pull down to refresh
I strongly recommend rethinking client diversity in Bitcoin. it isn’t healthy, and Satoshi even warned us of this.
One client, all operating in lockstep is best.
Otherwise it is a menace.
all operating in lockstep
We all have to? You mean like in the military? That's what Satoshi wanted?
in terms of clients, Satoshi literally said that, yes.
I don't believe a second, compatible implementation of Bitcoin will ever be a good idea. So much of the design depends on all nodes getting exactly identical results in lockstep that a second implementation would be a menace to the network. The MIT license is compatible with all other licenses and commercial uses, so there is no need to rewrite it from a licensing standpoint.
Wow. I stand corrected. So let me ask you. What's the benefit of running your own mempool then?
I stand corrected.
Why would you care to listen to what Satoshi in 2010 said though? It was written in a time when Satoshi was BDFL or, in retrospect, BDFAW. Now, there are politics. Like you said yourself, this is important to many people, especially those that are lost in a forest of unassignable merit to ideas because it's too complex.
What's the benefit of running your own mempool then?
Diversity. IMHO very important. Just because I found you the fact and the literal text doesn't mean I agree with it. In fact, I think it is not of these times and outdated. The best thing that can happen is more implementations. Maybe forks of Core, like Jimmy & co said they were working on, and preferably also others.
#noheroes
does the fundamental method of how Bitcoin works changed since Satoshi said this? it still needs a global consensus via lockstep operations.
did we not just have a menace “diverse” client like knots fork off the network? this will happen again and again as long as we keep looking for “client diversity”.
what is different now than in 2010 when Satoshi wrote this?
I personally believe this advice to be evergreen, and every single time it’s the same result.
sure, governance always changes in a project because it is tied to its people interacting with it. Conways law: “organizations design systems that mirror their communication structures”.
but I am talking about distributed systems and global consensus, an emergent property of software. It’s gotta be the same, or the system breaks. This is always going to be true.
What political (not technical) operators want is multiple clients so they can subvert the apparent failings in the governance model. It’s as sensible as trying to control the laws physics with the laws of man.
The menace quote came up a lot back when btcd had the bug that caused a chunk of the lightning network to crash. And then there are the people who say that we all need to match the reference client "bug for bug." I can see the merit of that approach, but I'm still not convinced that the risk of some portion of nodes crashing isn't better than the risk of a single implementation.
Also, Satoshi didn't envision this grant oriented, centralized governance model, correct? He saw it as more of a decentralized, community driven model?
Hm no. I think the community driven ideas came most vocally from Amir, and were also carried and ultimately implemented by laanwj.
To me it went from:
Satoshi owning it -> Gavin ruling it like a king -> laanwj eradicating all centralized leadership. The community drive without gatekeepers is only possible since the lead maintainer stepped down after a long process of making sure no leader is needed.
one could use that mempool to find candidate transactions to mine in blocks?
we didn’t solve the Byzantine generals problem for peace :-)
the exact quote is:
“I don't believe a second, compatible implementation of Bitcoin will ever be a good idea. So much of the design depends on all nodes getting exactly identical results in lockstep that a second implementation would be a menace to the network. The MIT license is compatible with all other licenses and commercial uses, so there is no need to rewrite it from a licensing standpoint."
Wow. I have to look into this further.
Because I think it's healthy to have a well supported alternative.