[Pkg-bitcoin-devel] Groestlcoin

[Micha Bailey]

A. BitTorrent is a much more mature protocol, implemented by many pieces of
software. Cryptocurrencies are much less stable, and as far as I know the
vast majority (if not every one) only have one significant full node
implementation.
B. The repercussions of a critical bug in a BitTorrent client are temporary
inconvenience until you download something else. The repercussions of a
critical bug - or even an unimplemented soft-forking change, such as will
be rolled out on the Bitcoin network in the coming months - in a
cryptocurrency node may be loss of users' money.
C. Distributed consensus systems, such as cryptocurrencies, are not nearly
as tolerant of bugs and mismatches. All software must be fully bug-for-bug
compatible, otherwise the network will diverge as soon as a mismatch is
triggered and the result will be a fork. If only a few Debian users exist,
they will be cut off from the network in the best case scenario and suffer
financial loss in the worst; if there are many, this will have
repercussions on the entire network.

On Friday, April 8, 2016, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:

> Quoting Micha Bailey (2016-04-08 12:45:04)
> > What are you saying, then?
>
> You already quoted what I am saying:
>
> >>> On Thursday, April 7, 2016, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk
> <javascript:;>> wrote:
> >>>> Only if Groestlcoin makes as disruptive changes to their protocol as
> >>>> Bitcoin did in 2013 will stable release of Groestcoin be problematic.
>
>
> > Unless you're confident that there won't be any changes on the network
> > that mandate upgrades of the software (including urgent hard forks
> > caused by bugs), releasing a cryptocurrency node into a stable release
> > where it can't be modified/updated seems irresponsible to me. I'd be
> > glad to hear counterarguments, but so far I haven't seen anything to
> > suggest that this isn't true.
>
> That argument applies to any network-related software.  Or arguably only
> any P2P-related software.  To paraphrase what I wrote earlier: Only if
> deluge makes disruptive changes to the bittorrent protocol will stable
> release of deluge be problematic.
>
>
>  - Jonas
>
> --
>  * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
>  * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/
>
>  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
>
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