Martin Zumsande

@sedited_ Not sure - I was under the impression that many people think that steady engineering improvements will get us there, not a sudden breakthrough with a completely novel approach no one saw coming. But yes, would love to read experts' opinions on this.

@Lightlike1 But isn't the fundamental issue that a sane criteria might not currently be knowable, because it might use a novel approach? It seems almost impossible to do without deferring to a body of experts.

Not an expert at all, but what I feel is missing is a meta-discussion on what QC advances would need to happen to actually commit and move forward with this or another scheme (with all the disadvantages of a forced transition).

This would help avoid "but QC still can't do X, it'll never be ready" / "but QC did already Y, the end is neigh" hindsight bias, of which there has been so much in AI discussions over the last years.

Both people who believe these breakthroughs will never happen, and those who believe they are imminent should commit in advance on what should be the point of no return - maybe they can even agree.

NEW: The Finney Freedom Prize for the 2012-2016 era goes to Pieter Wuille and Gregory Maxwell for their contributions to Bitcoin usability, scalability, and privacy. For more info on the Prize, Hal’s story, the committee, and future prizes, visit finneyprize.org

@_jonasschnelli_ They should. The holdings of nation states should not depend on what they randomly confiscate in criminal cases. (whether legit or not is another question). If nation states want to hold bitcoin, they should just buy bitcoin.

Germany sold 50,000 Bitcoin last year at $53,000 per coin, missing out on ~$2 billion in potential gains. Will the US make the same decision?

@chesscom Congratulations to @MagnusCarlsen, the new CEO of FIDE!

THERE ARE TWO WINNERS!! 🏆🤝🏆 After several overtime draws, Ian and Magnus agree to SHARE the FIDE World Blitz Chess Champion title! Absolutely insane on New Years Eve 🎉

1/ As Bitcoin continues to grow, so does the pool of talented individuals contributing to critical codebases. However, full-time employment opportunities for these individuals remain limited.

I think I’m losing my mind

@saylor Defeating the entire concept of self-custody and moving away from the banks.

BREAKING: FIRST EVER TIME ONE BITCOINER PAYS ANOTHER WITH A FORMER PRESIDENT STANDING CLOSE BY AND WATCHING.

@basisbtc @the_charlatan_ Yes, the key is also written to a file in the datadir, or the feature could be disabled. What won't work is create a new xOr-ed block dir, and then try to use that with a pre-v28 version of core.

@the_charlatan_ Would users still be able to copy dat files from one machine to another to skip IBD?

Bitcoin Core block data files will now be xor-ed: github.com/bitcoin/bitcoi…

Schrödinger's Cat is alive... and Pissed.

@lopp (or create their own forks / one-person projects where they don't need to interact with people, seek consensus or make compromises)

@lopp This is just human, a reality of life, no one wants to spend their time with people they don't like. In open source, there are certain people who don't get this and cultivate the self-image of a brilliant asshole who can get away with everything - they typically fail.

Open source software development is meritocratic. Those who criticize the personal politics of contributors do so because they don't understand FOSS and are unable to criticize code.

@eric_lombrozo @jamesob @lopp @JeremyRubin Not only consensus - the same increasingly applies to policy.

Code changes that do not affect consensus are inherently more meritocratic. At this point, consensus changes are inherently political which means that, for better or worse, the character of the proponent is highly relevant. I say this as someone who fought hard to make it meritocratic and failed.

@DavidFBailey @Scaramucci obviously

Hypothetical: if we were going to have one person sit down with President Trump for 30 minutes and help him set up his own non-custodial wallet… who should it be?

@peterktodd I was also making another point: If the role of maintainers is largely to implement the consensus of a larger community, size of this community is a better metric for decentralization of the project than number of maintainers.

@Lightlike1 You're making a point, safety, that's orthogonal to this thread. I also suspect the # of reviewers to Core vs Knots isn't actually as important as you think, because any OS has _so_ much third party code in it that you regularly run with permissions that can steal wallet.dat.

Yeah, this is just dumb. 1) You want as few people as possible with actual GitHub merge permissions, as it's a security risk because many people stupidly - or accidentally - run code w/o verifying PGP sigs. 2) The whole point of Knots is that if you don't like Core, you can run something else. If you don't like Luke, fork Knots too! My own full-rbf and Libre Relay forks are examples of this. More limited examples, as I change a lot less than Knots. But they still let you easily and usefully bypass Core's philosophy for a few specific features.

@peterktodd In Knots, probably only one person knows what's in it. If somehow a patch got merged that drains the user's wallet in the most obvious way, I doubt that anyone would notice. That's also a huge difference to Libre Relay etc., where the diff to Core is minimal and trivial to check.

@peterktodd The number of maintainers is a distraction - the main difference is the existence of a community. Even if Core had just 1 maintainer, it would still be a huge difference because many people look at each PR - maintainer can't just merge whatever they want but need consensus.