Warren getting upset about Feathercoin
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[quote name=“Tuck Fheman” post=“34846” timestamp=“1384805762”]
Sorry, saving Kevlar some time so we can move on to the next solution. ;)
[/quote]That’s kind of disingenuous Tuck. Kevlar pushed for the TechDev board to be made, it was, and he hasn’t really been active on it. Using Pete’s criticisms as a means of just avoiding the question is kinda lame. I mean, Kevlar could just pick up the torch if he wanted to - he could rally the troops, no?
This situation reminds me a lot of what I deal with when I’m large group backcountry camping. Usually, there’s one person who was in a leadership role for the planning, organization and early part of the trip - and when issues arise out in the field, they might not be doing what’s the best for the group for whatever reason. Well, we’re 3 days out from other humans and making shitty mistakes can result in dire consequences. It’s at that point that someone else usually steps up and rallies the morale, makes a few calls, and gets the ball rolling.
Maybe that’s what we need?
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[quote name=“mnstrcck” post=“34849” timestamp=“1384806490”]
[quote author=Tuck Fheman link=topic=4440.msg34846#msg34846 date=1384805762]
Sorry, saving Kevlar some time so we can move on to the next solution. ;)
[/quote]That’s kind of disingenuous Tuck. Kevlar pushed for the TechDev board to be made, it was, and he hasn’t really been active on it. Using Pete’s criticisms as a means of just avoiding the question is kinda lame. I mean, Kevlar could just pick up the torch if he wanted to - he could rally the troops, no?
This situation reminds me a lot of what I deal with when I’m large group backcountry camping. Usually, there’s one person who was in a leadership role for the planning, organization and early part of the trip - and when issues arise out in the field, they might not be doing what’s the best for the group for whatever reason. Well, we’re 3 days out from other humans and making shitty mistakes can result in dire consequences. It’s at that point that someone else usually steps up and rallies the morale, makes a few calls, and gets the ball rolling.
Maybe that’s what we need?
[/quote]What can I do to help? Do we need to get people more active around the Tech Development board? It seems we have had many suggestions for feature implementation such as a messaging system and I believe Zero Coin could still be worked with as they have a library. We will also have HD Wallets with the rollout of 0.8.5
I think what’s happening here is that there are lot of people who really care about Feathercoin and that is demonstrated in this thread. They want to see it succeed but are not sure exactly what they can do to help.
As regards Kevlar’s point about showing a good face and talking not doing I was not aware that I was not [i]doing enough[/i], it certainly hasn’t felt like that to me when dealing with Bittylicious, organising the conference to raise awareness, working with UKMark and his new venture to be released soon but then again I may be wrong. If I am I do expect to be told and put in my place because I do not wish to come across as all talk and no action or lazy because as I say that is not how I experience it from my point of view. Others may disagree.
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[quote name=“mnstrcck” post=“34849” timestamp=“1384806490”]
[quote author=Tuck Fheman link=topic=4440.msg34846#msg34846 date=1384805762]
Sorry, saving Kevlar some time so we can move on to the next solution. ;)
[/quote]That’s kind of disingenuous Tuck. Kevlar pushed for the TechDev board to be made, it was, and he hasn’t really been active on it. Using Pete’s criticisms as a means of just avoiding the question is kinda lame. I mean, Kevlar could just pick up the torch if he wanted to - he could rally the troops, no?
This situation reminds me a lot of what I deal with when I’m large group backcountry camping. Usually, there’s one person who was in a leadership role for the planning, organization and early part of the trip - and when issues arise out in the field, they might not be doing what’s the best for the group for whatever reason. Well, we’re 3 days out from other humans and making shitty mistakes can result in dire consequences. It’s at that point that someone else usually steps up and rallies the morale, makes a few calls, and gets the ball rolling.
Maybe that’s what we need?
[/quote]I’ve been as active on it as anyone else. The discussions generally don’t go anywhere useful, and they certainly haven’t resulted in code getting written, so I stopped trying.
Could I ghost write for Pete and watch him take all the credit? Sure. Sunny King did, but he was paid for his time and effort.
Let’s say I did. What would I do? There’s no roadmap for development, no direction from the community as to what features are of greatest demand, no other developers who are itching to contribute, no glaringly obvious bugs to fix, no innovative new features never seen before, and no reward for having done so.
I suppose that’s what I would do, huh? Set forth a roadmap for development, solicit direction from the community, support other developers who want to contribute, fix bugs, and implement innovative new features.
So why don’t I? I -=really=- don’t want to.
I agree that it’s going to take a developer to rally the developers. I don’t want that position, I don’t want to cheerlead, I don’t want the responsibility, I don’t want the title, I don’t want the attention, I don’t want to be a community leader, I don’t want to write C++, I don’t want to innovate for someone else’s solution, and I don’t want to ghost write for someone else. I’m VERY happy with my position as onlooker and commentator, and I have no delusions that I would somehow do a better job with troop morale when my own morale is reaching new lows and I’m being very successful with my own projects.
I’ve been devoting my free time to other crypto-currencies who do have a solid development process in place, and my own coding projects. The recent Zerocoin enhancements were a lot of work and it’s taken this long to get it there. It’s very rewarding and I’m enjoying the process immensely. My own projects have been showing some fantastic ROI as well the past week.
I sold all my alt-currencies earlier in the year and I’m holding BTC like it’s headed to the moon, and so far that’s been working FANTASTIC… so well I may quit my job soon and just write code for myself full time. ChrisJ and I have been discussing services and I’ll be spending a lot more time on those soon because they have the potential to turn into a game changer too, but the reward on those projects is easy to quantify. I think I’ll stick with what’s working, thank you.
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JS and Lisp don’t hide complexity.
They hide a fragile world. The problem with the bitcoin code has to do with the complete lack of organization.
In any case, I have things I want to do and I see a lot of unused talent here, so I’ll take you up on that Promethean challenge Kevlar.
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I think the reasons these conversations dont go anywhere and the reason that there are no major bugs to fix is that its working. Seems pointless trying to fix what isnt broken.
Zerocoin does sound interesting but ive not heard alot of people asking for it on here?
I would like to have a conversation about at what point or what would make it a reasonable time to rethink ACP and would be interested to hear everyones views although I would be hesitant to do it too early and go back to the situation we were in with the 51% attacks.
I think you are right that other things deserve attention and I think thats why bushstar has been focusing on the market. I think that will end up being really worthwhile.
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Now this is interesting from Warren:
[quote]Now that FTC is much discredited and near delisting, I suppose there is no harm in telling more of this story. Hopefully this will help others to avoid losing money to scams in the future.
The Litecoin devs agreed months ago that although we are capable of destroying their network due to their not fixing any security issues in their client, we were not willing to do anything that could be construed as illegal. I’m surprised that nobody else has done so as some of the possible attacks were known to the public and were previously used against the Bitcoin and Litecoin networks. For example, active attacks were the reason for the Bitcoin 0.8.3 emergency security release.
So with dev’s unwillingness to attack, some of the large Litecoin investors and pools came up with a plan to use entirely legal means to destroy FTC’s economy. Roughly 45% of the LTC hashrate under the control of several pool ops were willing to turn their hash power against the FTC network to strip mine and dump on the exchanges at a loss, subsidized by the large LTC investors. We devs were amused by this plan but we were pleased to leave it to the pools to work on. The reference client devs do not work on pool software, and client devs have lots of other higher priorities.
Some of the pools were testing the tech to do this. Then out of nowhere someone else entirely began a series of massive reorg attacks against the FTC network. The hashrate to do it wasn’t coming from the existing LTC pools, so our best guess is it came from GPU farms switching from Bitcoin hoping to manipulate the markets for trading profit. The reorg attacks, and especially the BIG time-travelling attack with the 72 block reorg, made a complete mess of FTC. The pools were then afraid to go forward with the economy draining strip mining plan because the cost would be too high if their blocks were orphaned in another reorg attack.
In the end, it turns out that FTC did a good job of killing itself and didn’t need Litecoin’s help.
The marketing shills, shiny videos and promises of “innovation” were unfortunately effective at attracting suckers to buy their meritless product that they were incapable of defending. It was surprising to me the extent of which they lacked engineering competence, we thought they would copy 0.8.x months ago. In any case, even if they were competent, there is simply no way to defend a copy when you are always a tiny % of the global hashrate capable of being used against your network. This is proven by the repeated, spectacular failures of Terracoin. Their centralized broadcast checkpoints was a final an act of desperation, an act of capitulation and the beginning of the slow death spiral.
I give Feathercoin this offer. Want a working Feathercoin 0.8.5.1 client with all of your innovations integrated and working? I’ll do it for a one-time payment of 100 BTC. You seem to hire help whenever you can’t figure out simple coding issues, so why not hire now? =)[/quote]
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[quote name=“zerodrama” post=“34862” timestamp=“1384811065”]
JS and Lisp don’t hide complexity.They hide a fragile world. The problem with the bitcoin code has to do with the complete lack of organization.
In any case, I have things I want to do and I see a lot of unused talent here, so I’ll take you up on that Promethean challenge Kevlar.
[/quote]Of course they hide complexity! That’s the entire point of a programming language: To allow the user to express their wishes in a natural form that gets transformed into it’s more verbose form which can be executed by a computer. There is no memory management in Javascript because that complexity is hidden. Tail recursion is trivial in Lisp because the complexity that’s required to enact it is hidden. You can’t even do DMA operations in either language because that complexity is hidden, let alone talk to the hardware directly. Under the covers, the compiler and/or the VM translate that simplistic expression into a very complex set of instructions that are encoded in a very complex and human-unfriendly format called “machine code”. You get to write in a very simple non-complex language, but ultimately it gets transformed into a very complex language. That’s called hiding complexity.
Computers are not fragile. They used to be, but they’re not any more. It used to be that a badly written piece of code could very trivially end your computing session, but now-a-days you REALLY have to go out of your way to make one process impact another’s execution. Modern operating systems have hidden so much complexity that most of today’s developers don’t even know what an interrupt even is any more, or how to trap one, or what the stack is, let alone how to smash it for fun and profit by overwriting your return address.
These days the worst you can expect in terms of fragileness when you execute bad code is that your process dies, and anything more than that requires a whole lot of work. That’s not fragile, that’s incredibly robust.
The Bitcoin code base doesn’t suffer from a complete lack of organization at all. The main code consists of less than 100 files, all of which are appropriately named, all of which follow good C++ coding conventions of exposing their headers in a .h file and providing implementations in a .cpp file. The objects themselves are broken up by responsibility and each one has several if not many appropriately named methods which are made appropriately visible and have appropriate parameter signatures that include const correctness and passing by reference of appropriately named objects. You can literally read the headers and get a very through understanding of what a method is expected to do. I picked a line at random to demonstrate:
[quote]
bool CWallet::ChangeWalletPassphrase(const SecureString& strOldWalletPassphrase, const SecureString& strNewWalletPassphrase)
[/quote]Now without even inspecting the implementation, I can tell you that this is a method on the Object CWallet which is designed to change the wallet’s passphrase. It accepts a reference to a const SecureString for the old wallet passphrase, and a const reference to a SecureString for the new wallet passphrase, and returns a boolean, presumably true if the operation is successful, otherwise false.
All of the code looks like this. There’s not a single place that I’ve seen where the code literally shits the bed and devolves into madness, and I’ve seen a LOT of code bases that do so I know one when I see one. If there’s some place where you think organization could be refactored, please point it out because I’d love to see it improved, but I’ve not actually witnessed this disorganization you refer to.
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[quote name=“Kevlar” post=“34859” timestamp=“1384809396”]
I’ve been devoting my free time to other crypto-currencies who do have a solid development process in place, and my own coding projects. [b]The recent Zerocoin enhancements were a lot of work and it’s taken this long to get it there.[/b]
[/quote]What coin is this?
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[quote name=“Tuck Fheman” post=“34878” timestamp=“1384815470”]
[quote author=Kevlar link=topic=4440.msg34859#msg34859 date=1384809396]
I’ve been devoting my free time to other crypto-currencies who do have a solid development process in place, and my own coding projects. [b]The recent Zerocoin enhancements were a lot of work and it’s taken this long to get it there.[/b]
[/quote]What coin is this?
[/quote]The soon-to-be-alt-coin that will implement Zerocoin, name still TBD. It’s not just a library any more, they’ve decided to do a reference implementation in their own blockchain. They went this route because, after much debate, it was decided that there wasn’t an existing coin worth implementing it in. Litecoin and Feathercoin was heavily considered, but eventually turned down due to a lack of development leadership; any coin that implements it would need some pretty heavy hand holding moving forward, not to mention a hard fork, and without a dedicated team capable of pulling it off it was decided it was best to just launch our own without all the legacy problems, and if individual developers of alt-coins wanted to they could just do their own implementation by forking their reference implementation.
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[quote name=“MrFeathers” post=“34880” timestamp=“1384816386”]
OOOO :o. This is going to be really interesting! Is it going to have a “fair launch” w/o premine? Is it going to be gpu mine-able scrypt? Is there going to be a website where I can track the release?
[/quote]More importantly [i]and on topic[/i], is Warren going to be upset?
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[quote name=“MrFeathers” post=“34880” timestamp=“1384816386”]
OOOO :o. This is going to be really interesting! Is it going to have a “fair launch” w/o premine?
[/quote]It had better, or there’s going to be hell to pay.
[quote]Is it going to be gpu mine-able scrypt?
[/quote]Highly likely. It’s already been announced that it won’t be SHA-256.
[quote]Is there going to be a website where I can track the release?
[/quote]Well here is the guy’s blog: [url=http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/]http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/[/url]
Don’t know where the official announcement is planned. Probablly bitcointalk.org.
To be sure it won’t be this year when it happens. The holiday slowdowns are rapidly approaching. If I had to guess I’d say late January, early February at the soonest.
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[quote name=“Kevlar” post=“34883” timestamp=“1384816896”]
Well here is the guy’s blog: [url=http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/]http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/[/url]
[/quote]Where do I buy shares?
;)
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[quote name=“Kevlar” post=“34879” timestamp=“1384815994”]
The soon-to-be-alt-coin that will implement Zerocoin, name still TBD.
[/quote]Coin of Destiny.
I remember watching Matthew’s video on Zerocoin when we first started discussing it here (back in May/June).
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[url=https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/401797786347114496]https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/401797786347114496[/url]
So, Feathercoin should jump right on this and implement it before [i]Coin of Destiny[/i] does.
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[quote name=“Kirjokansi” post=“34892” timestamp=“1384818812”]
I haven’t paid much attention to the Feathercoin forums until Bitcoin started going up and people started writing memoirs for it. Now that I have, I’ve found your views interesting. Maybe I haven’t read enough backwards, but I can’t figure out why are you so active and spend alot of time explaining yourself if Feathercoin’s got nothing going on for it?I find your thoughts interesting, though. I’m not big on coding, I’m a front ender, a UI-designer, but I’m always interested in the theory of it all.
[size=8pt]Offtopic: Has anyone ever thought of making a voting sytem based on a crypto currency? I’ve been looking at the discussion around it in my country and if something needs to be decentralized, it’s voting. [/size]
[/quote]I didn’t say it’s got nothing going for it. I really like some of the members of the community. I think it has a lot of potential, but it’s largely unrealized. I’m involved in a number of crypto-currency projects, and Feathercoin has one of the nicest, most passionate communities around. Being a part of that energy is addictive and I really enjoy most of the discussions I find myself having here. Most other discussions are technology based and tend to be rather dry, but life is never boring here.
Re: voting. Yep. Tons of work has been done in this realm. CommitCoin comes to mind: [url=http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~clark/papers/2012_fc.pdf]http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~clark/papers/2012_fc.pdf[/url]
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[quote name=“Kevlar” post=“34879” timestamp=“1384815994”]
[quote author=Tuck Fheman link=topic=4440.msg34878#msg34878 date=1384815470]
[quote author=Kevlar link=topic=4440.msg34859#msg34859 date=1384809396]
I’ve been devoting my free time to other crypto-currencies who do have a solid development process in place, and my own coding projects. [b]The recent Zerocoin enhancements were a lot of work and it’s taken this long to get it there.[/b]
[/quote]What coin is this?
[/quote]The soon-to-be-alt-coin that will implement Zerocoin, name still TBD. It’s not just a library any more, they’ve decided to do a reference implementation in their own blockchain. They went this route because, after much debate, it was decided that there wasn’t an existing coin worth implementing it in. Litecoin and Feathercoin was heavily considered, but eventually turned down due to a lack of development leadership; any coin that implements it would need some pretty heavy hand holding moving forward, not to mention a hard fork, and without a dedicated team capable of pulling it off it was decided it was best to just launch our own without all the legacy problems, and if individual developers of alt-coins wanted to they could just do their own implementation by forking their reference implementation.
[/quote]As I have mentioned it earlier, the current implementation of Zerocoin library is alpha quality. Experimental, not tried even on some kind of testnet, so there is a long way to production use. Yes, the concept is interesting and the results may be outstanding if everything is done properly. If they released a reference library with a decent documentation, I could work on getting it implemented in some altcoin. However, they want a coin with a highly skilled dedicated team of coders to integrate their concept. Well, things don’t work this way. If you invent anything and want to get it into production, you have to convince partners and investors first. You build a reference design, write the documentation, do a few demo runs, prepare a business plan or road map. I haven’t seen anything of it. I haven’t seen them coming and discussing a potential partnership in public or in private. It’s been nearly half a year since their annoucement. They change plans and decide to launch a coin of their own. No worries. One more, one less. We have seen many of them already. I hope they realise what they’re getting into. Time flies, competition gets stronger. Old tricks don’t work any more. I wish them good luck though.
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[quote name=“Vonkraut” post=“34870” timestamp=“1384813526”]
Now this is interesting from Warren:[quote]Now that FTC is much discredited and near delisting, I suppose there is no harm in telling more of this story. Hopefully this will help others to avoid losing money to scams in the future.
The Litecoin devs agreed months ago that although we are capable of destroying their network due to their not fixing any security issues in their client, we were not willing to do anything that could be construed as illegal. I’m surprised that nobody else has done so as some of the possible attacks were known to the public and were previously used against the Bitcoin and Litecoin networks. For example, active attacks were the reason for the Bitcoin 0.8.3 emergency security release.
So with dev’s unwillingness to attack, some of the large Litecoin investors and pools came up with a plan to use entirely legal means to destroy FTC’s economy. Roughly 45% of the LTC hashrate under the control of several pool ops were willing to turn their hash power against the FTC network to strip mine and dump on the exchanges at a loss, subsidized by the large LTC investors. We devs were amused by this plan but we were pleased to leave it to the pools to work on. The reference client devs do not work on pool software, and client devs have lots of other higher priorities.
Some of the pools were testing the tech to do this. Then out of nowhere someone else entirely began a series of massive reorg attacks against the FTC network. The hashrate to do it wasn’t coming from the existing LTC pools, so our best guess is it came from GPU farms switching from Bitcoin hoping to manipulate the markets for trading profit. The reorg attacks, and especially the BIG time-travelling attack with the 72 block reorg, made a complete mess of FTC. The pools were then afraid to go forward with the economy draining strip mining plan because the cost would be too high if their blocks were orphaned in another reorg attack.
In the end, it turns out that FTC did a good job of killing itself and didn’t need Litecoin’s help.
The marketing shills, shiny videos and promises of “innovation” were unfortunately effective at attracting suckers to buy their meritless product that they were incapable of defending. It was surprising to me the extent of which they lacked engineering competence, we thought they would copy 0.8.x months ago. In any case, even if they were competent, there is simply no way to defend a copy when you are always a tiny % of the global hashrate capable of being used against your network. This is proven by the repeated, spectacular failures of Terracoin. Their centralized broadcast checkpoints was a final an act of desperation, an act of capitulation and the beginning of the slow death spiral.
I give Feathercoin this offer. Want a working Feathercoin 0.8.5.1 client with all of your innovations integrated and working? I’ll do it for a one-time payment of 100 BTC. You seem to hire help whenever you can’t figure out simple coding issues, so why not hire now? =)[/quote]
[/quote]That guy is so hostile. At least we have ACP without which we would still experience large block reorgs with time travel attacks. Without it we would not be here anymore. I’m glad to have shown a way for small but popular coins to survive. Going forward we need a working alternative or huge hash rate though that is not enough alone in my opinion unless you are Bitcoin. ACP works so an alternative does not need to work out of the box, like PoS does not really work immediately. It is something that builds up its usefulness over time. However 0% PoS does not seem viable to me, no one wants to see their coins disappear for 520 confirms for no return. It may work now but what about in 10 years time, generating PoS blocks with 0% may be simply be avoided. We should not rely on the altruistic nature of future generations.
Kevlar, if you provide any code for Feathercoin I will make sure that you will have all the credit :)
There were changes to key.cpp recently by Sipa in preparation for HD wallets. This change stops ACP and CAlert from working. I’ve looked into this and got a running daemon that throws errors. Sunny kindly took a look but we are still getting errors. I have not spent too much time on it as I am not sure how to progress with this error. I’m very sure that this is easy to the person with the right skills but Warren seems unlikely to help out. Chances are that the problem is a simple one and perhaps you would kindly take a look at the assertion error.
I do what I can do, apologies for not being able to do more :-[
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Sickening to me that they can’t just do their own thing and let the other coins rise or fall on their own. So juvenile to attack like that, and somewhat ironic they are afraid of a little competition.
Yes I didn’t use proper sentence structure. Blow me.
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Well, any technical issues aside, there is one thing I know about successful people.
They do not give a shit about anything else going on around them because there isn’t any need to.
When you start writing long, lengthy diatribes about what you perceive to be your competition, your base needs to start worrying.
Singling out FTC and not making it a general diatribe against [i]every other scrypt-based coin built off that work[/i], warts and all, means something’s scaring him. And there’s no reason for it. There’s nothing that’s been accomplished here with people’s blood, sweat and tears that he could assemble a team to do the exact same or even excel at it.
And that he’s not done that… well. You just have to look back a little further than a decade to see examples of that strategy in play.
He’s ready to bail. OR. He’s got something crazier queued up.
Be weary. Wary? Weary. Sh’up, I should be in bed.
Just the same, remember. Feathercoin? Billy Goats Gruff.
[img]http://akinandgarvey.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/3Billys.jpg[/img]
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[quote name=“Bushstar” post=“34899” timestamp=“1384822573”]
That guy is so hostile. At least we have ACP without which we would still experience large block reorgs with time travel attacks. Without it we would not be here anymore. I’m glad to have shown a way for small but popular coins to survive. Going forward we need a working alternative or huge hash rate though that is not enough alone in my opinion unless you are Bitcoin. ACP works so an alternative does not need to work out of the box, like PoS does not really work immediately. It is something that builds up its usefulness over time. However 0% PoS does not seem viable to me, no one wants to see their coins disappear for 520 confirms for no return. It may work now but what about in 10 years time, generating PoS blocks with 0% may be simply be avoided. We should not rely on the altruistic nature of future generations.Kevlar, if you provide any code for Feathercoin I will make sure that you will have all the credit :)
There were changes to key.cpp recently by Sipa in preparation for HD wallets. This change stops ACP and CAlert from working. I’ve looked into this and got a running daemon that throws errors. Sunny kindly took a look but we are still getting errors. I have not spent too much time on it as I am not sure how to progress with this error. I’m very sure that this is easy to the person with the right skills but Warren seems unlikely to help out. Chances are that the problem is a simple one and perhaps you would kindly take a look at the assertion error.
I do what I can do, apologies for not being able to do more :-[
[/quote]This is the fragile environment I’m talking about. It has nothing to do with complexity. It has everything to do with C++ and filenaming standards and throwing a bunch of classes in one place being retarded. Like back when ASM instructions had to be followed by a goto.
Solution:
Put HD wallet code in a storage/HDwallet folder.
If you need to modify key.cpp for HD wallets, do that in storage/HDwallet/HDwallet_key.cpp.
Then key.cpp and HDwallet_key.cpp should inherit/include common/common_key.hPut ACP code in tools/security/ACP and CAlert in utils/message/CAlert.
This will allow you to get organized.
I’ll take those 100 BTCs now. :) Convert to FTC and send them to my tip jar.
