Software is the Weirding Way.

Thanks to Samson Mow, who takes pleasure in TRIGGERING ME, I've seen a copy of a document entitled, “A Statement from Members of the Bitcoin Community”. As usual with these pieces, it doesn't matter who wrote this curious proposal, who supports it or other contexts which can all be put aside for the sake of argument; the only thing that matters is what is true and what is false, and what is logical and what is illogical.

First of all, this document claims to come from “members of the Bitcoin community”. There is no such thing as “the Bitcoin community”, and even if there was, it would not be true in this instance. This is a letter from a small group of people, or one person, who is or are desperate to gain access to the centre of Bitcoin protocol decision making. Bitcoin (and all software) does not run on community or emotion or democracy. It runs on software. The only thing that matters in Bitcoin is software. And for the record, the most effective management structure of complex software projects appears to be Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL).

The men who manage the Bitcoin reference implementation and who are doing the unimaginably risky, astonishingly complex and difficult work of extending Bitcoin’s capabilities are completely open to suggestion. They are all contactable, and are not in hiding. There is no way, given their total dedication to Bitcoin, that they would reject anything that can help Bitcoin. The problem is that what helps Bitcoin is not letters, public announcements, forming foundations, writing white papers or posts on a forum. What helps Bitcoin is software. Without software, you can have no meaningful contribution to the development of the underpinning gears of Bitcoin. Of course, this doesn't prevent you from using Bitcoin or developing services on top of it; that work is welcome and needed, but you can’t have any effect on the way the system works at its root or core.

In this letter there is an offer of a $1,000,000 grant for “Bitcoin protocol development”. This is a very odd offer, for several reasons. There are over 30 signatories to this letter, all of them involved with Bitcoin. Who are these people? Between them they have many world class, top flight developers managing systems that are under bank level attacks from the most clever attackers on the net. They've solved some very difficult problems on their own platforms, designed tools from nothing that are unique and powerful, and run systems with excellent uptime and customer service. These are not babies, amateurs or noobs; they are very brave, talented men at the cutting edge of a new, complex field in computing.

Despite all of that, they can’t find anyone to add meaningful innovation to the Bitcoin protocol. Bitcoin is a solution to an old and very hard problem that took a quarter of a century to solve; indeed, there were people (and still are) that don’t believe there was a problem in the first place. Bitcoin is a once in a lifetime breakthrough, perhaps even once in a century. Its checks and balances and nature were created to produce a single outcome. Changing parts of it (like increasing the block size) destroys its fundamental proposition. But I digress; if these 30 had any ideas, they would have written an extension or addition to Bitcoin and published it. It could then be accepted or rejected by Bitcoin Core, and then we would be talking about that proposal specifically. Instead, what do they offer? A bounty.

We can infer from this that they have no software to offer. Furthermore the probability that a $1,000,000 bounty will produce any software is indistinguishable from zero. Bitcoin has finally seized the imagination of people all over the world, and no one except Bitcoin Core has come up with any meaningful improvements to it. The people who contracted Bitcoin fever have only been able to fork Bitcoin and then dismantle it in an attempt to neuter it and tame it by removing references to the word “Bitcoin”. They've all failed to deliver innovation, and all their promises are empty. If a consortium of banks (R3CEV) with billions to waste on trying to kill Bitcoin can’t come up with a single piece of software, there is no way on Earth that this $1,000,000 prize is going to produce a single piece of software. If it were easy, it would have been done already.

The fact of the matter is that the world’s most qualified people are already working on Bitcoin as part of Bitcoin Core. There are no more developers anywhere on Earth that are capable of contributing to Bitcoin in a meaningful way. There are people who want to try and add features (especially unethical ones, like identity management) but these have nothing to do with the operation of Bitcoin itself, and are just worthless extensions. All the best people are already working on Bitcoin. Thankfully, they're also philosophically in agreement with what Bitcoin is actually for, meaning that they won’t do anything to destroy it.

Part of the problem people have with addressing how software works is a lack of good English. Phrases like “Diversity of Innovation” are completely meaningless. It is a contamination from Social Justice Warrior culture; that somehow, everyone’s opinion matters, , and there are no winners and losers. Thankfully in the real world there are winners and losers, and software, especially Bitcoin, makes this law of nature a thing in action. There are bad ideas, all ideas are not equal and bad ideas must be rejected if you want to win. And no, not everyone can win, and everyone doesn't count.

In the real world, everyone has a place. If you are a Bitcoin user, your place is running the software that’s given to you, making changes to the public ledger with your private key by sending messages and vice versa. If you are a Bitcoin trader, your place is to make a profit buying and selling spaces on the ledger. Exchanges have a place facilitating trading for those who need that service. Merchant software developers, have a place making it easy for sellers to accept Bitcoin for their goods. The Core developers manage the protocol. Their place is keeping the root of the system running and reliable. And they have done a spectacularly good job at it.

It is false to claim that Bitcoin users don’t have freedom of choice. Bitcoin users already have freedom of choice. They can choose to use Bitcoin or not. They have many alt-Coins they can freely select. They can even create their own Bitcoin by downloading the source, compiling and branding it, or using a simple form that does all the work for you. The only principle that matters is that no one is forcing you to use Bitcoin. Certainly, if all the Bitcoin companies on earth who want big blocks decided to move to an alt-coin of their own making, they could have the exact Bitcoin that they want, with all the consequences of that decision. But they will not do this, and curiously, will not explain why they won’t do it. “I was an early investor in Bitcoin” does not give you a say, or special privilege in how Bitcoin runs, nor does it conver any authority to you.

There is an official Bitcoin. There will always be an official Bitcoin, just as there is an official Linux Kernel, or release of any software. The people who author it are the originators of it. Saying that there's no official Bitcoin is very curious, to say the least, and is not in line with reality. This is not Monopoly or a school yard lunch break fortress game, where what things are changes from minute to minute. Bitcoin is moving forward, very quickly and safely, and the common ground is the protocol. That is all there is, there is nothing more than that. And that is enough. On one hand, the author of this letter wants “Diversity” (more SJW language) “of Bitcoin protocol implementation” with a variety of development teams, but on the other, can’t find any developers amongst 30 companies (and their social networks) staffed with crack teams of experts to do it. What is wrong with that picture? First of all, citing “protocol implementations” sounds very smart, but it could be put better. There is a protocol that all clients must follow or their transactions will be rejected by the network. You can write whatever client you like, but it must adhere to the protocol specification absolutely. There is one protoccol, and it is under the capable management of Core. There can only be one protocol. And even if it were possible or desirable to have more than one, the author of this letter can’t find a single developer to write a line of C to add to Bitcoin. That is a fact.

“Diversity of innovation” is yet more SJW inspired twaddle. There are many Bitcoin companies all connecting to The Bitcoin Network for their own purposes with different software they've written. They all agree to the same standard; the protocol, and inside those restrictions, have platforms that provide useful services. Two examples are BitGo and BitPay. Both of these companies are doing useful work with their own software that connects to the Bitcoin network. BitGo has a beautiful set of Multisig innovations they offer, and BitPay has a very clever, fast and seamless software tool to allow merchants to accept Bitcoin. Those two companies are examples of real innovation and how to approach Bitcoin. As Segregated Witness comes on stream, you can expect both of these companies to shock the public with what they are building in secret. Note how they don’t rely on anything other than software and provision of service to make a statement. Saying “BitPay” and “BitGO” are bywords for the correct approach by their actions.

When Bitcoin faces problems, there is no “we” that faces them. Bitcoin is not a communist collective, and neither is it leaderless. Its like saying, “The internet is leaderless”. There are people who are in charge of protocols and standards, all of which are voluntary except for TCP/IP protocol which you must accept in order to be on the internet. That is what Bitcoin is; it is the low level protocol that everyone agrees to work with. And as everyone has just seen with Ethereum (E.T.H.E.R.E.U.M.), reckless changes to how the protocol works is now proven to be absolutely disastrous and should not be tolerated. You should note also that the same class of person that wanted Etherium to change to bail out a group of unfortunate users is also pushing to detonate Bitcoin.

When someone is making an argument, and they don’t use English correctly, you can take this as a sign that their argument is probably false, or that they are lying. I’m talking specifically about the misuse of the word “censorship”. Censorship is what happens when the State forbids people or publications from publishing facts in full. For example, in the UK, information about the Zircon Satellite was removed from newspapers by order of the State. That is censorship.

When an owner of a newspaper by his own choice declines to publish an article, that is not censorship, that is an editorial decision or editorial policy. Similarly, when the owner of a forum or publishing platform that’s open to the public decides that certain views or images may not be disseminated by his platform, that isn't censorship, that is editorial policy.

Censorship is the violent suppression of speech by the State. It is a hot button topic, and people deliberately misuse the word it to get an emotional reaction from their constituency. You can’t respect people’s property rights (especially if you claim to be a Libertarian) and also say that property owners are engaging in censorship. You have no right to access other people’s property and publish what they do not want to see disseminated on their platform, and no, just because its open to the public, no rights are converred to you.

There is a claim that there is a rift in “The Bitcoin Community”. If there was such a community, the only way a rift can be mended between men at war is if the party that is wrong admits they are wrong and stops attacking the other side. Everyone already has common ground in Bitcoin; the protocol, and that is enough to build services if you have the imagination and skill to do so. Its up to you to hire developers (if you can find them) to build your ideas (if you have any) and to participate and profit using the same protocol everyone else uses. FaceBook and YouTube are both built on the same software, and use the same TCP/IP protocol to serve their products. They're busy writing software, and not complaining about, “the limitations of TCP/IP”.

Now that Segregated Witness is quickly propagating to all nodes on the network, and it continues to be the case that no one but Bitcoin Core and is delivering new ideas or software we can safely say that this sort of meaningless, propaganda-like and toothless (software-less) call to action will change nothing. Meanwhile there is a large amount of work to be done to take advantage of Segregated Witness, and once client libraries for different languages are written to make accessing the new functions simple, you can expect to see a few exiting ideas and business models emerge. These ideas and business models will not come from anywhere other than the minds of software developers, who, being rational, understand there is far more gain to be had by writing tools on top of Bitcoin, rather than trying to join the rocket science class of elites in their thankless tasks, steeped in a toxic bath of debilitating radioactive stress, all the while being asked by everyone to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

If you didn't like this post, blame Samson Mow…ITS HIS FAULT!

Grilled Rabbit, root vegetables, pinot noir ↴