Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Draft BIP : fixed-schedule block size increase

From: Milly Bitcoin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2015 22:14:47 -0400

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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