Attracting more Bitcoin Cash developers
As the discussions continue about the proposal to forcefully fund developers from block-rewards I took a step back and asked what problem it is that needs to be solved.
The title is apt, there is a requirement that we attract more Bitcoin Cash developers. Not just in the ABC team, there is a general idea that there is a lack of developers able to get things done.
Lets take a quick look at the official dev chat of the ABC team on telegram:
So, it is clear that Amaury (the lead developer of ABC) is of the opinion that we need more developers. I agree with that. I think many people will.
On a positive note we can see from places like telegram, reddit, wechat and naturally read.cash there are plenty of people that are interested in actually making Bitcoin Cash better. One way or another. A good subset of those would be developers. We should see more people actually contribute then what Amaury calls "a handful of people" that carry everything forward. Why are we not growing in number?
The main dev from ABC today again complained that nobody helps him. This is not a new complaint. Repeatedly the ABC developer has stated that the only reason there are not more people helping him is because of money.
Now, may I suggest some alternative view on the situation:
don't bad-mouth your competition (1, 2, 3, 4) https://twitter.com/deadalnix/status/1168038114230722560 https://twitter.com/deadalnix/status/1167762739579801605 https://twitter.com/deadalnix/status/1167579391938957312 https://twitter.com/deadalnix/status/1190259910761680896
don't be a jerk in general. (1) https://old.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/f290hv/ftrader_distancing_himself_from_abc_project/fhbljex/
don't bad-mouth your customers, on telegram or in public.
don't blame others for not doing the work if you are the one that is to get paid (satoshi-dice).
don't eject from your team a member the moment they get personal problems (like micropresident getting sued).
don't remove contributors admin access without discussion or notification. (1) https://old.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/f290hv/ftrader_distancing_himself_from_abc_project/fhb8f7m/
don't move all communication from public channels to private ones which your moderators operate and then blame others from not feeling welcome. https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-ml/
don't accept 800BCH (several man-years worth of salaries) in donations, move it to a separate company and then a month later complain again that you don't have any money. https://www.bitcoin.com/fundraise/
don't ship software that tells miners to not mine more than 2MB blocks and blame others are not scaling.
don't have invite-only coin-wide developer with your moderators.
don't have invite-only hard fork planning.
When 3 teams work together to create a better DAA, don't just bypass them all and decide that your own newly written (with "code-review" by nchain!) to be the solution all clients must follow.
When someone leaves as a moderator over disagreeing viewpoints, don't kick them for saying they never did anything (see screenshot above).
So, who would be with me if I were to suggest that getting more money streamed into ABC is not going to be the solution to getting more devs? You just saw a long list of other issues preventing developer participation. Blaming it on the money sounds too easy.
In fact, I do understand how nice it must be to forever get paid to solve a problem that has little to do with money but instead you simply created by being a jerk.
Whats next?
In the various periodic hard forks upgrades in Bitcoin Cash we always saw Bitcoin ABC dictate the new protocol rules and the other 4 implementations follow.
As an aside, there used to be 7, we have lost the Bitcoin Cash clients bcash and bitprim during one or more of those forks. https://github.com/bcoin-org/bcash https://github.com/bitprim/bitprim/blob/master/doc/release-notes/release-notes.md
Nothing really worthy of discussion happened in those upgrades, but to any observer it was clear that ABC dictates and the rest follows without discussion. Questions were not answered. And the alternative to not following ABC is simple being forgotten. Like *bcash* and *bitprim* have.
It is becoming clear that ABC is trying to pull the same trick with the upcoming May 15th hardfork. With the "minor" detail that the ABC devs will get a constant income for the rest of their lives from what they want Bitcoin Cash to become. Any miner that disagrees will be orphaned by their software.
**Do you believe that these people should get more money so they can write your financial future?** Please share in the comments below.
title-image attribution goes to flickr user Aff. https://flickr.com/s/affers/
You lead and maybe I will follow
The dev-tax proposal was made by some mining pools last week and the community back-lash has been quite extensive. It is safe to say that the proposal as is will not get majority hashpower. A majority hashpower is what you need if you want to change the coin basic principles.
The btc.top and other pools that actually made the announcement possibly even expected this. They never had a majority hashpower, even ignoring that pools and miners are not the same people. Why would they do this then, you ask?
**What we observed is a fork in communities without a fork in code or chain.**
I'm not sure if people realized this yet. But this may be very interesting going forward.
As I wrote in my previous post:
There is one team that is asking for real funding and their reasons are based on a questionable business model.
This team, it is very clear to people having followed this weeks posts, is the ABC team. They are also the only ones in favor of this dev-tax.
Here we have deadalnix (the ABC spokesperson): (post / spanish) https://read.cash/@deadalnix/on-the-infrastructure-funding-plan-for-bitcoin-cash-bd372a10 https://read.cash/@DarthRoison/sobre-el-plan-de-financiamiento-de-infraestructura-para-bitcoin-cash-bb81a10e
They asked myself several times to implement such a measure in Bitcoin ABC directly, to which I responded every time that such an initiative needed to come from the miners as there is obvious conflict of interest if devs decide to take away money from miners and pay themselves with it.
As we can see in a public video from him, the original request for this kind of funding is also from Amaury. While not a smoking gun, this quoted paragraph gives a strong impression that the miners have responded to such requests by stating ABC should just change their software to make it mandatory. Everyone knows that the market would react badly to this idea, and Amaury states he didn't take that risk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ywIL17ityk
But now some mining pools made the first move, ABC takes it all the way:
I propose that the control of the key needs to be in the hands of people who have proven they work in the best interest of Bitcoin Cash, even during rough times, have a commitment to infrastructure and a proven track record, such as Jonald Fyookball, Mengerian and myself.
Please read this and realize that this man, today, has a lot of power to decide what goes into Bitcoin Cash. Does that make you feel happy?
So, what about Jonald and Mengerian?
Lets start with Jonalds "facts": https://read.cash/@jonald_fyookball/little-known-but-important-facts-about-the-mining-plan-a1f1fe13
Bitcoin ABC (the lead implementation of Bitcoin Cash) could not have unilaterally decided to fund themselves as it would have been political suicide, even though this had been requested before.
Ok, these guys obviously coordinated their stories.
We need to get bigger before we worry about things like “decentralization” and “purity of protocol”.
At least he is being frank. I agree that those values would be killed. The rest of the community is not so eager to kill those in order for Jonald to get a nice paycheck, though.
I take responsibility for “pushing” and encouraging this.
Thank you for your frank admitting of where you stand on this, Jonald.
Mengerian wrote a post here too. As yet another poster using a pseudonym it is curious to see that Amaury suggested him to be part of the inner circle. Reading his post it is clear that the man is well versed in writing non-committal sentences. It feels like reading the writings of a politician. https://read.cash/@Mengerian/my-view-on-the-miner-infrastructure-funding-plan-efa0ee95
Is it a “Tax”? This question has been asked 1000 times, but here’s a different perspective: If anything should be compared to a tax, it is the block reward itself.
To the extent that the block reward is a “tax”, the Infrastructure Funding Plan is not a new tax, but a reallocation of the existing one.
But, lets focus on the mans beliefs, not his great writing skills.
This would effectively make it a consensus rule.
Here we have the most important part. Orphaning blocks that don't pay him and his friends are no longer to be called Bitcoin Cash. That is his opinion. This is what the man honestly beliefs.
Leaders should represent those they intent to lead
There is no point in linking to the hundreds or thousands of posts, tweets, articles and blogs that all conclude the same thing. The sharp opposite of the above quoted people.
The Bitcoin Cash community is not really divided, in fact it is amazingly coherent. The only ones that really want this dev-tax are the ones that have designed it and are the ones that will benefit from it.
These people claim to represent us. As Jonald called ABC: "the lead implementation of Bitcoin Cash".
I ask you, my dear reader, to consider if this is really the team you want to be the leader. If there is a way we can make very clear to them that they do what the holders want, miners and people don't just follow them. That is not how Bitcoin works.
As closing, all 3 blogs had the same sentiment in almost the same wording.
Also, doing it without orphaning will fail because the contributions from individual miners will be meager, and pools cannot do this at scale because they will quickly become uncompetitive.
This is why this idea will never work. If ABC releases a client that forces this, then I'm willing to pay a developer to make a fork release for miners to mine with. Removing only the part that forces this uncompetitive behavior. ABC does not call the shots.
The holders call the shots. The miners decide with hashpower. This is the power of Bitcoin Cash.
Thoughts on developer funding
With a miners funding **announcement** we understand that the actual work and, well, funding targets are not decided yet. This gives the opportunity to take a peek at the kind of development work and teams we have today and what funding would do to them. https://medium.com/@jiangzhuoer/infrastructure-funding-plan-for-bitcoin-cash-131fdcd2412e
The most obvious teams are the ABC and the BU teams. They both have high numbers of nodes shipped and running on the network. It is likely that both are used by the miners doing the funding.
BU itself has received funds already a couple of years ago and they are clearly not in need of more funds. They just approved the year salary of another developer as well as many projects, like the specification documentation project. They supposedly still have millions in BTC/BCH.
ABC, then is the more likely target. ABC's Amaury has been vocal about how he thinks miners should pay him. The video from the Australia conference some months ago is very enlightening on this position. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ywIL17ityk
What we learn in that video is that ABC behaves like a copy-of-Core. The software Bitcoin Core ships is seen as the place where development happens. Amaury states:
The positioning of ABC is clearly that it is reliant on Bitcoin Core. The software development being done there is leading. Innovation is difficult to impossible in Bitcoin Cash. Again, according to ABC.
But is this really the case? Is it really so difficult to split away from the people we decided to no longer want to work with 2 years ago? Many people speculated that the Bitcoin Core people write code to avoid Bitcoin from being a danger to the establishment (banks, mostly). If that is so, then what is the cost of importing their changes? We might all remember the infinite inflation bug that was inserted in Core. What happened once can happen again and we might not catch it before copying it into ABC. https://www.bgp4.com/2018/09/22/the-latest-bitcoin-bug-was-so-bad-developers-kept-its-full-details-a-secret/
Bitcoin Cash has a long list of good implementations. Some more developed than others. From the ones mentioned above and then we have BCHD, Flowee the hub and Verde. Each one having its own strengths and weaknesses. What is most important is that all of them have no problem having ownership of their respective codebases. In contrary to what we read from Amaury that this would be tantamount to suicide. I understand it likely is not a dreamjob to just follow the code from developers that don't like him or his goals. A divorce like we saw between BCH / BTC typically means one moves out and ignores the other. I expect this to get weird or even nasty at times. Is that why the BTC devs call us bad names?
Funding for a questionable business model
It seems clear from the statements made by the ABC lead that the business model for ABC is of questionable design. They openly acknowledge that most maintenance work is done by the Bitcoin Core team and the ABC people have problems fulfilling requirements on the Bitcoin Cash side as a result. We saw this most recently with the 25-unconfirmed transactions dept that ABC inherited from Core. We saw the problem with block size where miners are told they can't mine bigger than 2MB.
Any company not being able to support its customers like this in any other market would end up being replaced by one that is more competent. Instead, the miners suggest to fund them millions of dollars. How does that make sense?
What is the problem that funding solves?
This is the real question that the miners making this proposal need to answer. The Bitcoin Cash community has grown immensely over the last years. Every day new developers come in and work on their own projects. Every month more infrastructure is being created. Infrastructure in the shape of libraries, indexing software, services and much more. Really impressive stuff.
What is also infrastructure are designs and implementations like the Cash Fusion privacy innovation that is in testing today.
Immense efforts have gone into the SLP token designs. With a company at the front that has recently created a piece of infrastructure to validate and index them.
So, really, what is the problem that needs solving? There is one team that is asking for real funding and their reasons are based on a questionable business model.
People working in Bitcoin every day will be like stock-owners. This is how I expect open source developers to fund themselves after some time. If you do this every day full time, you can play the market much better than the normies can. Not a professional trader, but in this market you really don't have to be.
What problems are being solved by this hard fork?
@SharkySharkdog