Mike Hearn

I should turn this into a FAQ, but PowerShell is natural on Windows, where the OS provides objects (either via the .NET VM, or COM and .DLLs, etc.)

A Unix shell like bash or Oil is natural on Unix, where the OS uses text files. And in distributed systems where data is JSON, YAML, XML, protobuf, msgpack, etc. not objects.

So basically shell is a "situated" language, and the easy of accomplishing any given task depends a lot on the environment.

Windows is more tightly coupled and trying to provide something nice for you. Unix is messier but doesn't limit you, and it's what basically all big systems are made of these days. A major strength of shell is to glue things together that nobody thought should be glued together.

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Good example here from Paul Bucheit: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/simplest-explanation.html#productive-programmers-secretly-use-shell

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/communicating-with-code.html

However, we needed a way for Gmail to make money, and Sanjeev Singh kept talking about using relevant ads, even though it was obviously a "bad idea". I remained skeptical, but thought that it might be a fun experiment, so I connected to that ads database (I assure you, random engineers can no longer do this!), copied out all of the ads+keywords, and did a little bit of sorting and filtering with some UNIX SHELL COMMANDS

I then hacked up the "adult content" classifier that Matt Cutts and I had written for safe-search, linked that into the…

The content in this article about anti-spam techniques is fascinating. But the title should be edited to indicate its vintage: 2014.

Also, by the by, there is some interesting context about the author (Mike Hearn) and his recent activities that are not related to the topic of spam.

Warning: off-topic digression below.

Mike Hearn became one of the most visible Bitcoin core developers, working in that community for 5 years, until a well-publicized departure where he declared Bitcoin a failure[0].

He then joined R3CEV, a startup venture that is building a private blockchain platform for a consortium of 70 of the world's largest banks. Hearn's departure was criticized by members of the cryptocurrency community, such as Bram Cohen, who famously called his exit a "whiny ragequit" [1].

Regardless about how one feels about the internal politics of the bitcoin dev community, the R3 project is technically interesting (to me, at least) because it uses Kotlin [2], a JVM-based functional language, and also because it has some interesting design approaches that depart from the established bitcoin blockchain model [3].

I still think that private blockchain platforms have an uphill battle if they want to compete for developer attention with rapidly evolving broad-based platforms like Ethereum and Bitcoin, but the R3 Corda platform is nevertheless worth tracking.

[0] https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7

[1]…

I read:
"It feels like while the Bitcoin Core development community is robust, the ecosystem of stakeholders and the understanding of how decisions are made and information is shared is still fragile and vulnerable. I fear that the communication and now emotional rift between various key groups and individuals is wide right now, but I believe it's imperative that we try to bring the community together and focus on executing on a shared technical plan that represents our best shot at broad consensus from both a technical and a practical perspective."

It reads like a response on the Bitcoin situation describted in the Jan 14 Medium article by Mike Hearn on the "Resolution of the Bitcoin experiment". Problems resulting in the rift between Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic and Bitcoin Unlimited.
https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7

He seems to suggest Ethereum and Bitcoin alternatives cannot yet replace Bitcoin Core as it is robust and battle tested as he writes:
"If you're serious about security and stability -- and you should be -- Bitcoin is almost the only choice with the largest bounty, and largest community, with the most practical modern experience deploying to a broad and active network in the real world."

But is Bitcoin the only choice and are the bitcoin stability problems outlined by Mike Hearn and others an "idee fixe" or just a dispute over blocksize?

For the past two years, the Bitcoin community has been embroiled in a debate about how to scale the network to handle more transactions. The debate has at times become less technical, rhetoric about "centralization" and the values of the community has become introduced, etc. Recently the debates have come to a head, and some have referred to it as a "Civil War"[0].

For technical background, I recommend these two posts by Mike Hearn, who has since left the Bitcoin community [1] [2]

Now, what the original article is talking about is the "Core" development team--the people who have commit access on the Bitcoin Github repo. The whole debate has essentially become Core vs. some other factions, mainly miners. You'll see the arguments in [1] and [2].

(Keep in mind, Mike Hearn is strongly on the anti-Core side of the argument. But those articles should give you an idea of what to search for, if you want to hear arguments on the other side.)

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-10/bitcoin-risks-splintering-as-civil-war-enters-critical-month

[1] https://medium.com/@octskyward/on-consensus-and-forks-c6a050c792e7

[2] https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7

Other metrics indicate could be just that it's holiday season. In the northern hemispheres, people are outdoors & enjoying the summer.

This coincides with the sudden drop in Google searches for bitcoin and others, also I've noticed the number of users online on poloniex has dropped significantly. This seasonal pattern was first observed with bitcoin, check this out: https://medium.com/@octskyward/bitcoin-s-seasonal-affective-disorder-35733bab760d

Also, other negative news: 1. Alphabay, the largest darknet market went offline, not sure if that is significant. 2. Bitnumb, largest(?) crypto exchange in South Korea got hacked, also not sure how much impact this had, but usually an exchange hack has a short term effect on prices and there has been a lot of recent activity in SK.

Other reason may be that boom and bust cycles are a natural occurrence of crypto markets. They were getting white-hot for the last few months and finally need some time to cool. So move along, nothing to see.. The cycle continues. The next boom might be bigger than anything we've seen before :-)

> Hearn mentions this mechanism three times in the article. He even discusses the tradeoffs of ignoring this versus rejecting the block. Hardly misleading.

Hearn mentions the nVersion mechanism? Specifically in https://medium.com/@octskyward/on-consensus-and-forks-c6a050c792e7 ?

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see any mention of the word "version"

> He said "essentially tricked", and I think his explanation is clear.

I think you're misunderstanding my point: everything you raised above is negated by the fact that the soft-fork mechanisms we use are designed to give warnings to users and miners who are not running the new(1) protocol. For example, in addition to the nVersion mechanism I mentioned, segwit transactions are intentionally designed to be not standard transactions, and thus non-segwit miners will reject them. This is an important feature to ensure that those miners don't unintentionally create invalid blocks.

1) I say "new" rather than "upgraded" to avoid making the claim that soft-forks are necessarily an upgrade.