Re: Wondering out loud: Which should Chinese miners support - Core, Classic or another?
Some believe that the Chinese community's interest being underrepresented at the level of core development is much due to the fact that as a whole they have been myopically focusing on making money and not paying enough attention to protocol maintenance. As a result, they have almost no say and are little more than merely audience.
Please elaborate on what you mean by "the Chinese community's interest."
The three things I've heard about China-specific BTC interests relate to verification, bandwidth, propagation, and GFC latency issues.
- 20MB Gavinblocks are too big/slow for Chinese miners (and were vetoed by f2pool, etc.)
- 8MB XT blocks are lucky, because of some pun or superstition
- SPV mining was being done in unsafe/invalid ways by some Chinese miners, resulting in slightly more chaos and drama than usual
Other than geography and government related connectivity issues, I don't understand how a neutral protocol like Bitcoin would have any kind of nation-specific interests.
I also don't understand how you can arrive at general conclusions about a group so large, and thus full of conflicting and competing opinions and interests, as the Chinese Bitcoin community (which must number in the thousands or millions).
Are you doing the same thing as some big-blockers here in the west, which is to presume to speak for the majority even though no vote has been taken?
But you are aware that it is almost impossible to speak without some level of generalisation, aren't you? Sure, I by very definition can't have perfect knowledge of all people who identify themselves as Chinese.
But let's not get too philosophical.
What prompted me to post this topic is that I went to a BTC conference in Beijing last week - there were about 60 people, all Chinese with exception of two who don't speak the Chinese language. I assume that the rest are representative of the Chinese to some degree?
And I find that their views are echoed again and again by the Chinese articles and forum posts that I read on daily basis, which reinforce my impression that these are indeed what the Chinese believe.
Also, I work at a Chinese office in Zhongguancun district, Beijing and sometimes, have meals with them, and I sometimes shares a dormitory with some Chinese colleagues - paid for by the company. I assume they are representative in a way too?
If that doesn't matter, I lived three months in a Chinese Bitcoin data centre in Western Sichuan and interviewed scores of people when I write for some Bitcoin media outlets.
If all these don't qualify me to speak for the Chinese according to your standard, then fine, just ignore me.
Ignoring you would not allow us to learn from each other, so I won't do that.
I am happy and thankful you are reporting on what you hear and see in the Chinese Bitcoin ecosystem.
But your experiences, although very interesting, are anecdotal and do not qualify you to be the Chinese Ambassador to Bitcoin.
In the very large group of Chinese Bitcoiners, there are just as many different opinions as we find in American Bitcoiners or European Bitcoiners.
I don't presume to appoint myself American Ambassador to Bitcoin, because I think the idea of bringing old-fashioned nationalistic nonsense into a better future (based on a neutral protocol for value transfer) is silly. And if you haven't noticed, we in the West love to disagree with each other!
Maybe we have missed an important unique feature of Chinese Bitcoiners, that they may for cultural reasons be less likely to speak up for an opinion perceived to be unpopular. Do you feel there may be truth in that hypothesis? Have you met any outspoken Chinese small-blockers/Core supporters/Blockstream fanboys, do they simply not exist, or are they uncomfortable expressing disagreement with the majority?