Quote from: cypherdoc on December 31, 2014, 02:14:57 AM

Quote from: tvbcof on December 31, 2014, 02:12:03 AM

Of course, as always, I happen to see sidechains as not only 'right' for Bitcoin but basically Bitcoin's best hope for success. Naturally this goes some distance toward helping build my confidence in the enterprise as well, and makes it quite understandable why this novel contract agreement bullet-point is acceptable to all.

you're missing the point. the act of leaving by those devs requires a conscious act and decision to do the "right" thing. how can we keep trying to sell Bitcoin to the world as a "trustless" system when we have to "trust" Blockstream devs to do the right thing?

I'm not sure if you know but people who can code in bitcoin core receive frequent lucrative offers (eg like $500k) to code altcoins. Devs all received them, and rejected them. The only people who took such money was Peter Todd (I think busy at $250/hr), however as I understand it he only takes that work with the caveat that he can work on decentralising bitcoin or other tech that is mutually useful to bitcoin. A few of these guys have almost no bitcoins or spent them trying to do startups or such things. I think thats a pretty clear evidence of intent to do the right thing. They have more fealty to bitcoin as a concept and doing the right thing than putting food on their table. And also disdain for ethics of pump & dump business models that have victims at the bottom of the pyramid.

You can view that while in theory some one could fork bitcoin if Gavin went nutso on something really bad (or was blackmailed into doing something dodgy) or something, that the community could fork the code. However in practice there is also realistically a shortage of people with the skill set to maintain and create security patches for a fork, so while the desire to do it would be real, the number of devs is a problem.

As Greg mentions here thats something we thought was important to improve - train more core devs - so there is more decentralisation. http://www.coindesk.com/gregory-maxwell-went-bitcoin-skeptic-core-developer/

Secondly basically there isnt anything thats going to happen in the core that a consensus of this group of people dont agree to. And they listen to feedback and want to keep the social contract and understand that contract. In fact their view is ideally its impossible for them to not keep the social contract (for their own personal safety as well as desired outcome) because the bitcoin network is really controlled by the economic majority. Thats kind of what cant be evil is about, an attempt to replicate that type of thinking into a corporate structure to fail-safe it. Not even miners can fork the protocol if no full nodes nor users like the change. That effect holds companies honest to bitcoin ethos - companies are dead in the water without developers. As I said our company was founded by core developers. And we actually view it as a feature that if we all disagreed vehemently with a strategy the company would have a problem - like a technical inability to do the thing we disagreed with.

Its actually in the companies interest to do the right thing as a company also, in terms of fiduciary responsibility because something bad for bitcoin ethos will likely be rejected by the bitcoin user & business community.

You might imagine given the shortage any core developer could walk out and get job the next day. Even outside of bitcoin its a pretty uber-geek architect level crowd in terms of employability. But right now the only hope of doing something might be Peter Todd (however he's pretty rabidly pro-decentralisation, pro-anonymity (eg stealth addresses etc), anti-censorship (work on proof of publication and end-to-end policy full node only exploration with tree-chains idea) etc so I doubt he'd be interested to do something bad for users), or perhaps Mike Hearn (who sort of floated the idea of red-lists though I'm not sure how serious he was). However I dont think Mike did a lot of core development in years, more working on java wallet library and apps.

Sidechains may also be good for that - an escape valve - people who want to do crazy stuff, can go do it in a sidechain, that no one (who cares about bitcoin ethos features) would use. Vs try to coerce legally or otherwise developers into subverting bitcoin itself at its core where there's no choice left, and bitcoin risks destruction.

In summary yes we thought about this stuff, and outside of some disagreement that sidechains create more risk than they remove (I say they remove risk, because bitcoin is exposed to offchain risk & monetary shocks from eg mtgoxings, such that sidechains are a clear improvement over offchain economically), I'd imagine we're in violent agreement on the ethos of bitcoin and whats are the important aspects of idealised bitcoin features & ethos.

Feel free to suggest protocol improvements. Eg other ways to firewall features (eg hardened vm per feature inside core) or whatever.

Adam