Gavin Andresen

For those unfamiliar with how crazy the shenanigans at r/bitcoin (and bitcointalk.org), the historical primary online discussion forums for Bitcoin (both run by the same individual [1]), the subreddit uses a 70+KB custom stylesheet [2] to unhide collapsed (downvoted) comments, hidden points, thread sort order set to controversial, and very heavy-handed moderation/banning to unduly influence/control conversation [3].

The community seems to have done an ok job working around this with r/btc (although conversation there is almost completely dominated by discussions on the hard fork and against Core) and the bitcoin.com forums (although again, not without some drama/controversy, and both of those forums are still run/controlled by a single person (Roger Ver)) - it seems like guaranteeing open/neutral discussions for crypto-currencies is still an unsolved problem.

Personally, while I'm following along (and running a Classic node), I've liquidated the few coins I've had to see how it shakes out. It's incontrovertible that Bitcoin has hit its current capacity limits which is especially dangerous with the upcoming halvening, and the primary development cabal has been unwilling to scale it, despite foreknowledge/certainty and increasingly urgent calls over the past 2 years. If Bitcoin becomes viable again, I'll throw my money back in the ring, but if it doesn't, well, it was an interesting experiment and spurred a lot of innovation, but also pointed out some still unsolved problems…

> zkSNARKs are not only meant and used for cryptocurrencies. They are decades old technology but ofc they can be used for all sorts of solutions including cryptocurrencies.

Yes, but their current popularity (and the reason why so much effort is put into this subfield of cryptological research these days) is most likely due to their use in the context of cryptocurrencies, as far as I can tell. If I'm wrong, please let me know.

> Maybe there are real people working on crypto problems or maybe there is some sort of Crypto winter akin to AI winter[1].

Most likely, both. Once the low-hanging fruit is picked, things tend to slow down a bit (at least for a while). As you pointed out, this is common in many research fields, and not something specific to "blockchain tech".

> Let's take Satoshi for example a top notch computer scientist and a top notch C++ programmer. Who is even close to him? Vitalik? Kid who dropped out of college and rediscovered Satoshi's smart contract scripting language that Bitcoin had way back in 2008.

Just because Satoshi is a better programmer than Vitalik (I don't know if it's the case, but I'll assume it to be true), and he decided to leave the field (allegedly), it still doesn't mean that there aren't capable people out there working in the field.

> Is Gavin Andresen[2] still involved?

From what I can tell, yes: http://gavinandresen.ninja/

> These are the kind of people I am talking about.

Fair enough. But then the argument should be that "most…

point 1 is obviously true

To point 2 - the original white paper doesn't even mention "block size limit" because originally Bitcoin did not have a block size limit. "Honest miners" are assumed by the author to always include all profitable transactions (ie. where the fee > marginal cost to include it in a block).

The limit was added after an attack in the earliest days of Bitcoin. That attack vector is simple: a miner who mines a block includes bogus transactions to himself in order to inflate the block to gigantic proportions. Other miners, who have to validate its contents, choke on the block. Meanwhile the attacker is free to keep mining, and / or the network stops processing transactions.

The original attack, and why it's no longer relevant, is described in this blog:

http://gavinandresen.ninja/One-Dollar-Lulz

In short, the attack vector which prompted the creation of a block-size-limit consensus rule is no longer a concern, as it has been addressed in two ways:

(1) This attack surfaced in the earliest days of Bitcoin, when it cost nothing to mine and miners risked nothing if they mined a block and threw it away by attacking the network. Today, industrial miners risk $10K with every block they would lose if they tried the original attack - which by the way

(2) is preventable without even having a consensus rule, for example by running Bitcoin Unlimited, a version of Bitcoin which attempts to re-create "original" Bitcoin by allowing each miner to set his own…

I have also only scanned, but I agree I didn't see somewhere he outright says he still believes Wright as of the deposition date in 2020.

I think these might be some of the strongest statements people are talking about:

* Page 88 in 590/5:

7 A Sitting here today, I think it's more 8 likely than not that I saw a proper signature, but 9 I -- but I do have some doubt. * Page 163 in 590/5:

5 A I meant that he bamboozled me about the 6 gobbledygook proof, but I still think it's most 7 likely that he did not bamboozle me during the 8 signing ceremony. From my viewpoint on the sidelines, these are too irrationally close to endorsing Wright as Satoshi, because they cling to some hazy jetlagged memories in a hotel that looked like a real signature, over every other sign pointing to Wright being a fraud.

I feel for Mr. Andresen -- the signature may have just barely been 50.5% credible to him and he can't arrive at another conclusion on it in isolation. But with all the other evidence, I suppose a lot of people feel like his refusal to clearly denounce Wright may as well be continued support.

Also, according to his blog post at http://gavinandresen.ninja/satoshi , it took until 2023 for him to state "I now know it was a mistake to trust Craig Wright as much as I did" (excerpted), yet he still doesn't outright denounce him. Maybe my original statement that Mr. Andresen believed him for years was not quite correct, but if he let his website support…

> It is not yet a problem.

That's a controversial premise that the article repeatedly addresses.

You may not be convinced, but there is a lot of stuff cited in there on that exact point.[1] Those links lead to other resources fleshing this out pretty quickly.[2, 3]

I found this bit persuasive:

> "Some customers contacted Chris earlier today asking why our bitcoin payouts didn’t execute ... The issue is that it’s now officially impossible to depend upon the bitcoin network anymore to know when or if your payment will be transacted, because the congestion is so bad that even minor spikes in volume create dramatic changes in network conditions. To whom is it acceptable that one could wait either 60 minutes or 14 hours, chosen at random? It’s ludicrous that people are actually writing posts on reddit claiming that there is no crisis. People were criticizing my post yesterday on the grounds that I somehow overstated the seriousness of the situation. Do these people actually use the bitcoin network to send money everyday?"[original article, citing [4]]

I'm an outsider here, and don't have a stake in this. So maybe people who have followed this debate more closely can recognize that as a total fabrication, but to me it sounded like a plausible business concern.

[1] http://gavinandresen.ninja/why-increasing-the-max-block-size-is-urgent

[2] http://gavinandresen.ninja/the-myth-of-not-full-blocks

[3] http://hashingit.com/analysis/44-bitcoin-traffic-bulletin-redux

[4]…

Cross post from the NYT article comment:

In open source communities, impactful contributions yield influence. Here are the top 100 bitcoin contributors:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/graphs/contributors

Guys like Wladimir, Pieter, Gavin, Cory Fields, Gregory Maxwell and Luke Jr have a voice because they’ve contributed many thousands of lines of code. (Lines of code are only a proxy for impact).

You may have noticed Mike Hearn isn’t in the top 100 contributors list. He is the primary author of the Java implementation of a bitcoin library:
https://github.com/bitcoinj/bitcoinj

He started it in 2011, definitely early. But a substantial amount of bitcoin core work had already set the path. There are also similar implementations in many different languages but they are not the primary reference implementation for full nodes.

According to Hearn’s blog post:
“I’ve talked about Bitcoin on Sky TV and BBC News. I have been repeatedly cited by the Economist as a Bitcoin expert and prominent developer. I have explained Bitcoin to the SEC, to bankers and to ordinary people I met at cafes.”

Being cited by journalists is not the same as being a primary contributor.

The disagreement between Hearn and the other developers isn’t about whether to increase capacity, it’s about how. Many of the primary full-node contributors believe a hard-blockchain-fork is a risky approach. Lots of work is being done to explore better options, like segregated witness…