Quote from: obitoo on February 12, 2014, 02:21:09 PM

lol @ all you guys that don't work in software

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythical_man_month

Quote from: raid_n on February 12, 2014, 03:36:59 PM

Quote from: obitoo on February 12, 2014, 02:21:09 PM

lol @ all you guys that don't work in software

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythical_man_month

+1

Think about it: Do you really want the core bitcoin client to constantly be updated and changed where a careless change might fork or otherwise compromise the blockchain?

The Malleability issue only becomes a real issue when it is not properly handled which in this case is directly linked to custom software used by exchanges.
People need to realize that bitcoin is distributed software and works because all participants comply to a specific set of protocols.
If you change this protocol and older versions reject elements of the new protocol you will have a very real risk of forking the blockchain into an "old" and " new" branch.

In this sense it is good that things are not being rushed because we sure as hell don't want or need a forking of the blockchain at this instance

I don't disagree. Heck my company is a good example of this, we keep it lean and cheap here. My current lead is getting almost everything done himself (though hes pretty fucking expensive, and I am paying for his health insurance and he has 4 kids Cry

). We do tools for animation professionals, which involves a lot of OpenCL, C++, and QT.

But there is not many software products out there with a $10B market cap which only have 10 people. Try telling Autodesk (~$11B market cap) to limit their team to 10 people and see how that goes. I feel the comparison of bitcoin to a company is fair because bitcoin has competition, and it's a money enabling tool. And to maintain their value in the long term, they need to stay ahead of the curve, whether that means features or stability (hopefully stability).

Just because bitcoin isn't adding as many features as possible doesn't mean it can't benefit from a larger team. You could argue for bitcoin it's better to have a small close-knit team. I agree, but it's not hard to keep the current team and expand on it from the testing side. Rather than adding more people with the intention of adding more features to bitcoin, I would suggest a larger team of testers and QA. I can see in their sourceforge mailing list they mention they don't have time to test every merge request.

More people doesn't necessitate constant updates or an addition of features. It could mean the same amount of updates but with more complete and secure testing, and more foresight on bugs and exploits.

Quote from: Torque on February 12, 2014, 04:31:27 PM

Quote from: TheGhost on February 11, 2014, 09:48:17 PM

If the devs rush out a fix and it fails, or take too long, I will have questions about bitcoins ability to compete long term, even with the head start. Bitcoins greatest enemy is not governments or a lack of usefulness, it is competing cryptos, and if a crypto exists with 10x more developers, it will win.

So you really think that alternate cryptos have larger, smarter, and more well funded development teams than bitcoin? And the Bitcoin protocol being real-world stress tested on a global scale for vulnerabilities for over the last 4 years, while almost all of the new alts have been around less than a year (in some cases < 6 months)? And some of them not even based on the bitcoin code, but some dodgy custom code written by obscure developers, that hasn't even been fully tested and vetted?

Hmmm... yeah, competing cryptos will win. Wink

I don't think anything that currently exists will beat bitcoin, not by a long shot. But if nvidia decided that they wanted to develop for litecoin, dogecoin, or some imaginary 'cudacoin', because it helps them sell GPUs, then you can bet the team will be larger than 10 people. They don't even have to own the code for it to benefit them, they only need to ensure that more people are using it, so they can sell more GPUs. I used nvidia as an example because they've done this before with other software. It's a longshot that something like that will happen, frankly I think bitcoin is going to win regardless, but I'm sure whales don't want any possibility of it, even if that possibility is slim.