LetterToRoger

Bringing the Community Back Together

Eric Lombrozo
to Roger
Mar 31, 2016

Roger,

I’m glad we’ve started talking a bit more recently - I feel like for far too long too many parts of the community failed to really talk to one another. It deeply saddens me to see the path things took last year - it’s very unfortunate, we’re all Bitcoiners…we all want the best for Bitcoin. We still face many threats from the outside, if we’re fighting each other from within we don’t stand a chance.

As per our earlier chat, the problems we’re currently facing are rooted not so much in technical disagreement but in personal issues and deep misunderstanding. If we are to make progress in solving these issues, the first thing that needs to take place is we need to stop assuming bad intentions on the part of others - I sincerely believe we’re all trying to do what we think is best for Bitcoin. But there are some serious issues we need to address…and it won’t be easy for everyone. Big mistakes have been made all around and fixing the problems will require accepting this. We must set our ego aside and focus on what’s best for the community and our future.

As a longtime contributor to Bitcoin Core, I see the very hard work and dedication of these guys first-hand - often unappreciated - that ensures the Bitcoin network continues to operate securely and robustly, 24/7. Not only is it very challenging engineering work - it also carries significant responsibility as billions of dollars' worth of other people’s assets rely on all this work. I think I can confidently state that there are a very, very tiny number of people in the world qualified to do this stuff. Furthermore, having worked together with many of these guys for years, we’ve come to know one another well…it’s a very strong team with at least a few dozen highly active contributors.

After the collapse of the Bitcoin Foundation, these guys were left without any political support, without sustainable funding, without capable public relations. Other than MIT DCI, Blockstream, Ciphrex, ChainCode Labs, and perhaps one or two others, NONE of the major companies in this space stepped up to contribute very much. In fact, things went in the exact opposite direction…with a bigger and bigger rift growing between much of industry and the Core devs.

There were numerous discussions by the Core devs on a few technical forums on issues. In particular, there was a super long thread in the mailing list on the issue of increasing the block size in which different views were expressed by a bunch of different people. Unfortunately, it seems much of the industry remained oblivious to this discussion as they were not following and Core lacked proper representation to make sure views got heard.

...

The issue most of the Core devs had was never really about whether we should increase the block size - but how we should do it.

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Gavin, unfortunately, followed Mike down this very dangerous path which politicized mining.

Politicizing mining is about the single most dangerous thing that can happen to Bitcoin! I CANNOT EMPHASIZE THIS ENOUGH! This issue is SOOO much more of concern than whether blocks are full or fees are high. A key component of Satoshi’s design was that it should be very hard for anyone to be able to control a majority of hashpower lest they attempt to do hostile things to the rest of the network. I would imagine someone like yourself would be very emphatically opposed to doing things in a way that gives entry to hostile entities who want to usurp control over the network. The part of Core that did not include Gavin and Mike was overwhelmingly very much *against* opening up such attack vectors as a matter of principle…and unfortunately the block size issue was thrown in as the wedge.

Bitcoin Core is committed to near-term AND long-term scalability - committed to both on-chain AND off-chain ideas. The reason that many of us got so excited about making segwit the centerpiece of the Core roadmap was because it gave us a way to increase block size while addressing some of the validation cost issues AND solved many important issues with Bitcoin unrelated to block size (i.e. malleability, commitment extensibility, script replacement, perhaps even fraud proofs) AND allowed us to deploy it as a soft fork in many ways quite similar to how we deployed BIP16 meaning there would be no flag day and deployment could proceed incrementally. It seemed like a win-win…everyone gets what they want and we avoid the most problematic aspects pertaining to deployment logistics. Unfortunately, it’s clear not everyone saw it quite like this. There’s obviously still significant misunderstanding in the community, some people are still just too pissed off to want to cooperate, and some people are still looking for a way to save face.

I ask for your help as a fellow Bitcoiner and as a friend to help end this silly dispute that’s been tearing apart our community. I know it won’t be easy to heal wounds, but we’ve got to stop with this petty tit-for-tat proxy war on reddit and we’ve got to stop politicizing mining - we need to find a better way of having all our concerns addressed and resolve issues without having to polarize entire groups of people against one another who, in the end, are not the cause of the problem. It’s not their fault.


- Eric