Despite our forum clashes, I humbly and with goodwill ask:
Would you mind de-listing S.DICE temporarily to encourage shareholders to put pressure on the site operators to stop taking advantage of the block chain during this critical stage of Bitcoin growth? I know this might go against your short term financial interests but really if you stop to think about it, the "startup capital" of the Bitcoin network (gmaxwell's terminology for the currently unused space in each block) is going to unproductive activity which does not grow the Bitcoin economy.
If nothing is done about SD transaction spam (economically unspendable outputs which can't be pruned), transaction fees will be driven higher and every miner will bear the cost of forever storing these unprunable tx in their copies of the blockchain. In the long run, increased fees are not a problem but at the early stage we are in, it could dampen Bitcoin adoption or possibly kill it.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
The approach proposed is fundamentally flawed in multiple places.
First and foremost, the only reasonable authority in Bitcoin is derived through the working of
contracts. Put another way this states that the power of "a collective", ie a group of users no
matter how large to dispose for the future is nil. Put in yet another way, Bitcoin is not a
democracy, but a republic.
Consequently, to propose that MPEx breach its contract with SatoshiDICE because you would like
me to is a waste of breath : you are not a party to that contract, and consequently you have no
standing whatsoever in that relationship. The contract specifies clearly how it works, and it
will work as such.
Secondly, and just as importantly : the current codebase is broken beyond belief. As explained
in an earlier Trilema article, the main problems Bitcoin faces currently come from the general
inability and ineptitude of the de facto dev team. These problems are a. that users can not
create arbitrary size transactions up to the size of one full block ; b. that the client does
not correctly select the best possible combination of available inputs to feed a list of
arbitrary outputs. More generally speaking the codebase is replete with magic numbers, which is
no way to code. The fact that a 7Gb download takes an hour if we're talking a movie and a week
if we're talking the blockchain - especially considering that the average torrent rarely has
over 100 seeders and the Bitcoin blockchain rarely has under 1k - is further testament to the
utter inability of the core team.
Consequently, the correct approach is for these people to either fix the codebase - which will
require serious work - or else step down and let other people do it. The early enthusiasm of
"everyone's welcome and we're glad to have you" may have bridged us between Bitcoin being worth
nothing and Bitcoin being worth 1/10`000th of a pizza, but we are now playing in the grown-up
league and as such we need grown-up code. It is certainly not acceptable to proceed as proposed,
from a "this is what the codebase can do, we will pretend to limit usage of Bitcoin to that"
perspective, as is contemplated here. The only acceptable and the only correct approach is,
"this is how Bitcoin can be used, therefore this is how Bitcoin should be used, therefore this
is what our code must accomodate, let's get to work on it."
The fact that a number of people - such as Luke-jr, Gmaxwell, Mike Hearn etc - feel inclined to
compensate for their modest technical ability with a disproportionate and unwarranted political
preocupation is of course to be expected : the marginal and the stupid have tried to propel
themselves in the position of populist "leaders" for as long as humanity existed. This will not
work in Bitcoin, because that is not how Bitcoin works. It is specifically designed to foil the
very common alliance between the stupid but lazy and the ambitious but inept that regularly
wrecks fiat ventures of all sorts, from small business to entire countries. It will work as
intended for that purpose.
Please you idiots, fix the codebase. If you can't do that, go away.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)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=THL3
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----