Quote from: makomk on March 12, 2013, 12:44:54 PM

Quote from: niko on March 12, 2013, 06:08:31 AM

It is also a huge issue that those suggesting we need the protocol spec are brushed off with the "you don't get it" nonsense by elitist devs.
Bits and pieces, some expired, are scattered around Wiki. Is that the best we can do?
@MP: would you be willing to lead the effort of formulating the current protocol spec?

You really, really don't get it. We can't have a protocol spec becasue the existing client has a whole bunch of unspecified and unintended behaviour that no-one knows about, and any divergence from that behaviour by any major implementation will result in fiascos like this one. This problem could just as easily have been caused by a independent third-party implementation of the client. The developers have been finding and documenting all the corner cases as thoroughly as possible, but some of them are - like this one - really subtle and hard to spot. I'm not sure anyone's managed to fully work out the circumstances under which 0.7 will fail to accept a block due to this bug.

You're right, I really don't get it. "Any divergence from that behavior... will result in fiascos like this one." Breaking news: this little fiasco was the result of a bug in the reference client, not any "divergence" of alternative implementations. You want to base a technology handling billions of dollars on a black box that, according to your words, "has a whole bunch of unspecified and unintended behavior that no-one knows about" Huh

FYI, someone will get to know some of these things, and some of that will become zero-day exploits. If your kind of sentiment and irrational justifications continues to prevail among developers, I am going all out of Bitcoin. I still don't understand how any sane person can try to defend voodoo black box approach to defining the protocol.