms of developers and the like is practically all you see there, for the last 8 months!

You are not explaining the origin of the "please don't promote network forks" rule. ("Bitcoin XT", now "Bitcoin Classic").

The people pushing the need to fork would bombard the Reddit forum for many months, very likely with sockpuppets. They were extremely hostile and aggressive, down voting anyone who would disagree with them. Readers would notice their posts would instantly be scored negative only seconds after a post. This pro-fork group would harass the developers with personal attacks and threats, forcing some developers to leave due to the harm it was having on their mental health.

Only after this went on for a very long time did the moderators finally try to get things under control. The pro-fork crowd yelled “censorship”. But this is not censorship, it is long needed moderation.

> People who run alternative implementations of Bitcoin get DDoSed so heavy, that sometimes whole districts of cities get cut off from the internet.

The majority of the fork software run on freebie Amazon AWS servers:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/499bai/51_of_bitco...

Where do you get this claim that "whole districts of cities" are being cut off the internet?

https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-con...

Nearly every developer, along with the vast majority of miners, have agreed to this.

The group that did not agree (Coinbase, 2 developers, and some small miners) is extremely good at social media and has done a great job of spreading a false story of "serious scaling problems" and "developers can't reach consensus". It's simply not true.

They want to take over the bitcoin network with a fork, which will follow different rules, called "Bitcoin Classic". This is their second attempt at a takeover, the last was the failed "Bitcoin XT" fork. There is no sane reason to fork the network short of trying to take control of the protocol.

Here is the roadmap that the main Bitcoin ("core") team has put together and is working on:

https://bitcoincore.org/en/2015/12/23/capacity-increases-faq...

A fake "grass roots" campaign was started on Reddit, where numerous sock puppet accounts were used to bombard the /r/bitcoin subreddit with calls to change Bitcoin's "block size limit" to a much larger number.

This would allow more transactions per second, at the cost of hurting Bitcoin's P2P decentralization (the main thing it is good at). These posters claimed there was a dire, urgent need to do this immediately, and used spam transaction attacks on the network to make it look necessary.

They also used downvoting/upvoting scripts to push their posts to the top, and to censor the developer's responses (reddit hides posts with a -5 score; any post by developers instantly would be downvoted to that level).

They harassed the developers with constant personal attacks, to the point that it became impossible for them to engage the community. They also flooded the development mailing list, and many developers unsubscribed.

As for the "block size increase", an absurd number was picked (20x increase), and knowing that the developers would not go along with it, the "solution" proposed was a fork of the both the software and the network itself called "Bitcoin XT".

All but 2 of the 90+ Bitcoin developers thought this was a terrible idea, especially since they have come up with much safer and better solutions to achieve the same goal (scaling up the transactions per second).

Yet when this fork attempt failed to gain any support, a better funded, even more aggressive second attempt (oddly named "Bitcoin Classic") started being promoted.

It is being pushed by the CEO of Coinbase (the author of this blog post) and backed by some of the other bitcoin exchange's CEOs.

I think the creator of bittorrent, Bram Cohen, sums up what developers and the larger technical community are thinking about these takeover attempts- https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/697705876337995776