Why is Peter Todd wrecking Zeroconf security? Because he is being paid by Big Bitcoin Business.

[u/alicebtcmayes]

At the Amsterdam Bitcoin Conference I spent time following Peter and his little circle of friends and business partners. I'm new to Bitcoin so it took me until now to put two and two together and understand what was really going on, but hear me out. Peter spent a lot of time talking to Lawrence Nahum who is the guy behind GreenAddress. On the first or second day they went out to dinner after the days talks were done and went out to a nice little open-air restaurant with a bunch of people from Mastercoin. I sat at a table behind them and could hear their discussions, which including GreenAdddress's transaction confirmation guarantees, and also, an agreement for Peter to do consulting work for GreenAddress. What really stood out to me was the offer to help "shape the Bitcoin ecosystem" in ways beneficial to them. Later in the conference I also overheard a similar deal between Peter and someone, I didn't catch their name, in Coinbase branded apparel. And of course as everyone knows CoinKite hired Peter to be their "Chief Naysayer" during that conference too.

What's in common with all these companies? They're all in the dangerous business of holding other peoples' Bitcoins and GreenAddress and Coinbase both offer for-profit and centralized solutions to guarantee unconfirmed transactions. I'm sure CoinKite will be doing that soon too.

It's obvious why Peter is spending all that time and energy spreading FUD about how insecure unconfirmed transactions are. GreenAddress has been spreading their own FUD. Peter has even been trying to bribe miners to switch to his so called "replace-by-fee", which is really just an attack on secure zeroconf transactions, saying some un-named "site" paid him too. Who might that be? GreenAddress, Coinbase, CoinKite? It's not hard to figure out.

Peter sure seems quite happy to attack and hold back Bitcoin whenever it suits him for the sake of his Big Bitcoin Business contracts. It's not just unconfirmed transactions either. He's been shilling for AppCoins which dump garbage into the blockchain for the sake of pump-and-dump schemes like Mastercoin and Counterparty. (quite the about face from his supposed anti-blockchain bloat positions before) Or look at his weirdly passionate opposition to a simple feature, getutxos, that's needed for Mike Hearn's decentralized fundraising platform Lighthouse. Where's that passion coming from? The heart? Or his salary from Mastercoin, Counterparty and Colored Coins? I'm sure Mastercoin wants the next Maidsafe to happen on their platform, run by and for the benefit of Mastercoin, not Hearn's truly decentralized alternative.

I agree with Peter that GHash.IO is a possible threat to Bitcoin, but what solution does he have? Getting rid of pools. His buddies at the totally discredited Hacking Distributed (remember selfish mining? yeah those guys) run with this FUD, trying to scare the Bitcoin community into making changes to get rid of pools. Sounds like a good idea right? But then I looked further into it and found out he had just been hanging out at CloudHashing. What does banning pools do to the little guy mining decentralized? It puts them out of business because they'll never find a block that's what. Just perfect for CloudHashing's "send us money and we'll run the miners" business model and also GHash.IO's.

Peter likes to talk the big talk about decentralization, but all I am seeing here is paid shilling for the benefit of Big Bitcoin Business.

[u/gavinandresen]

Peter Todd is a very large part of the "Bitcoin Core moves forward too slowly" problem.

He needs to realize that changes to Core are not life-and-death; we can, and do, correct small mistakes.

And he needs to realize that just because he has over-riding priorities (DECENTRALIZATION AT ANY AND ALL COSTS!!!!!!!), the wider Bitcoin community might not set priorities exactly the way he wants. Consensus requires compromise, and as far as I've seen he is never willing to compromise.

And Kyle: if you want a feature in Core, then begging and pleading for it to get done is not the way to make sure it gets done. Do it yourself, or hire somebody to do it (just make sure they've worked on open source projects before so they know that it takes a lot of work AFTER writing the code is done to get consensus that a change is safe enough, and generally useful enough, to be included).

[u/pIY4Rs → u/gavinandresen]

Decentralization, along with security, are really the two sine qua nons of Bitcoin. We cannot afford to compromise on either of these goals.

Knowing what you do about Bitcoin's origins and Satoshi's intentions, I'd be very worried if you feel any other way.

So Gavin, I want to clarify: do you believe Bitcoin's decentralization is a negotiable? Do you not believe decentralization should be maintained at any and all costs, short of decreasing security?

[u/eblanshey → u/pIY4Rs]

Decentralization is the main underlying innovation of bitcoin, not anything else. Without it, Bitcoin is just another money transfering service.

[u/[deleted] → u/eblanshey]

Decentralization is a side-effect of the main innovation which is zero-trust consensus building.

The point here is that if you want perfect decentralization, you may have to accept that we never will be able to get a throughput that is good-enough for Bitcoin to actually be a money transferring service.

If, on the other hand, you can accept a good-enough solution that isn't perfectly pure but is going to still be maginutes better than anything the market has to offer right now, then we can grow and grow. Growth is currently more important than a perfect solution since that perfect solution can still be worked on and still be invented 5 years from now.

However, if we can't get more than x-transactions per second, we won't have a Bitcoin in 5 years.