[Bitcoin-development] On Rewriting Bitcoin (was Re: [Libbitcoin] Satoshi client: is a fork past 0.10 possible?)

[Peter Todd]

On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 11:04:49AM -0800, Adam Back wrote:
> Strongly with Peter on this.  That its highly complex to maintain strict
> consensus between bitcoin versions, does not justify consensus rewrite
> experiments; it tells you that the risk is exponentially worse and people
> should use and rally around libconsensus.

It's worth remembering that one of the goals in writing - or to be more
precise, separating - libconsensus from the Bitcoin Core codebase is to
make it easier to maintain strict consensus between Bitcoin Core
versions.

> I would advise any bitcoin ecosystem part, wallet, user to not use software
> with consensus protocol rw-writes nor variants, you WILL lose money.
> 
> You could view bitcoin as a digital signature algorithm speculatively
> tinkering with the algo is highly prone to binary failure mode and
> unbounded funds loss.
> 
> Want to be clear this is not a political nor emotive issue. It is a
> critical technical requirement for security if users of software people
> write.

The necessity of it isn't a political or emotive issue, but the
consequences are definitely political. Just not in the way that most of
the ecosystem appears to think.

-- 
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
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