Centralization of Bitcoin development in fewer devs?

[Fernando Bitti Loureiro]

Mike, all,

In our Bitcoin community in Brazil there is also been a heated debate about the merits of BitcoinXT and whether it's going to work. Although I wouldn't like to enter the merits, the arguments become ad hominen too. In order to keep the community objective and tied to facts, not impressions, I've been reviewing some of the arguments and working to record presentations that clear misunderstandings.

One of the arguments is that, if the BitcoinXT initiative is successful, Bitcoin development is going to be centralized in fewer devs.

Checking the Github, I see 100 developers for BitcoinXT:

https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt/graphs/contributors

It's seem to not be possible to separate the fork stats from the original "Bitcoin" stats, at least I didn't find how to do it.

So if I look one from July 9th to date, I see just Mike and Gavin.

https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt/graphs/contributors?from=2015-07-09&to=2015-08-21&type=c

This should prove that, in fact, recently no one besides Mike and Gavin have contributed to BitcoinXT development.

But when I look into other sessions, like https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt/blob/master/README.md, I see 17 contributors to the BitcoinXT readme file, and thus doubt my own observations.

So my questions, if I may, are:

1) is the argument of Bitcoin being centralized in fewer devs a fallacy or real? Regardless of whether centralization is a good or bad thing, please...

2) where may we see the answer as a factual observation instead of a debate of opinions?

Thanks,

Fernando

[Jameson Lopp]

I think many people are confusing development of an implementation with development of the protocol.

If XT ends up becoming the most popular implementation and none of the Core developers decide to submit pull requests to the XT codebase, then it's not a big deal. XT can continue to pull in changes from upstream (Core) as they are merged.

The only way that I see the "development centralization" claim being true is if every Core contributor rage quits all Bitcoin development as a result of XT succeeding. This seems highly unlikely to me.

Also, if BIP101 succeeds from the XT implementation, it seems quite likely to me that Core would merge it in so that the two codebases remain compatible. But that's speculation on my part.

- Jameson

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[Thomas Zander]

On Saturday 22. August 2015 10.16.07 Fernando Bitti Loureiro wrote:
> So my questions, if I may, are:
> 1) is the argument of Bitcoin being centralized in fewer devs a fallacy or
> real? Regardless of whether centralization is a good or bad thing, please...

I have some patches in bitcoin core and stopped contributing because of the
core developers having discussions that were really not technical or at all
predictable. They seemed just personal preferences which made it hard to
predict if something I did was going to be included or not.

After this fork I see that the discussions are much more healthy and technical
in nature, as such I'm probably going to contribute again after my holidays.

I hope this gives you at least one point of view on how XT will end up being
more healthy and less centralized than the 'old' core.
--
Thomas Zander

[Fernando Bitti Loureiro]

Thanks, Jameson and Thomas for sharing your opinion.

Thomas, 

What is confusing me is that I can clearly see you and mruddy are contributors for BitcoinXT here, including a pull request of yours on Jul 12th:

https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt/pull/32

However your names don't show up in:

https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt/graphs/contributors?from=2015-07-09&to=2015-08-21&type=c

Where may I, without mistake, see the list of developers who are contributing to bitcoinXT development today?

Is it that all commits will be listed under Mike regardless of the dev who made the pull request?

I'm just trying to identify the facts, between all opinions, which I'm also listening to.

I won't insist on this request anymore.

Congratulations for contributing for Bitcoin development!

Cheers,

Fernando Bitti

www.BitcoinNosNegocios.com.br

[Mike Hearn]

Fernando,

You're getting confused because you're looking at lists of people who:

1. Have contributed code to Core (and because XT is Core, thus XT as well)
2. Have contributed code that's in XT but not Core
3. Have contributed code to XT that isn't yet accepted or merged

The pull request you linked to is marked open (see the green badge at the top left). If accepted it will change to say "closed" or "merged".

It's still open because, as you may have noticed, both Gavin and I have been away last week and didn't have much time for coding. So the work wasn't yet reviewed. In the case of this patch, I'd like Gavin to review it, as he worked on that region of code last and knows it best. If he doesn't have time, I'll do it.

Now, to your wider question. XT is about more than just the block size limit. If you look at Core, they have also decided they don't like unconfirmed transactions and P2P smartphone wallets. They blocked improvements for a long time already and are now preparing to delete support for P2P lightweight wallets entirely.

Obviously neither feature is required for some kind of rarely used settlement network, which is their vision. But they are rather important for the actual Bitcoin network we have today.

Their wildly different (incorrect) vision and the general way they treat volunteer developers, means lots of people who would have contributed to the Bitcoin project haven't done so, or did and then stopped. I'm one, Gavin is one, Thomas Zander is also one.

As you can see from the pull requests queue and chatter on this list, suddenly people are coming out of the woodwork with patches that aren't anything to do with bigger blocks, they're just stuff that was rejected for questionable or outright spurious reasons by the Bitcoin Core project. So now there's a chance for a re-review under a different development philosophy.

And all this is just after 7 days. So I am not too worried about number of developers.

With respect to "centralisation of developers": centralisation doesn't come from the size of a dev team or who pushes the commit button, it comes from inability to stop using what that team produces because they are a monopoly. Right now Bitcoin Core has a monopoly and are desperately trying to keep it, by telling everyone the sky will fall if they use XT. And monopolies suffer all sorts of problems, don't they?

[Fernando Bitti Loureiro]

Thanks Mike, for your first hand answer

Glad to see you and Thomas and others accessible. 

I will continue my studies on Bitcoin in order to understand the impacts of XT (or keeping the previous route).

Good luck,

Fernando

[František Plaček]

Hi Mike, all...

I wanted to post a question today if some mutual agreement with Core could be done, when Jeff Garzik and others published alternatives for BIP101, i think the BIP102 - 2MB block size, so i thought it would be actually great, that you made your point and the block-size will be increased, end of story...but now i understand it is not about block-size...I had long time the same feeling about Core development and before about Bitcoin foundation that there is too much politics to make any important decisions. I mostly agree with your and Gavin's views and i support you, BUT that doesn't mean i am not scared about BTC future, because the community is getting and will be divided in some point and this is not a good thing...I am not technical guy, just a long term holder, but somehow i would really feel better if SOME agreement would happen and that we would all co-operate together. The fork proposal had to be done to wake Core Devs up, no doubt about it....But as you wrote, it is not about block-size only so i just hope you know what you guys are doing, because I don't want to tell my kids: "Bitcoin? Well, we had a good chance to create something great, out of the power of politicians, but we, the community have destroyed it because politics..."   

Do you see fractional BTC development as a good thing?  

Thank you

František

Bitcoiner from Czech republic

Dne neděle 23. srpna 2015 13:05:27 UTC+2 Mike Hearn napsal(a):

[Hector Chu]

Let me attempt to answer this.

In the future there will be two Bitcoins, Bitcoin Core and XT. This
will by necessity happen, because as TX rate increases the backlog
will become untenable and the majority will go with bigger blocks.
Apart from Core, which can't without serious egg on their faces, as
they have consistently said that block size cannot rise as it
increases mining centralisation and there have been no tests showing
why 8MB is a safe limit. (Indeed, BIP101's limit doubles every couple
of years, so that will be the worst proposal for them.)

It is also possible that people would rather prefer a lower risk, one
time increase to 8MB with no doubling. Mike's fork will have such a
head start by then that the alternatives might never catch on and gain
significant traction.

It is as Mike already said. Core's vision is led by Blockstream and
wants Bitcoin to become a low-volume settlement network, with
Lightning Network or similar atop of it. XT's vision is to scale with
usage growth, and to keep on-chain payments as competitive as possible
with alternative payment technologies.

On 24 August 2015 at 14:59, František Plaček

[Gavin Andresen]

On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 9:59 AM, František Plaček <frantise...@gmail.com> wrote:

Do you see fractional BTC development as a good thing?  

I'll be answering variations on this question a lot over the next weeks/months...

... and I think it is another area where there are just philosophical differences.

Yes, I think having lots of diverse implementations of the Bitcoin protocol is a very good thing. I know Greg Maxwell has been pretty vocal in the past disagreeing with that, and I understand his point of view: it is really hard to get two or three or eleven different implementations to accept and reject exactly the same sets of transactions or blocks. Consensus is hard.

But it is hard to get EXACTLY THE SAME implementation running on different hardware or just running at different places on the network to accept and reject exactly the same sets of transactions or blocks. Bitcoin Core versions 0.7 and earlier could "self-fork" -- exactly the same code running on identical hardware could disagree about what chain was valid because of a bug.

And it's now safe to talk about the REAL reason for BIP66, which was to prevent a fork between 32-bit machines and 64-bit machines.

One of the principles of security is to eliminate single points of failure. Another is to try to minimize the damage done by failure of any one component. A diversity of implementations running on the network helps both of those aspects of security, and that is why I'm happy to see other implementations like Conformal's btcd or Coinbase's Toshi, and why I think multiple forks of Satoshi's original codebase is healthy for the long run.

--

--
Gavin Andresen

[Roy Laurie]

On Monday, August 24, 2015 at 8:30:33 AM UTC-7, Gavin Andresen wrote:

... and I think it is another area where there are just philosophical differences.

What are your thoughts on the motivation between the different groups / factions of developers working on Bitcoin?

For example, it seems to me that the "Blockstream faction" is more oriented towards aggressive sidechain development at the cost of slowing progress in Core - essentially using the latter more as a launchpad. Is there any truth to that?

- Roy Laurie