Re: [bitcoin-dev] Requirement for pseudonymous BIP submissions
On Saturday, 18 March 2017 16:23:16 CEST Chris Stewart via bitcoin-dev wrote: > As everyone in the Bitcoin space knows, there is a massive scaling debate > going on. One side wants to increase the block size via segwit, while the > other side wants to increase via hard fork. I have strong opinions on the > topic but I won’t discuss them here. The point of the matter is we are > seeing the politicization of protocol level changes. I agree with your assessment, the sides are political and picking sides makes people a target. For that reason I know that many companies are not picking sides, we’ve seen some bad stuff happen to companies that did. I’m not convnced it makes sense to use anonymous, but provable, identities is the way to solve this. Though. I also don’t believe people are rejecting proposals purely based on the name. What I see is that pratically all proposals are ignored for the time being becaues we can’t make any changes anyway until we have made a protocol upgrade and came out stronger. I do agree that bips are seen politically, but not based on the person that suggests them, but more based on the content being useful for their political side. I am not entirely against pseudonymous submissions, but in that case I think it should be carried by a well known member of the Bitcoin community. This raises the bar somewhat to a point where you have to convince someone that is already publicly known to propose it with you. -- Tom Zander Blog: https://zander.github.io Vlog: https://vimeo.com/channels/tomscryptochannel ___ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
Re: [bitcoin-dev] Requirement for pseudonymous BIP submissions
On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 08:32:07AM -0500, Chris Stewart wrote: > >I quite agree, and I would add that sometimes making yourself > recognisable is far more important that merit. > > The intent of my original proposal allows you to reveal yourself *after* > the BIP has been accepted if you so choose. You do this by just revealing > the preimage of the author hash. As others have pointed out, you can't > *force* people to use this process -- but we can make it a defacto > requirement by the BIP maintainer. Just like how you can't *force* people > to format their BIPs in a certain way, but the BIP maintainer has the right > to decline them if they aren't formatted that way. > > > Today, BitFury's CEO threatened to sue developers if they didn't kowtow to > > his demands to leave the PoW alone. This is unacceptable. Decisions have > to > > be made on merit and the interest of the project, and nothing else. > > I think everyone on the list needs to see that paragraph again, and let the > implications set in. We are talking about money here. Decisions in this project are not made based on 'merit', they are made based on ROI. If killing the project is more profitable, many of the actors involved are obligated to their shareholders to attempt to kill the project. Or maybe in this case, they might be obligated to their investors to attempt to try to run all the competing miners out of business and acquire a majority stake in the hashpower. If Merit were actually important, I would hope we would be talking about a way to finance development in a way that provides real financial incentives for merit, rather than what appear to be some perverse incentives that seem to be rewarding short-term traders, conflict, and further consolidation of mining and exchanges. The other problem with merit is there are just about as many ideas about what has merit as there are people judging the merit of the project. For instance, I think demurrage and increasing the money supply are ideas with more merit, but those ideas are not profitable to existing bitcoin investors, and thus are not seriously discussed. ___ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
Re: [bitcoin-dev] Requirement for pseudonymous BIP submissions
On Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 07:15:09PM +, Luke Dashjr via bitcoin-dev wrote: > On Saturday, March 18, 2017 3:23:16 PM Chris Stewart via bitcoin-dev wrote: > > There is inconvenience added here. You need to make a new email address, > > you need to make a new github account to submit the BIP. > > GitHub doesn't allow people to have multiple accounts last I checked. C'mon people. Anyone remember when git didn't even exist and all we had was CVS, subversion, and BitKeeper? Get me a couple of motivated grad students who know Python and we can turn a combination of Mercurial, BitTorrent, and pynode into a distributed, leaderless, decentralized version control system that can let users create a crypto key, anonymously propose BIPs, and then get paid in crypto for the best commits. Who else would contribute to a crowdfunding effort to do such at thing? ___ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
Re: [bitcoin-dev] Requirement for pseudonymous BIP submissions
If this was in place I would contribute more and I wouldn't have to create throw-away accounts. This is not a space where you want to be a recognisable target. Today, BitFury's CEO threatened to sue developers if they didn't kowtow to his demands to leave the PoW alone. This is unacceptable. Decisions have to be made on merit and the interest of the project, and nothing else. This is very important and needs to be given priority. Most Core developers and all the main ones except Satoshi have built a public persona, either for ego or for practical monetary reasons. Obviously there's academia where everything is about plastering your name as much as possible and getting cited. So it's understood. Although I understand the difficulty of getting funded and getting trusted without a face, there needs to be an outlet so people can interact and contribute in a proper cypherpunk way. Also, GitHub is quite anti-privacy. So I recommend not reusing personal accounts from work. -muyuu ___ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
Re: [bitcoin-dev] Requirement for pseudonymous BIP submissions
> On Mar 19, 2017, at 7:00 AM, bitcoin-dev-requ...@lists.linuxfoundation.org > wrote: > > GitHub doesn't allow people to have multiple accounts last I checked. GitHub doesn’t allow email addresses to have multiple accounts. ___ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
Re: [bitcoin-dev] Requirement for pseudonymous BIP submissions
>I think this is an excellent idea. I consider myself to be extremely data-driven and logical in my thinking, and have still fallen victim to thinking "oh great, what's on about now?" when seeing something posted or proposed. I think we need to all recognize we are only humans -- thus susceptible to our emotions influencing our decisions. The notion of identity is an easy way to form judgements for/against an idea before thoroughly vetting it. I also think a by product of this would be to curb reddit/twitter trolls from talking about these protocol changes. It is a much less juicy story if you have to say "9458b7f9f76131f18823d73770e069d55beb271b created a BIP to propose a block size increase" compared to "Satoshi Nakamoto created a BIP to propose a block size increase". Note about the OP: "The hash “6f3…9cd0” is just my..." should really say "The hash '9458...271b' is just my.." Forgot to change the hash this morning. On Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 11:57 AM, Andrew Johnsonwrote: > I think this is an excellent idea. I consider myself to be extremely > data-driven and logical in my thinking, and have still fallen victim to > thinking "oh great, what's on > about now?" when seeing something posted or proposed. > > And vice versa, it prevents people from being more partial to a bad or not > so great idea simply because it was posited by someone they hold in high > regard. > > Simple, yet effective. I would actually even go a step further and say > that all BIPs should be done this way as a matter of procedure, I can't > think of a downside. > > > On Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 10:46 AM Chris Stewart via bitcoin-dev < > bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote: > >> As everyone in the Bitcoin space knows, there is a massive scaling debate >> going on. One side wants to increase the block size via segwit, while the >> other side wants to increase via hard fork. I have strong opinions on the >> topic but I won’t discuss them here. The point of the matter is we are >> seeing the politicization of protocol level changes. The critiques of these >> changes are slowly moving towards critiques based on who is submitting the >> BIP -- not what it actually contains. This is the worst thing that can >> happen in a meritocracy. >> >> *Avoiding politicization of technical changes in the future* >> >> I like what Tom Elvis Judor did when he submitted his MimbleWimble white >> paper to the technical community. He submitted it under a pseudonym, over >> TOR, onto a public IRC channel. No ego involved — only an extremely >> promising paper. Tom (and Satoshi) both understood that it is only a matter >> of time before who they are impedes technical progress of their system. >> >> I propose we move to a pseudonymous BIP system where it is required for >> the author submit the BIP under a pseudonym. For instance, the format could >> be something like this: >> >> BIP: 1337 >> >> Author: 9458b7f9f76131f18823d73770e069d55beb2...@protonmail.com >> >> BIP content down here >> >> The hash “6f3…9cd0” is just my github username, christewart, concatenated >> with some entropy, in this case these bytes: 639c28f610edcaf265b47b0679986d >> 10af3360072b56f9b0b085ffbb4d4f440b >> >> and then hashed with RIPEMD160. I checked this morning that protonmail >> can support RIPEMD160 hashes as email addresses. Unfortunately it appears >> it cannot support SHA256 hashes. >> >> There is inconvenience added here. You need to make a new email address, >> you need to make a new github account to submit the BIP. I think it is >> worth the cost -- but am interested in what others think about this. I >> don't think people submitting patches to a BIP should be required to submit >> under a pseudonym -- only the primary author. This means only one person >> has to create the pseudonym. From a quick look at the BIPs list it looks >> like the most BIPs submitted by one person is ~10. This means they would >> have had to create 10 pseudonyms over 8 years -- I think this is >> reasonable. >> >> *What does this give us?* >> >> This gives us a way to avoid politicization of BIPs. This means a BIP can >> be proposed and examined based on it’s technical merits. This levels the >> playing field — making the BIP process even more meritocratic than it >> already is. >> >> If you want to claim credit for your BIP after it is accepted, you can >> reveal the preimage of the author hash to prove that you were the original >> author of the BIP. I would need to reveal my github username and “ >> 639c28f610edcaf265b47b0679986d10af3360072b56f9b0b085ffbb4d4f440b” >> >> *The Future* >> Politicization of bitcoin is only going to grow in the future. We need to >> make sure we maintain principled money instead devolving to a system where >> our money is based on a democratic vote — or the votes of a select few >> elites. We need to vet claims by “authority figures” whether it is Jihan >> Wu, Adam Back, Roger Ver, or Greg Maxwell. I assure you they are
Re: [bitcoin-dev] Requirement for pseudonymous BIP submissions
I think this is an excellent idea. I consider myself to be extremely data-driven and logical in my thinking, and have still fallen victim to thinking "oh great, what's on about now?" when seeing something posted or proposed. And vice versa, it prevents people from being more partial to a bad or not so great idea simply because it was posited by someone they hold in high regard. Simple, yet effective. I would actually even go a step further and say that all BIPs should be done this way as a matter of procedure, I can't think of a downside. On Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 10:46 AM Chris Stewart via bitcoin-dev < bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote: > As everyone in the Bitcoin space knows, there is a massive scaling debate > going on. One side wants to increase the block size via segwit, while the > other side wants to increase via hard fork. I have strong opinions on the > topic but I won’t discuss them here. The point of the matter is we are > seeing the politicization of protocol level changes. The critiques of these > changes are slowly moving towards critiques based on who is submitting the > BIP -- not what it actually contains. This is the worst thing that can > happen in a meritocracy. > > *Avoiding politicization of technical changes in the future* > > I like what Tom Elvis Judor did when he submitted his MimbleWimble white > paper to the technical community. He submitted it under a pseudonym, over > TOR, onto a public IRC channel. No ego involved — only an extremely > promising paper. Tom (and Satoshi) both understood that it is only a matter > of time before who they are impedes technical progress of their system. > > I propose we move to a pseudonymous BIP system where it is required for > the author submit the BIP under a pseudonym. For instance, the format could > be something like this: > > BIP: 1337 > > Author: 9458b7f9f76131f18823d73770e069d55beb2...@protonmail.com > > BIP content down here > > The hash “6f3…9cd0” is just my github username, christewart, concatenated > with some entropy, in this case these bytes: > 639c28f610edcaf265b47b0679986d10af3360072b56f9b0b085ffbb4d4f440b > > and then hashed with RIPEMD160. I checked this morning that protonmail can > support RIPEMD160 hashes as email addresses. Unfortunately it appears it > cannot support SHA256 hashes. > > There is inconvenience added here. You need to make a new email address, > you need to make a new github account to submit the BIP. I think it is > worth the cost -- but am interested in what others think about this. I > don't think people submitting patches to a BIP should be required to submit > under a pseudonym -- only the primary author. This means only one person > has to create the pseudonym. From a quick look at the BIPs list it looks > like the most BIPs submitted by one person is ~10. This means they would > have had to create 10 pseudonyms over 8 years -- I think this is > reasonable. > > *What does this give us?* > > This gives us a way to avoid politicization of BIPs. This means a BIP can > be proposed and examined based on it’s technical merits. This levels the > playing field — making the BIP process even more meritocratic than it > already is. > > If you want to claim credit for your BIP after it is accepted, you can > reveal the preimage of the author hash to prove that you were the original > author of the BIP. I would need to reveal my github username and > “639c28f610edcaf265b47b0679986d10af3360072b56f9b0b085ffbb4d4f440b” > > *The Future* > Politicization of bitcoin is only going to grow in the future. We need to > make sure we maintain principled money instead devolving to a system where > our money is based on a democratic vote — or the votes of a select few > elites. We need to vet claims by “authority figures” whether it is Jihan > Wu, Adam Back, Roger Ver, or Greg Maxwell. I assure you they are human — > and prone to mistakes — just like the rest of us. This seems like a simple > way to level the playing field. > > Thoughts? > > -Chris > > > > ___ > bitcoin-dev mailing list > bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev > -- Andrew Johnson ___ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
Re: [bitcoin-dev] Requirement for pseudonymous BIP submissions
On Saturday, March 18, 2017 3:23:16 PM Chris Stewart via bitcoin-dev wrote: > There is inconvenience added here. You need to make a new email address, > you need to make a new github account to submit the BIP. GitHub doesn't allow people to have multiple accounts last I checked. Luke ___ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
[bitcoin-dev] Requirement for pseudonymous BIP submissions
As everyone in the Bitcoin space knows, there is a massive scaling debate going on. One side wants to increase the block size via segwit, while the other side wants to increase via hard fork. I have strong opinions on the topic but I won’t discuss them here. The point of the matter is we are seeing the politicization of protocol level changes. The critiques of these changes are slowly moving towards critiques based on who is submitting the BIP -- not what it actually contains. This is the worst thing that can happen in a meritocracy. *Avoiding politicization of technical changes in the future* I like what Tom Elvis Judor did when he submitted his MimbleWimble white paper to the technical community. He submitted it under a pseudonym, over TOR, onto a public IRC channel. No ego involved — only an extremely promising paper. Tom (and Satoshi) both understood that it is only a matter of time before who they are impedes technical progress of their system. I propose we move to a pseudonymous BIP system where it is required for the author submit the BIP under a pseudonym. For instance, the format could be something like this: BIP: 1337 Author: 9458b7f9f76131f18823d73770e069d55beb2...@protonmail.com BIP content down here The hash “6f3…9cd0” is just my github username, christewart, concatenated with some entropy, in this case these bytes: 639c28f610edcaf265b47b0679986d10af3360072b56f9b0b085ffbb4d4f440b and then hashed with RIPEMD160. I checked this morning that protonmail can support RIPEMD160 hashes as email addresses. Unfortunately it appears it cannot support SHA256 hashes. There is inconvenience added here. You need to make a new email address, you need to make a new github account to submit the BIP. I think it is worth the cost -- but am interested in what others think about this. I don't think people submitting patches to a BIP should be required to submit under a pseudonym -- only the primary author. This means only one person has to create the pseudonym. From a quick look at the BIPs list it looks like the most BIPs submitted by one person is ~10. This means they would have had to create 10 pseudonyms over 8 years -- I think this is reasonable. *What does this give us?* This gives us a way to avoid politicization of BIPs. This means a BIP can be proposed and examined based on it’s technical merits. This levels the playing field — making the BIP process even more meritocratic than it already is. If you want to claim credit for your BIP after it is accepted, you can reveal the preimage of the author hash to prove that you were the original author of the BIP. I would need to reveal my github username and “639c28f610edcaf265b47b0679986d10af3360072b56f9b0b085ffbb4d4f440b” *The Future* Politicization of bitcoin is only going to grow in the future. We need to make sure we maintain principled money instead devolving to a system where our money is based on a democratic vote — or the votes of a select few elites. We need to vet claims by “authority figures” whether it is Jihan Wu, Adam Back, Roger Ver, or Greg Maxwell. I assure you they are human — and prone to mistakes — just like the rest of us. This seems like a simple way to level the playing field. Thoughts? -Chris ___ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev