Quote from: Syke on September 13, 2010, 02:15:29 AM

Satoshi,

So you support people taking your code, modifying it to skim bitcoins off the miner, and then releasing the binary without releasing the modified source code?

That's exactly the point! I get the impression that many people commenting do not understand the issues involved quiet well enough and get confused a little ... no offense Wink

So I would like to hear a response to that question too ... are you going to support and condone someone taking the code, adding a little eye-candy and little nice features perhaps and distributing this proprietary closed-sourced client to the bitcoin community? As you seem to be actually encouraging that by releasing the code under MIT license.

How are you going to check if there isn't any "bonus" to that eye-candy in the form of a backdoor, if it does follow the protocol correctly, if it doesn't at some point in time just transfer all the bitcoins from everyone to some hardcoded address? Is there any reliable way or are we just supposed to *trust* the publisher?

Why all the trouble to develop a decentralized system with specific goal of eliminating the need for central authority to trust when you then allow this exact thing to be reintroduced in the form of trusting the publisher of your software?

For those who would trade their principles for wider adoption ... I would rather want smaller community of a system I can rely on than a big one that is compromised. As far as I'm concerned, the corporations and "businesses" that won't respect the principles of transparency and openness can stick it! They're going to corrupt it and destroy anyway if they are allowed any larger influence. Did it not occur to you that there is a reason some corporations won't touch GPL? They can not cheat and rip people off with that kind of software ... that translates into lower profits. I don't know about you but I certainly wouldn't miss that kind of "company" ... That's like asking Microsoft to help popularize your OS - they are going to screw you over the first chance they get, it's going to get popular allright but it's going to be no longer the OS you had in mind at first.

Your argument Satochi that it creates duplication of work is a valid one ... it makes cheating and compromising the bitcoin community a hell of a lot easier for anyone who wishes to do so. But I did not realize that was the kind of duplicity we were worried about.

I would like to hear any reasonable scenario where distribution of a proprietary bitcoin software would be acceptable, would *you* accept a proprietary implementation to run on your system? Would you recommend to anybody to use such an implementation? I'm really curious about this ... thank you.

(and sorry, I'm kind of perturbed by the responses ... if you sense any tension from my post it's from frustration that people would even consider running a black box software dealing with bitcoins, incredible!)