Warren getting upset about Feathercoin
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This morning I got linked into a post by Warren over at Litecoin forums where he is scathing over Feathercoin while responding on his stance over XPM.
[quote]We don’t pay much attention to other projects after we’ve deemed them to be bad ideas. Notwithstanding what is written below, users have the freedom to use whatever they want, so whatever.
Fallacy of Users Opting In to Centralized Checkpoints A coin is not centralized because users need to opt-in to broadcast checkpoints? This specious argument was used by Feathercoin’s supporters too. It fails because if the economic majority (like pools) follow broadcast checkpoints, then it doesn’t matter if users have opted in or not. Now I haven’t studied if this actually happens with XPM, but this is exactly what happens with FTC’s broadcast checkpoints.
Good Luck Removing PPC’s Centralized Checkpoints Regarding PPC… these amount to empty obfuscating defensive excuses. Sure he wants to remove the broadcast checkpoints. Novacoin’s Balthasar made similar promises because he too knows that it is indefensible. Unfortunately for PPC, in the age of ASIC’s it will be impossible to keep a sha256d network stable without it, so I would be highly surprised if it is actually removed. PPC’s underlying economic design is fundamentally flawed. Furthermore, even if PPC were stable without centralized checkpoints, that doesn’t magically make PoS a good idea. PoS features the perverse quality of the rich getting richer without spending anything to acquire more. It seems the market has largely rejected PPC for this reason.
While I’m on the topic of Sunny King, I must congratulate him for grabbing profit from Feathercoin without actually fixing it.
[url=http://forum.feathercoin.com/index.php?topic=3438.65]http://forum.feathercoin.com/index.php?topic=3438.65[/url]
Early in Feathercoin’s life, Bushstar really struggled due to his extremely poor skills in basic software engineering to understand the code that he copied. After suffering from crippling reorg attacks and massive hashrate swings rendering the FTC network unusable, he initially begged coblee for help in fixing Feathercoin. We refused to accept a rather substantial bribe largely for two reasons. First, Feathercoin is an entirely meritless copy that exists entirely to profit its early adopters and promoters. Second, software is even more dangerous if its developers are incapable of understanding the code they are supposed to maintain. If you have a massive marketing operation to promote the value of your product, you better make damned sure that your product is safe and you are capable of responding to problems that may arise.(Yes, these arguments could have been applied to Litecoin prior to its modernization and organization of a competent team to defend it.)
(Another note, coblee’s initial suggestion to Bushstar: If he’s serious about stabilizing the FTC network while keeping it decentralized, then change it into a merge coin in the same way Namecoin converted into a merge coin. Bushstar opted out of this proven solution because it takes away the ability to profit.)[url=http://www.coindesk.com/peercoin-vault-of-satoshi-deal/]http://www.coindesk.com/peercoin-vault-of-satoshi-deal/[/url]
Out of desperation and amid continued massive crippling attacks, they hired Sunny King to substantially mitigate the hashrate swings and to add his centralized checkpoints feature to Feathercoin. An inspection of Feathercoin’s 0.6.x github reveals that Sunny King did absolutely all code changes that were “difficult” in any way. Sunny King fixed only difficulty smoothing and centralized broadcast checkpoints. To our amusement, he did so without fixing any of the dozens of vulnerabilities that could allow a moderately skilled script kiddie to annihilate the FTC network. The difficulty smoothing change even enabled the spectacular attack where nearly all of FTC’s pools were knocked offline and the blockchain was crippled by a massive 72 block reorg.(Today FTC seems to be struggling with making a working 0.8.5 release. This is especially sad, given it took me less than an hour to make a fully compatible Feathercoin client out of Litecoin 0.8.4.1 a few months ago. It remains a mystery to me how anyone finds FTC to have any credibility. I guess marketing makes up for the complete lack of engineering competence.)
So … Sunny King is one of the few competent alt coin developers. The market has largely decided that his ideas are not good, but we congratulate him for successfully grabbing profit from Feathercoin without actually helping them to survive in a sustainable way.[/quote]
Source: [url=https://forum.litecoin.net/index.php?topic=7142.msg54677#msg54677]https://forum.litecoin.net/index.php?topic=7142.msg54677#msg54677[/url]Very disappointing to see so many negative adjectives thrown in, it does not look good. He seems to forget Litecoin’s more humble beginnings and that we are we are in an open source space. The pressures we face are now very different from Litecoin when they started out and that ACP is designed to protect us while we are small. ACP is a solution for small young coins before they have enough hashpower to protect themselves. I never saw the offer of merge mining as a friendly one as it would marginalise us completely which is something that would seemingly bode well over at the Litecoin camp.
Great news that he got a 0.8.4 client working but how about a 0.8.5 client with the changes to keys that works with ACP and CAlerts?
Perhaps I can add Warren to the 0.8.5 repo so he can show us his skills :)
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Its a pretty personal attack bushstar I see them on this forum too from time to time. He talks about marketing a lot yet from what I can see the whole thread is about convincing people to drop feathercoin and come to litecoin which is just marketing.
I would try and ignore it ACP while not hugely popular has made the coin safe and we all as users are benifiting from that. I back you bushstar ignore the haters! -
Thanks Kris. When I started out it was in the Litecoin camp and I spent good time arguing with Bitcoiners about the need for alts. These guys just sound like the Bitcoiners now saying that there should only be one, but now it is that there should only be two. Often when it comes down to it you realise that these people are thinking about money and see any alts as a drain on value in the markets. For crypto to work you need diversity so that you have many different solutions. This being an open source space we can share between different variations and the best solutions can rise to the top.
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I agree I think its laughable when he was talking about getting another developer involved for ACP heaven forbid you don’t do everything on your own. What a crock.
Your right there are still bitcoiners slagging all altcoins just now litecoin being “number 2” coin for now is. looking down its nose at us.Reminds me of the sketch about the class structure.
[url=https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=z1yHUuDwLtCO7AaXiYHoDg&url=http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DK2k1iRD2f-c&cd=1&ved=0CDgQtwIwAA&usg=AFQjCNH55yzajAQ6rIwG9QZo9FyUeKV4fg]https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=z1yHUuDwLtCO7AaXiYHoDg&url=http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DK2k1iRD2f-c&cd=1&ved=0CDgQtwIwAA&usg=AFQjCNH55yzajAQ6rIwG9QZo9FyUeKV4fg[/url]Well its easy to be self righteous when you have the upper hand.
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Well Bush, i think you are doing a good job.
Keep it up :) -
I wouldn’t worry too much, Warren argued himself out anyway, and he will come round.
Sometimes it takes people time to work out who their “real friends” are.
Personally, I think its great our lead developer has “extremely poor skills in basic software engineering” and needs help, it’s means Feathercoin is not such a dictatorship as Litecoin.
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[quote name=“kris_davison” post=“34454” timestamp=“1384601509”]
Its a pretty personal attack bushstar I see them on this forum too from time to time. He talks about marketing a lot yet from what I can see the whole thread is about convincing people to drop feathercoin and come to litecoin which is just marketing.
I would try and ignore it ACP while not hugely popular has made the coin safe and we all as users are benifiting from that. I back you bushstar ignore the haters!
[/quote]Your reputation is not a choice. It exists as soon as 2 people agree on a ‘fact’ about you. A Brand is the same, a brand is a reputation that has had time to bake in to the collective memory of a group of people. Again it’s not a choice.
So you’re exactly right, everything they say and do is part of the market signal and basically the choice is whether you decide to make a conscious effort to do it properly and consider carefully how you want your message to come across. That’s why I say that the best companies are the ones where they tech developers and communications team have a mutual respect for one another’s professions.
Style is substance, knowing how to look your best is in itself a form of knowledge. It’s convenient to draw nice tidy lines between marketing and product but really it’s very a blurry line. And if you believe in what you are doing there is no reason not to portray your work in the best way.
If you don’t tell your story the way you want it told other people will tell it for you. And the funny thing is that Warren is helping us with our marketing right now by drawing attention to us by giving us something to respond to.
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Open Source.
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Open source means giving up the need for control. But apparently not if it includes your wealth.
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[quote name=“MrFeathers” post=“34475” timestamp=“1384614597”]
Feathercoin may not have the third largest market cap, but we sure get publicity as if we do. People love to talk about Feathercoin and I think its because they are intimidated by its success so far. The fact that warren barely addressed PPC/XMP and instead decided to go off topic and discuss Feathercoin shows Feathercoin weighs heavily on his mind. Many people expected Feathercoin to quickly fail and its success has disproved all of them. I think this publicity is a good sign that some people are worried that Feathercoin will continue to grow and become more successful. :)
[/quote]+1
The market wants to see you persist over the long term. It will throw all kinds of obstacles in your way and it wants you to grow from those failures. It does this to weed out the time wasters and dreamers and get to the doers.
The most important feature of any currency is survivability and that comes from stewardship and the devotion of the people who give it value. The most important test Money has to pass is that enough people agree on its worth.
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[quote]Early in Feathercoin’s life, Bushstar really struggled due to his extremely poor skills in basic software engineering to understand the code that he copied.[/quote]
I don’t get where people get off making slights like this. I don’t care how many years of experience you’ve got racked up in development; we’re all (critics included) marching through uncharted territory here. There may be an occasional foible but in the grand scheme of things [i]who cares[/i]. We’re not building a building, it’s something far more dynamic and can be altered as time and needs go on and because of that the changes you can live with right now may differ from your long term goals. Anyone that has the viewpoint that any decision made right now is [i]“disastrous”[/i] is viewing this whole [i]“cryptocurrency thang”[/i] as a get rich quick plan for them to have an exit strategy in the next 2-3 years and not something to be braced up so that it might stand on it’s own for much longer.
Feathercoin’s current value is in that it’s taken a beating in 51% attacks and a different path was taken to address it rather than sit back, let the damage to the network, value and reputation accumulate. Even if five years from now we realize it wasn’t the best decision it was still [i]a variant decision[/i] and these other coin devs and future coin devs are going to take something from it from value (hopefully!): knowledge.
We get it. Any form of centralization is [i]bad[/i] and I buy fully into that worldview/ideology. But lots of distributed technologies started out with centralization simply because [i]that’s how they had to start[/i]. With adoption came the freedom of distribution.
We’ll get there. People can make the “cart before the horse” argument all they want but tech comes first, followed by marketing then by ideology.
TL;DR omg coffee i need coffee nao
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I am here for people who get off their butts and post ideas and people who read those ideas and message the poster.
I am not here for people who are basically incapable of taking some creative initiative and hope their coin will be worth something someday, like when Dunkin Donuts accepts it.
inb4 I create DonutCoin for just that purpose.
I am here because, even if we had the worst codebase, the truth is we growl at bears, even if we’re beavers.
We were supposed to be delisted.
We are still here.
We are not going anywhere.If at some point Feathercoin dies and some other coin does much better, I would still be posting ideas in this forum.
I’m not here to make Feathercoin the best coin. I’m here to make cryptocoin work regardless which one takes the lead.Unlike the ADHD section of bitcointalk frothing over their new coin, I still remember there’s a banking system on the verge of suicide.
If we’re not confronting that issue, then we’re not going to be anymore ready than any other coin. -
[quote name=“zerodrama” post=“34486” timestamp=“1384621393”]
I am not here for people who are basically incapable of taking some creative initiative and hope their coin will be worth something someday, like when Dunkin Donuts accepts it.inb4 I create DonutCoin for just that purpose.
[/quote]brb reserving donutcoin on githubEDIT: Done.
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[quote name=“zerodrama” post=“34486” timestamp=“1384621393”]
I am here because, even if we had the worst codebase, the truth is we growl at bears, even if we’re beavers.
[/quote]
+1
Bush, I have so much respect for you. Keep up the good work and remember “any press is good press” when you can respond to the criticisms in a level-headed and professional manner. -
His bad attitude notwithstanding, Warren makes several good points that many here have made as well: ACP is absolutely centralization; FTC has had significant struggles because of Bushstar’s lack of development experience and the somewhat closed development process; and there is really nothing that functionally separates FTC from Litecoin at this point in time.
These are challenges we currently face and need to overcome. Ridiculing Litecoin developers is not going to help us do that.
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LOL
Clone Wars.
FTC has come ahead on both community strength, community development, innovation. We actually talk about features and possibilities in the forums. There is no creepy foundation.
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[quote name=“Aldanga” post=“34532” timestamp=“1384644824”]
His bad attitude notwithstanding, Warren makes several good points that many here have made as well: ACP is absolutely centralization; FTC has had significant struggles because of Bushstar’s lack of development experience and the somewhat closed development process; and there is really nothing that functionally separates FTC from Litecoin at this point in time.These are challenges we currently face and need to overcome. Ridiculing Litecoin developers is not going to help us do that.
[/quote]He is, unfortunately, correct on all accounts.
He pointed out the glaringly obvious flaw in ACP which I pointed out over and over again when it still hadn’t been released: It fails because if the economic majority (like pools) follow broadcast checkpoints, then it doesn’t matter if users have opted in or not.
As we speak the latest codebase is “invite only”, and it’s now been weeks that a “key” has held up it’s functionality, something which is, according to the Litecoin dev, trivial to fix. I reviewed the changes to the 0.8.5 codebase, and I can attest that a very trivially small amount of changes have been made, almost all of which are name changes from Xcoin to Feathercoin. Besides ACP and difficulty adjustments, no new development has seen it’s way into the client in terms of user facing features.
Zerocoin development has gone nowhere. Discussion of removing ACP has been non-existent. Even the difficulty change was the result of at least two other developers who put a lot of time into modeling the change before implementing it, and Bushstar’s only reply is “Sad to see this being said”, and “Let’s see Warren do what I’m not able to.”
Zerodrama is right, we actually talk about features and possibilities in the forum, but unless that results in code that Bushstar writes, it’s a bit of a waste of time and effort, isn’t it?
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Kevlar,
Why don’t you help us out with the changes? I’m also still waiting for your post in Technical Development too, by the way!
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Yeah lets all bash bushstar. I mean what do you want from the guy to rise to the bait and get into some long flame war about who did what and when. We are where we are and we are hopefully moving forward.
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I’m not a programmer, but the code isn’t exactly very transparent. If we’re going to maintain the code, we need some way to document and group develop. This was one of the reasons I, previously, suggested an actual coding thread, where we could discuss / document the functions, parameters and work flow.
I might be wrong and we just need to get more programmers involved? I would be interested too see “how the code works” but coding is a specialised area, I’m still learning Github.
We certainly need to keep tabs on future developments as they come through, perhaps even do our own patches, as opposed to forking Litecoin and reintroducing Feathercoin changes.
I have always found good coders aren’t the best at specifications or strategy, its a point of failure and centralisation having only a few or one developer. Even within coding, for instance, one of my programmers was good at human interfaces, another was good at object orientation and UML.
To me, the program already looks too complicated for one person to maintain, or fully understand.
It certainly looks like Warren has a chip on his shoulder against forked alt-coins, which is a shame, since co-operation back-porting generic patches to Bitcoin / Litecoin, so that the Feathercoin client is built with a switch from common code, is much more efficient use of time and would be less prone to errors and bugs being introduced.
Unfortunately, it seems we wasn’t born with a genetic understanding of the code, like the Litecoin developers, so its gonna take some work and co-operation to move forward. I think we’ve already decided we need to be solid first, so we don’t have to rush.
