Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.
by
cypherdoc
on 02/06/2015, 03:46:53 UTC
i read about this here one time but i don't fully understand it nor the implications, not being a coder.

a spec is a written, detailed, normal language description of how the protocol works, is that correct?  wouldn't the current developer's guide qualify as something similar?

where as the code is what actually executes within the operating system and carries out the protocol rules?

and why NL, do you believe it would've prevented what we have going on now?
The Bitcoin Core is in such bad shape that fully specifying its behaviour is indistinguishable from impossible.

You could say this is Satoshi's fault. What we now call Bitcoin Core started out life as a prototype and evolved into its present condition - it is not an engineered piece of software.

I think the best course of action would be to acknowledge that the prototype has served its purpose and retire it in favour of treating a non-prototype codebase as the reference implementation for which a specification can be written.

Doing that would have the beneficial effect of increasing the number of developers who can participate, since the reference would be more understandable and better documented.

but there is truth to the fact that those embedded bugs and general messiness somehow "contribute" to the behavior of how the system works in unknowable but apparently predictable and stable ways which seem to work.  by changing those bugs or trying to clean up the mess, someone somewhere along the line will disrupt the predictability to where how the code operates may become unstable or unpredictable.  that would be bad.  it would take someone or some group truly exceptional to be able to rewrite the entire code and have it function exactly like it does today.  and with billions on the line, that would be a tremendous responsibility for a volunteer, would it not?