Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] BIP 102 - kick the can down the road to 2MB

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2015 09:58:46 -0400

On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 09:04:12AM -0400, Peter Todd via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> For that reason I think BIP102 is extremely poorly designed. I can only
> conclude that Jeff Garzik is either deliberately trolling us and/or
> manipulating discussion with a badly designed proposal that he doesn't
> actually expect to be adopted verbatim, or is incompetent.

Expanding on that a bit:

On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 09:14:26PM +0800, Jeremy Rubin wrote:
> unsolicited feedback:
>
> I'd send a quick apology for this bit
>
> """
> For that reason I think BIP102 is extremely poorly designed. I can only
> conclude that Jeff Garzik is either deliberately trolling us and/or
> manipulating discussion with a badly designed proposal that he doesn't
> actually expect to be adopted verbatim, or is incompetent.
> """
>
> it's a little over the top.
>
> I think that Garzik is probably releasing it in reaction to the fact
> certain people are only looking at something with code attached.
>
> No need to call someone stupid for sharing a proposal... although it seems
> sketchy that he got a BIP # for this. You want to foster a less hostile
> community...

I don't agree with you at all.

This is a case where if Jeff doesn't understand that issue, he's
proposing changes that he's not competent enough to understand, and it'd
save us a lot of review effort if he left that discussion. Equally, Jeff
is in a position in the dev community where he should be that competent;
if he actually isn't it does a lot of good for the broader community to
change that opinion.

I personally *don't* think he's doing that, rather I believe he knows
full well it's a bad patch and is proposing it because he wants to push
discussion towards a solution. Often trolling the a audience with bad
patches is an effective way to motivate people to respond by writing
better ones; Jeff has told me he often does exactly that.

I think in this case we shouldn't do anything, so short-circuiting that
process by pointing out what he's doing publicly makes sense.

Re: BIP #'s, we explicitly have a policy of allocating them for stupid
ideas, to avoid having to be gatekeepers. Ironically that makes it
harder to get a BIP # if you know what you're doing, because Gregory
Maxwell will argue against you in private and delay actually allocating
one if he knows you should know better. :)

-- 
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
00000000000000000d9cad4228c0396ff49c1de60f8ee155928eee22705f6619