Quote from: gmaxwell on October 21, 2012, 11:14:07 PM

Quote from: casascius on October 21, 2012, 09:14:10 PM

That said, users should have every right to go to a settings screen and choose the minimal contribution for any reason or no reason at all, no questions asked. Their computer is their property, they have the right to restrict its resource usage as they wish, and software whose developers insist on consuming more resources than welcomed is as annoying as telemarketers who think that nobody will miss the few wasted seconds of their day when they call people. They are the reason non-developers value "walled gardens" like Apple's App Store, to the befuddlement of many developers.

I don't think this is a simple matter of principle as you've stated it.

At the end of the day the developers have given their time, to write freely licensed software, have distributed it with the source, been generally transparent about changes (I'd say very highly transparent, but some security sensitive things have had delayed details), do their work in the open, and generally help people hack on it. From a principled perspective I think thats where our obligations end... and thats more than enough that even if you're not a hacker you can get other people to code changes for you perhaps not for free but it's not generally considered polite to demand what people do with their time if you're not paying them.

Of course, it's _nice_ to be sensitive to people's wishes, but that has it's limits. We would be fools to add a "[X] DDOS attack bitcoin" or "[X] Blackhole transactions" settings to the menu and will not do that even though there are some people "for any reason or no reason at all" who would want them. To some extent the ability to exclude "features" like that is part of the payment we get for contributing to the system, and part of the reason people should choose to use and recommend the reference software instead of some other is the consideration of features that where included _and_ excluded, even if some people don't always agree completely with all of them. So features which are dangerous to the user or the network because they're easily misunderstood ought not be included, or ought to be sufficiently burred to prevent injury... and that if it's in there you know that bitcoin experts looked at it and weren't too horrified by it.

Selecting a client mode has obvious important applications, so I'm sure it would be offered. But if it's possible to maximize the good outcomes without hurting the applications by aggressively burying it a commandline (-screw-over-bitcoin=more) then it might not be a bad idea to do that. I suspect for all the the usecases for switching it the person will _know_ that they want to reduce resources and will go looking, we don't have to suggest the idea that a free lunch is only a click away if they weren't already thinking about it. Although burring it would be less good for user choice it must be balanced against all the other factors.

In any case, sorry for the tangent. We're a long way off from this and it may make sense to do just as you've said. I just wanted to muse a bit on the value of user choice and how I think that fits into feature decisions.

Quoting for archival purposes.

...part of the reason people should choose to use and recommend the reference software instead of some other is the consideration of features that where is the consideration of features that where included _and_ excluded, even if some people don't always agree completely with all of them.

This is central planning right here.