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Core Bitcoin Devs Leave Project, Create New Currency Called Decred (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Core developers in the Bitcoin project have left and started a new currency called Decred. Developers are citing a lack of transparency and a conflict of interests between the group that funds the actual Bitcoin software development, and the decisions taken inside the project. Jacob Yocom-Piatt, CEO at Company 0, who has funded development of Bitcoin since early 2013: "This is in part due to a lack of mechanisms and pathways for funding development work directly from the community, and as a result Bitcoin development is funded by external entities that create conflicts of interest between the developers and the representative power of the community that uses Bitcoin."
Incredibly misleading title. These devs made a Go alternative implementation of bitcoind. This is danger of taking press release titles at face value.
This is exactly the kind of manipulative nonsense that has been infuriating developers and driving them away from Bitcoin.
"phantomcircuit" is Patrick Strateman, an employee of a company called Blockstream. Blockstream employs many of the developers who work on Bitcoin Core, which is the de-facto standard node implementation, descended from the original code written by Satoshi. When Satoshi left, he handed the project on to a guy named Gavin Andresen.
Gavin later handed on the project again to another guy, and under that guys non-existent leadership (he rarely if ever even posts to his own developer mailing list) the project started making decisions that upset many people, most notably, they decided that the block chain should retain a hard-coded limit on block sizes that was originally put in as a temporary hack, with the result that the block chain is currently full - Bitcoin cannot process any more transactions/second than it presently does and payments have started to break as a result.
So Gavin and myself created a fork of Core called XT to give people and miners the option that Bitcoin Core had decided to refuse them. It is exactly the same software as Core, but with extra patches that cause it to cast a vote for raising the limit. If 75% of blocks vote for the increase, then blocks can get bigger after that point.
Unfortunately, Blockstream and Bitcoin Core developers do not believe the user community should have a choice. So they decided to claim that Bitcoin XT is "not bitcoin" or put another way, any source fork that they disagree with "isn't bitcoin", even if it uses the same block chain, sends the same coins, speaks the same protocol and from the users perspective is indistinguishable from Core. They have decided that more or less any bullshit is acceptable in order to bring about what they want - a project that is theoretically open source, but which cannot actually be forked. These tactics include DDoS attacks on any computer that runs XT and extensive censorship of community forums and websites.
The comment I'm replying to is a classic example of this kind of BS in action. Strateman says he wants to "avoid confusion" and then immediately claims Gavin isn't working on Bitcoin anymore, even though in fact Gavin has only ever worked on Bitcoin and has never worked on an alt coin.
When the Decred guys talk about "governance issues", that's a polite way of saying that people like phantomcircuit and his employers have gone crazy and can't be trusted anymore.
But Gavin has never worked on any alt coin at all. That's my point.
The definition of "alt coin" is literally an alternative coin made by creating a separate block chain. Alt coins have their own transactions, their own network, their own value and their own currency symbol. They may be based on the same code as Bitcoin or might have a different codebase, but they are not the same currency.
Redefining widely used terms is a classic propaganda technique (hence "newspeak" in 1984) and Blockstream/Bitcoin Core guys have become devils for it. Other than trying to define a patchset on top of Bitcoin Core as an "alt coin" because they disagree with it, they've also attempted to redefine the meaning of "SPV wallet" to claim no such things exist, despite the fact that the term has been used for years and the top mobile wallets on both Android and iOS describe themselves as being SPV wallets.