Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Why Satoshi's temporary anti-spam measure isn't temporary

From: Eric Lombrozo <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2015 22:17:33 -0700

> On Jul 28, 2015, at 8:46 PM, Milly Bitcoin via bitcoin-dev <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
>> GUYS, WE’VE KNOWN ABOUT THESE PROBLEMS AND HAVE TALKED ABOUT THEM FOR
>> YEARS ALREADY…AND IT SEEMS PRACTICALLY NOTHING HAS HAPPENED…
> 
> What is the incentive for someone with high level technical skills to spend all their time developing and testing code?  Especially since the code is generally the boring task of "fixing the plumbing" and won't benefit the developer directly ... except they will be blamed if something goes wrong.
> 
> Russ
> 
> 
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Some of the most highly skilled technical people working on Bitcoin Core have been doing exactly that! The main incentive, of course, is that later on you get to work on something that’s actually pleasant to work on rather than a whole bunch of garbled crap that doesn’t work properly.

However, the great irony is that the devs who have long since recognized the importance of fixing these issues have also tended to be loathe to touching any of the consensus code unless it fixes some critical immediately exploitable security hole…while the devs who most clamor for consensus code changes have tended to all but ignore these issues entirely.

I sometimes wish it were the other way around.

- Eric