Mike Hearn

Bitcoin had a 1 MB block size limit put in place in its early life as an anti-DOS measure. The plan was to raise the limit as the block size, from genuine usage, came up against it. The problem is that it requires a hard fork to raise the limit, so there needed to be near-unanimous agreement to go through with it. While the vast majority of people in the Bitcoin space wanted to follow through with raising the limit, a small but dedicated group worked to undermine the efforts to reach a consensus. This article, published in 2015, provides a window into the politics surrounding the issue, and how the block size limit increase was ultimately sabotaged: https://medium.com/@octskyward/on-block-sizes-e047bc9f830

Follow up post by author here https://medium.com/@octskyward/a-small-followup-aa399a83acbb#.qayqlrqk… to respond to conspiracy theories

I think it's a reference to "Replace By Fee." I don't follow bitcoin closely enough to know exactly what this is, but here's an argument against: https://medium.com/@octskyward/replace-by-fee-43edd9a1dd6d#.zf4deyyiu

For the past two years, the Bitcoin community has been embroiled in a debate about how to scale the network to handle more transactions. The debate has at times become less technical, rhetoric about "centralization" and the values of the community has become introduced, etc. Recently the debates have come to a head, and some have referred to it as a "Civil War"[0]. For technical background, I recommend these two posts by Mike Hearn, who has since left the Bitcoin community [1] [2] Now, what the original article is talking about is the "Core" development team--the people who have commit access on the Bitcoin Github repo. The whole debate has essentially become Core vs. some other factions, mainly miners. You'll see the arguments in [1] and [2]. (Keep in mind, Mike Hearn is strongly on the anti-Core side of the argument. But those articles should give you an idea of what to search for, if you want to hear arguments on the other side.) [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-10/bitcoin-risks-splin… [1] https://medium.com/@octskyward/on-consensus-and-forks-c6a050c792e7 [2] https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb3…

The content in this article about anti-spam techniques is fascinating. But the title should be edited to indicate its vintage: 2014. Also, by the by, there is some interesting context about the author (Mike Hearn) and his recent activities that are not related to the topic of spam. Warning: off-topic digression below. Mike Hearn became one of the most visible Bitcoin core developers, working in that community for 5 years, until a well-publicized departure where he declared Bitcoin a failure[0]. He then joined R3CEV, a startup venture that is building a private blockchain platform for a consortium of 70 of the world's largest banks. Hearn's departure was criticized by members of the cryptocurrency community, such as Bram Cohen, who famously called his exit a "whiny ragequit" [1]. Regardless about how one feels about the internal politics of the bitcoin dev community, the R3 project is technically interesting (to me, at least) because it uses Kotlin [2], a JVM-based functional language, and also because it has some interesting design approaches that depart from the established bitcoin blockchain model [3]. I still think that private blockchain platforms have an uphill battle if they want to compete for developer attention with rapidly evolving broad-based platforms like Ethereum and Bitcoin, but the R3 Corda platform is nevertheless worth tracking. [0] https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experimen… [1]…

I have written an analysis of what might happen next year in Switzerland and elsewhere: https://medium.com/@octskyward/ok-what-now-e3f64d38f7#.q4vchepw1 It is almost without question that the Swiss will hold another referendum in the coming months, as their deadline for implementing the previous referendum's legislation (which they are legally bound to do) will expire in February. However due to the latency on getting new laws through Parliament they really have to start now. There is no way to renegotiate with the EU because the EU sees any geographically European population that chooses to defy the EU as some kind of terrorist, with whom negotiation is unthinkable. They refused to negotiate with the Swiss and are now demanding the Swiss join the EU proper or else there won't be any further negotiations (ever). The Swiss do not want to join the EU. So the stage is set for a showdown. The best case outcome for the EU is a new vote in which the Swiss choose to continue the status quo for a little while longer.

I read: "It feels like while the Bitcoin Core development community is robust, the ecosystem of stakeholders and the understanding of how decisions are made and information is shared is still fragile and vulnerable. I fear that the communication and now emotional rift between various key groups and individuals is wide right now, but I believe it's imperative that we try to bring the community together and focus on executing on a shared technical plan that represents our best shot at broad consensus from both a technical and a practical perspective." It reads like a response on the Bitcoin situation describted in the Jan 14 Medium article by Mike Hearn on the "Resolution of the Bitcoin experiment". Problems resulting in the rift between Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic and Bitcoin Unlimited. https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experimen… He seems to suggest Ethereum and Bitcoin alternatives cannot yet replace Bitcoin Core as it is robust and battle tested as he writes: "If you're serious about security and stability -- and you should be -- Bitcoin is almost the only choice with the largest bounty, and largest community, with the most practical modern experience deploying to a broad and active network in the real world." But is Bitcoin the only choice and are the bitcoin stability problems outlined by Mike Hearn and others an "idee fixe" or just a dispute over blocksize?

Not sure how much of this still applies, but I remember reading this a while back when I also realized PS just didn't click for me https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-woes-of-powershell-8737e5346b1

https://medium.com/@octskyward/on-consensus-and-forks-c6a050c792e7#.hl… Mike Hearn would disagree with you, and he knows a lot about how Bitcoin works.

>"That said, I don't mind reinventing the wheel in new ways - every time our wheels get better and better. But perhaps they could get better faster with fewer steps backwards with a little schooling on the foundations of our field." You may be interested in Graal/Truffle. One of the main aims is to make it a playground for experimenting with programming language design by reducing the work that goes into the underpinnings of these new languages. It's also meant to offer fairly decent performance. https://medium.com/@octskyward/graal-truffle-134d8f28fb69#.nachabnff https://github.com/graalvm/truffle/blob/master/README.md

Have you looked at Truffle & Graal, which are going to be introduced in Java 9 to some extent? https://medium.com/@octskyward/graal-truffle-134d8f28fb69#.hgyprrd1j https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graal_(compiler)

From what I hear the JVM still has a funded team at Oracle. It's Java EE that has been put in the fridge. See fi this article on the upcoming Graal vm: https://medium.com/@octskyward/graal-truffle-134d8f28fb69#.9tsd6xbs6

The JVM, especially with Graal and Truffle, would also be a good fit: https://medium.com/@octskyward/graal-truffle-134d8f28fb69

For me the largest put off with Bitcoin is the community. They seem to be very intolerant of criticism, to the appearance of a cult or ideology.[1] The problem lies in that unlike most open source projects, a sizeable portion of the community stands to make huge profits, giving rise to a permanent conflict of interest. Time and time again, the financial interest of the early adopters continue to stifle actual development of the technology.[2] [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/49osb4/examples_of_rbitcoin_cens… [2]: https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experimen…

Basically, the current block size limit of 1MB isn't sufficient for the current volume of transactions. Some transactions aren't making it into blocks in real-time and have to sit waiting in a queue to be processed. This leads to delays in processing commercial payments, which in turn threatens Bitcoin's viability as a mainstream currency. Some people argue the issue could be easily fixed by simply raising the block size limit, but others disagree and believe that would become too costly in bandwidth and processing capacity for miners, so AFAIK there's still no consensus on a resolution. A couple other good explanations: http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=535 https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experimen…

Also, see this: https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experimen…

It's been posted elsewhere in this thread, but: https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experimen… HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905118

Let me kick off by giving my choices: BOOK - Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (http://www.amazon.com/Snow-Crash-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0553380958/) ARTICLE - The Resolution of the Bitcoin Experiment (https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experimen… PAPER - Are we living in a simulation? (http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf)

Could it have been Bitcoin related? The timing seems to roughly match up with the Bitcoin XT DDoS attacks mentioned here: https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experimen…

Please be sure to read the links posted in this post: https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experimen…

> Hearn said in his post on blog-publishing platform Medium. https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experimen…

This is the actual medium post, where Mike expresses his frustrations and what this article is referencing. It explains things rather well. https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experimen…

With the caveat that I haven't tried it myself: > What about pattern matching? This is where the word “sealed” above comes in handy; we can do an exhaustive pattern match without an else/otherwise branch from https://medium.com/@octskyward/kotlin-fp-3bf63a17d64a#.8dbwaz4yi

I looked around and found a nice writeup on Kotlin: https://medium.com/@octskyward/why-kotlin-is-my-next-programming-langu…

For more context, here's a list of posts by Mike giving some background and some more thoughts: The capacity cliff: https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-capacity-cliff-586d1bf7715e Crash landing: https://medium.com/@octskyward/crash-landing-f5cc19908e32 On consensus and forks: https://medium.com/@octskyward/on-consensus-and-forks-c6a050c792e7 They were quite useful for someone not familiar with the topic.

It depends on how you define an "established" dev. The majority of developers of wallets, for instance, are for the blocksize increase. But the majority of bitcoin-core developers are against it. Gavin and Jeff are the only bitcoin-core committers in favor. This is explained in Mike Hearn's blog post, as linked in his email on this post: https://medium.com/@octskyward/why-is-bitcoin-forking-d647312d22c1

After reading Mike Hearn's article on the subject[1], I'm convinced. The next project where I'd normally reach for Java and where I have some freedom in choice of language, I'd pick Kotlin instead. [1] https://medium.com/@octskyward/why-kotlin-is-my-next-programming-langu…

I should turn this into a FAQ, but PowerShell is natural on Windows, where the OS provides objects (either via the .NET VM, or COM and .DLLs, etc.) A Unix shell like bash or Oil is natural on Unix, where the OS uses text files. And in distributed systems where data is JSON, YAML, XML, protobuf, msgpack, etc. not objects. So basically shell is a "situated" language, and the easy of accomplishing any given task depends a lot on the environment. Windows is more tightly coupled and trying to provide something nice for you. Unix is messier but doesn't limit you, and it's what basically all big systems are made of these days. A major strength of shell is to glue things together that nobody thought should be glued together. --- Good example here from Paul Bucheit: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/simplest-explanation.html#product… http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/communicating-with-code.html However, we needed a way for Gmail to make money, and Sanjeev Singh kept talking about using relevant ads, even though it was obviously a "bad idea". I remained skeptical, but thought that it might be a fun experiment, so I connected to that ads database (I assure you, random engineers can no longer do this!), copied out all of the ads+keywords, and did a little bit of sorting and filtering with some UNIX SHELL COMMANDS I then hacked up the "adult content" classifier that Matt Cutts and I had written for safe-search, linked that into the…

> Hearn mentions this mechanism three times in the article. He even discusses the tradeoffs of ignoring this versus rejecting the block. Hardly misleading. Hearn mentions the nVersion mechanism? Specifically in https://medium.com/@octskyward/on-consensus-and-forks-c6a050c792e7 ? Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see any mention of the word "version" > He said "essentially tricked", and I think his explanation is clear. I think you're misunderstanding my point: everything you raised above is negated by the fact that the soft-fork mechanisms we use are designed to give warnings to users and miners who are not running the new(1) protocol. For example, in addition to the nVersion mechanism I mentioned, segwit transactions are intentionally designed to be not standard transactions, and thus non-segwit miners will reject them. This is an important feature to ensure that those miners don't unintentionally create invalid blocks. 1) I say "new" rather than "upgraded" to avoid making the claim that soft-forks are necessarily an upgrade.

Other metrics indicate could be just that it's holiday season. In the northern hemispheres, people are outdoors & enjoying the summer. This coincides with the sudden drop in Google searches for bitcoin and others, also I've noticed the number of users online on poloniex has dropped significantly. This seasonal pattern was first observed with bitcoin, check this out: https://medium.com/@octskyward/bitcoin-s-seasonal-affective-disorder-3… Also, other negative news: 1. Alphabay, the largest darknet market went offline, not sure if that is significant. 2. Bitnumb, largest(?) crypto exchange in South Korea got hacked, also not sure how much impact this had, but usually an exchange hack has a short term effect on prices and there has been a lot of recent activity in SK. Other reason may be that boom and bust cycles are a natural occurrence of crypto markets. They were getting white-hot for the last few months and finally need some time to cool. So move along, nothing to see.. The cycle continues. The next boom might be bigger than anything we've seen before :-)