Mike Hearn: A Bitcoin Believer’s Crisis of Faith

[BitcoinXio]

A new article by the NY Times featuring Mike Hearn, talking about the block size debate, Greg Maxwell, Gavin, and everything that is going on with bitcoin right now. Sadly, Hearn has sold all his coins (according to the article) and has left bitcoin.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/busin ... ve-up.html

Hearn also penned his own personal post on Medium from his own words, which you can read here:

https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-reso ... .gxr925zgt

[rogerver]

This is really heart breaking and frustrating.

[kingscrown]

Yeah i wonder if he really sold ALL bitcoins or left few.

Een with all this mess, even if BTC splits into lets say 2-3 ones.. Still good to have 2-3 ones then

[nakedbitcoins]

This is really heart breaking and frustrating.

I think it would be unrealistic to think that every Bitcoin dev. would stick around. It was bound to happen at some point ,but it is still sad.

[bitkilo]

Quote from Mike Hearn's medium article

Allowed buyers to take back payments they’d made after walking out of shops, by simply pressing a button (if you aren’t aware of this “feature” that’s because Bitcoin was only just changed to allow it)

Can anyone tell me what this relates to or link me to where this is explained?

[bitkilo]

In Mike Hearn's article he says:

The resulting civil war has seen Coinbase — the largest and best known Bitcoin startup in the USA — be erased from the official Bitcoin website for picking the “wrong” side and banned from the community forums.

Is there anyway we are maybe able to capitalise on this by promoting forum.bitcoin.com as the forum when any bitcoin related discussions are encouraged to take place and also allowing any Coinbase discussions if they are being censored on other bitcoin forums.

[freedomno1]

Quote from Mike Hearn's medium article

Allowed buyers to take back payments they’d made after walking out of shops, by simply pressing a button (if you aren’t aware of this “feature” that’s because Bitcoin was only just changed to allow it)

Can anyone tell me what this relates to or link me to where this is explained?

He explains what he means further down in his post, it's about replace-by-fee.
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questi ... ace-by-fee

It's a method that allows replacing an already transmitted transaction by transmitting another transaction with a higher fee. This only works on transactions before they are signed by miners (0-confirmations).

More info nothing like Dev Conflict to wake you up from napping
https://medium.com/@octskyward/replace- ... .d0qiz8h6z
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/3 ... al_on_the/

Decent convo
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4 ... o_gave_up/

In Mike Hearn's article he says:

The resulting civil war has seen Coinbase — the largest and best known Bitcoin startup in the USA — be erased from the official Bitcoin website for picking the “wrong” side and banned from the community forums.

Is there anyway we are maybe able to capitalise on this by promoting forum.bitcoin.com as the forum when any bitcoin related discussions are encouraged to take place and also allowing any Coinbase discussions if they are being censored on other bitcoin forums.

I would like that myself the noise is pretty strong and clear minds and heads will prevail if we can get real discussions going or someone with a bit more knowledge of all the sides develops a FAQ that the community can agree with to get informed.

[bitkilo]

Wasn't transmitting another transaction with a higher fee always possible and just called a attempted double spend?

What he said sounded more to me like reversing transaction after sent.
Is this.not what it is his talking about?
I must read the article again, I got a bit distracted towards the end

[freedomno1]

Wasn't transmitting another transaction with a higher fee always possible and just called a attempted double spend?

What he said sounded more to me like reversing transaction after sent.
Is this.not what it is his talking about?
I must read the article again, I got a bit distracted towards the end

Ofir wrote on Rbf made the most sense to me.
https://99bitcoins.com/conspiracy-again ... hed-earth/

Let’s try an example.

Let’s assume Bob wants to cancel a transaction of one mBTC he sent to Alice, but Alice wants to ensure the transaction goes through. Originally Bob didn’t even add a fee and Alice’s wallet realizes this so it automatically uses CPFP and adds double the fee (0.2 mBTC fee, assuming the standard fee is 0.1 mBTC).

When the miners see this second transaction, they will want to include the original transaction because it’s the only way to get the double fee. Bob wants to cancel this , so he uses RBF and creates a new conflicting transaction which sends the original one mBTC back to him, except with a 0.3 mBTC fee. Since fees are taken out of the total Alice is actually willing to compromise and get only 0.8 mBTC and pay 0.2 mBTC to the miners, while Bob is willing to get only 0.7 mBTC (with 0.3 mBTC used as fees).

A miner who is looking at this will see one set of transactions that will net him 0.2 mBTC in fees, and another transaction that will net him 0.3 mBTC in fees, and will probably want to confirm Bob’s transaction. Alice knows this and creates a new CPFP transaction with a higher fee of 0.4 mBTC. After all, it’s better to get the leftover 0.6 mBTC than to get nothing. Bob goes ahead and raises his RBF to 0.5 mBTC. As you can imagine this will continue until Bob offers 0.9 mBTC in fees, while getting back only 0.1 mBTC. Alice, now extremely furious, will offer a new transaction with no leftover and the full one mBTC as fees for the miners just to spite Bob.

This whole fee race has caused Alice and Bob to burn through all the money and use it as fees until no change was left. Everyone acted rationally and expectedly. Who wins? The miner, who got the entire transaction as a fee instead of the small standard fee. And here we get to what has been called the “Scorched Earth” of zero-confirmation transactions.

Well, it is for this reason and others that unconfirmed transactions are not considered safe, especially as compared with transactions that have many confirmations. Although this isn’t the reality today, all this is valid and legitimate according to the protocol and does not require anything to happen, except that miners start acting more “rationally” and prioritize profits.

Other articles
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/commen ... t_it_make/
https://medium.com/@octskyward/replace- ... .urmcakz12

RBF to me looks like a mining race over a double spend, effectively a miner would not know the difference between them but prioritizes whichever one has the highest transaction fee, it seems also like a way to resolve congested traffic by opening a premium lane on the highway aka non standard tx if its busy and making it the new mandatory lane, and perhaps as a consequence adding fees can mess with the chronological order of transactions at 0 confirms since resending with higher fees is basically a double spend and can lead to other issues as the 99bitcoins and Hearn point out.
(Still a bit lost myself so feel free to correct me if I was off somewhere.)

In my opinion why not just use Push tx instead if the Tx is stuck rebroadcasting does the same thing; instead of creating a miner gets more fees because its stuck at 0 conf scenario.

Looking at it from another POV though this provides an added incentive to off-chain transactions and services to avoid traffic in Bitcoin just like inputs.io used to.

(Ah the time machine)

"Inputs.io Enables Anyone To Send Bitcoin Instantly And Securely"
It's easy and free
We made Bitcoin easy while powerful.
Get your secure wallet in 30 seconds.

Instant payments
Bitcoin transactions take a hour to confirm.
Inputs.io makes it instant with no fees.

Security + privacy
The most secure wallet ever created.
Automatic free mixing for your privacy.

(Until it is not)
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Inputs.io
Inputs.io was a free Bitcoin web wallet that leveraged its own off chain payment network. Inputs implemented numerous security measures, and featured instant, fee-less offchain confirmations with an easy to implement developer API.

Inputs.io is no longer operational as November 7th, 2013. 4100 BTC was stolen from Inputs due to a compromise of the server hosting account.

--
That aside it is sad seeing a Core Dev go but hopefully we move forward and do not break under pressure
--

[bitkilo]

All this Alice and Bob back and forth would have to be done in quick succession, some miner is bound to pick up one tx and confirm it before this got to total fee transaction.

I thought just Pushtx as well but the miners would still chose the transaction with the higher fee if not done quick enough.

I wasn't fully aware of how RBF transactions worked until i just had a quick read.
I didn't know that this would cause the orginal transaction to be returned to the wallet.

Does Todd's proposal of a undo button require that the replacement transaction have the same spend amount only with a higher fee for the 2nd transaction?
Or is he proposing a simple undo button where as a user would just have to enter a fee to recover the 1st transaction?

[Mike Cautillo]

Is Mike Hearn a part of R3 in any capacity??

[jdlutz1965]

The price of Bitcoin is taking a hit as many are now seeing the vulnerable position that Bitcoin has with a lack of clear leadership and potential for mayhem.

Sent from my XT1575 using Tapatalk

[LiteCoinGuy]

if anyone if changing his mind because of an ex google employee who wrote some code for bitcoin, he should leave bitcoin too

bitcoin gives a fuck about Mike, Gavin, Maxwell or any other dev (i respect all by the way!)
there are hunderds of other devs in the world who will take their place. bitcoin will not fail. bitcoin will laugh.

[BitcoinXio]

This is really heart breaking and frustrating.

Yes I feel the same. I know many don't see eye to eye with Hearn's motives or view points generally speaking, but many agreed with him on the block size debate, and his final post although disappointing that he is leaving bitcoin and has lost faith, nails many points right on the head. The bitcoin network is at a standstill, and isn't going to progress anywhere until we get past the block size. It's unbelievable that we have an entire community that wants an increase but yet a small group of core devs that don't.

Roger, what do you suggest? Any ideas? Obviously we can all continue to rally behind different bitcoin implementations, but so far nothing is working. There is lots of talk about now Bitcoin Classic. How can we make this the go-to solution? I think the community is looking for leaders in the space to help take charge. People like you, Coinbase, Blockchain, BitPay, Gavin, etc, the list goes on and on. If you all come together, maybe something extraordinary can happen?

We need another one of these types of posts: https://blog.blockchain.com/2015/08/24/ ... nd-bip101/

But with some actual action behind it, deadlines, and action items that can be held to. No more talk.

[iFixBTCmemoryIssues]

A new article by the NY Times featuring Mike Hearn, talking about the block size debate, Greg Maxwell, Gavin, and everything that is going on with bitcoin right now. Sadly, Hearn has sold all his coins (according to the article) and has left bitcoin.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/busin ... ve-up.html

Hearn also penned his own personal post on Medium from his own words, which you can read here:

https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-reso ... .gxr925zgt

True failure only happens when you abandon your quest, good he is gone - obviously he was not strong enough to endure the downsides of business through computers, sucker!

As they say, "man up and grow some balls"

[TsonicTsunami]

Is Mike Hearn a part of R3 in any capacity??

BINGO, open source Bitcoin is a failure so let me go over here and work for a centrally controlled garden wall blockchain, R3. R3's mission will be to patent the technology and outlaw others from using it through regulation. Mike Hearn is where he belongs, haven't seen this much drama since Doggie coin guy quit.
In other news,performed a few transactions today and the network is humming along fine. You can add this to the " Bitcoin is Dead" obituary page.

[Odinson]

"For a community that has always worried about the block chain being taken over by an oppressive government, it is a rich irony."

This is neither irony or coincidence. Blocking blockchain growth via censorship and coercion is how enemies of bitcoin have chosen to attack it. Lots of loosers will (and have) taken the 'safe' path and end up on the wrong side of the glass. I do appreciate Mike Hearn for saying it even if it's not especially true.

Linus is part programmer and part sociologist. That's his leadership role, even if he can't articulate that. Forgiveness of cruelty is divine, forgetting is stupidity.

To Gavin: A cipher pool eliminating specialized mining hardware is needed to split up the Miners IMO. The 50% miner problem will be the next attack vector IMO. It's going to get ugly and messy, and then the tide will go out.

Bitcoin has already won, because open source has already won. Forking is a human right. As demonstrated by the Christian reformation + Gutenberg opening the renaissance. Everything else is all high drama. It's just money. Currency derives from society.

[nandibear]

I read the nytimes article before I discovered this forum. However, I wasn't aware of the Medium article (pub. Jan 14 2016).

I've now read the Medium article and at paragraph 3, sentence 1 the following statement is made by Mike Hearn, But despite knowing that Bitcoin could fail all along...

If that's true then why did Hearn invested the last 5 years of life in Bitcoin? I’ve spent more than 5 years being a Bitcoin developer.

Moreover, why did he quit Google to work full time on Bitcoin? His [Gavin Andresen] reliable technical judgement is one of the reasons I had the confidence to quit Google (where I had spent nearly 8 years) and work on Bitcoin full time.

[nandibear]

My mistake, I misread his statement (for some reason I sometimes skip words when reading and also when writing).

After looking over my first comment again I see now that Hearn said, could fail and not would fail.

That makes much more sense. I apologize for my previous comment.