It is actually not odd at all that a formal process is dismissed out of
hand. It is all about protecting turf and holding on to power. If
there is a well defined process then that takes the power out of the
hands of the people who have been running the show and making up the
rules. In some cases developers see Bitcoin as their "baby" and they
think they must control it in order to protect it but in doing so they
can become an "overprotective parent." Another problem is that some
people in Bitcoin have disdain for the people they need such as
financial, economic, security, and legal experts. Some think they are
smarter than those people because they discovered Bitcoin first and they
think their knowledge of Bitcoin means they are also superior in all
these other areas. I have seen some discussions of developers who have
met with people from the financial sector and they come out of the
meeting with the attitude that all the experts are stupid and that
Bitcoiners have everything figured out. One developer tried to tell me
that you can't do systems engineering in Bitcoin because it involves
security rather than safety (of course that issue has been well vetted
and NIST has a whole series of documents to address that very issue
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/PubsSPs.html).
Russ
On 6/26/2015 6:16 PM, Simon Liu wrote:
If Bitcoin is a $3bn project where stakeholder interests are to be
safeguarded, or if Bitcoin is to be compared to a civil engineering
project where life and death is at stake, it seems only logical that a
well-defined and well-documented process be introduced to properly
evaluate proposed changes. Although too late for the block size debate,
it seems odd that discussion of such a process is often dismissed out of
hand.
To maintain the current approach of supermajority consensus, based
around ingrained wisdom, personal preference and unwritten rules would
suggest that Bitcoin is still an experiment, in which case perhaps any
decision regarding the block size should be based upon technical merit
alone rather than economic interest.
--Simon
You're the one proposing a change here; we're evaluating the safety of
that change.
In civil engineering we have enough experience with disasters to know
that you can't give into political pressure to do potentially dangerous
things until the consequences are well understood; hopefully we'll learn
that in the consensus cryptography space before a big disaster rather
than after.
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