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.
The problem is that there are two very different things in play here:
- How humans think the Bitcoin protocol behaves
- What Bitcoin Core actually does
There is no case where a divergence between these two things is good. It means that despite years of effort Bitcoin Core is in some ways still a black box capable of surprising behaviour instead of predictable behaviour.
We have no guarantee that Bitcoin Core is self-consistent (like it wasn't in March 2013). Due to the way that code was written, it's likely that we never will have such a guarantee.
The only way out of this mess is to deprecate Bitcoin Core in favour of more-specifiable implementations as rapidly as possible.
If Bitcoin Core (and derivatives) were a minority of the nodes in the network, then the next time one of Bitcoin Core's surprises manifested it would be a problem that a minority of the network would need to fix instead of newly-discovered behaviour that the entire network would need to implement.
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?
That work has already been done by the authors of btcd (btcsuite).
They do have some truly exceptional developers, particularly davec.
That he receives snubbing, derision, and personal attack for his efforts is a major example of how toxic and dysfunctional the Bitcoin development culture has become.
Nope. Szatoshi will back Back and Maxwell. The cypherpunks will stick together (or hang separately).
Some cypherpunks would do well to engage in soul searching regarding the question of so many of their flagship efforts (PGP) have been market failures.
Knowledge of cryptography doesn't automatically translate into understanding business, economics, engineering, or interface design.