Re: [bitcoin-dev] Scaling Bitcoin conference micro-report

[Milly Bitcoin <milly@bitcoins.info>]

On 9/21/2015 1:04 AM, Corey Haddad via bitcoin-dev wrote:
 > If it turns out that the blocksize divide is hinging on differing
 > developer views on the nature of the threat posed by governments,
 > perhaps it would be better to defer to people who specialize in that
 > area.  ...
...
 > The main idea here is that if this is a politics question, please
 > consider you may be outside your area of expertise.


That is a great suggestion.  Jerry Brito is the number one guy to go to 
for this information.  You will find that many early Bitcoiners are 
completely clueless as to the motivations of regulators.  However, you 
still have the problem that some influential developers know Bitcoin but 
otherwise are completely ignorant.  They will go around claiming 
everyone who discusses regulation is a "statist" and so forth.  Some 
people on this list actually claimed I am "statist" simply by pointing 
out that governments do both good and bad things and that most people 
trust and depend on governments to a certain extent.  That is simply a 
fact, it does not support any agenda.

Another example are the developers who are going around claiming a 
stress test is a criminal action against those running nodes.  Such a 
claim brings all kinds of complicated legal questions about the 
liability of people running nodes.  Instead of contacting someone who 
researched the issue (such as Peter Šurda who ended up posting several 
sensible replies) the developer posted some hyperbolic article on Reddit 
which did nothing but promote misinformation.  On top of that it makes 
Bitcoiners look totally ridiculous.  One day they claim Bitcoin will 
collapse all these government institutions and the next day they want 
those same government institutions to arrest people for overflowing 
their memory pool.

One final issue about the conference ... the developers should not be 
accepting advertisers engaged in nefarious activities.  In particular 
BicoinTalk was accepted as an advertiser.  It is well known that site 
has promoted fake banks where many users lost money 
(CoinLeders/Inputs.io), illegal investments schemes where,any people 
lost funds (BLBSE) and whole host of questionable, illegal, immoral, and 
unethical activities.  Just because the guy who runs the site wrote a 
block explorer that does not mean the developers should blindly promote 
a highly questionable web site that damages Bitcoin's reputation.  The 
people running these events need to start acting responsibly.

Russ