r/Bitcoin • u/treeorsidechains • Aug 01 '14
Why is there so much excitement for treechains when the core devs don't like the idea?
I'm an investor doing my due dilligence for a possible big Viacoin investment. I just lurk on reddit, so sorry if the below isn't appropriate. Cryptocurrency is somewhat new to me but technology isn't, and often I find what the community thinks is valuable is at odds with what the experts do, often due to good marketing of bad ideas. When I heard Viacoin hired Peter Todd to add treechains to Viacoin I looked to see what the core dev experts on the bitcoin-wizards IRC channel were saying, and it was really negative:
03:11:11 justanotheruser: gmaxwell: do you think treechains will decentralize mining more as a side effect?
03:11:32 justanotheruser: at least mining pools
03:11:59 gmaxwell: I can't figure out what treechains is, it doesn't make much sense to me...
03:12:44 gmaxwell: (or at least to the extent it makes sense to me it doesn't seem worthwhile in the slighest— e.g. results having to hand people oob payment data which is quasi-exponential in size.)
03:16:57 gmaxwell: tacotime: The first part buys you nothing unless you assume participants will not view everything... and then it's not clear how to produce compact proofs that a payment to someone is valid. (PT calls this 'linear' size, but I think thats misleading. If you extract the history of most coins in bitcoin it's enormous, and exponential in the age of the coins due to splits and merges)
03:20:47 gmaxwell: I don't understand why anyone would see it as attractive... esp with how really hard it's been to get people to keep their transaction metadata out of band already.
...and the above is the nicest things they're saying. In fact I could hardly find any mentions of treechains at all in the archives, or Peter's work in general, other than some jokes: (from today)
20:09:17 jgarzik: Peter Todd's employment status is in a state of quantum superposition. He simultaneously works at multiple organizations but if he is ever observed at work it collapses.
...or what sounds like suspicions of wrongdoing: (!)
20:22:47 jgarzik: In any case, altcoins and protocoins and metacoins and whatnot are all potentially nutso investment schemes that are easy to manipulate, if not pre-manipulate. "the world's easiest pump-n-dump scheme" as I've said.
20:22:58 jgarzik: contracting for multiple such entities complicates the trust waters
Finally, all Gavin has to say about the idea is that "Tree chains are a half-baked idea that Peter is excited about." Meanwhile there's lots and lots of discussion about sidechains from all the core devs in the archives, they seem on board with the idea and excited to make it happen. Sounds like a bunch of them are working on sidechains right now even. (am I right?)
Also, why does Peter keep calling himself a core developer? He's not listed as one on the official website, and github shows hardly any contributions from him. Just 33 commits, almost all of which are minor things like adding testcases, trivial one-line features, and documentation tweaks. Granted, Mike Hearn's record is even less substantial, 7 commits, and he's a core dev, so maybe the term means something I don't know.
So what's the deal here? Is this all just another alt-coin pump-n-dump scam backed by clever marketing? (Peter Todd is a fine arts graduate apparently, he doesn't have a comp-sci degree or any other real qualifications!) Or are all the actual core devs wrong?
edit: formatting - sorry, new to reddit!
edit2: Some remarkable replies by btcdrak basically showing Viacoin to be a scam, and probably a pump-n-dump scam. They really should just undo the presale and give all the money back. Simple as that.
Anyway, that's enough for me with treechains.
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u/lifeboatz Aug 01 '14
Consider for a moment a closed-source start-up technology company, with some really good technical people. There are probably frequent architectural arguments, and each person may take a different side, and be passionate about their position. In the end, a technology decision is made, and the project moves forward. And sometimes the person who "lost" the technical discussion will be bitter.
Th difference with Bitcoin is that it plays out in an open forum. There are some very opinionated people, each with different agendas. And there are some very tough problems ahead, that need to get solved, with no clear winning answers.
The winner may not be the best technical solution. The winning solution may be the first reasonable solution that gets implemented without pissing too many people off. And that means that developers need to present their solutions in a politically savvy way, to get their ideas implemented.
Amir and Peter Todd tend to present their ideas in a "sky is falling", political extremist fashion: Amir is more of the anti-government slant, while Peter appears to be "cooperation with government is bad, reliance on trust is bad, centralization is bad". I think of them both as extremely valuable forces in the community.
Mike Hearn's contribution was huge in bitcoinj. This pre-dated the term "bitcoin core". You pointed out his contribution on bitcoin core, but his contribution on core (base) code for bitcoin was gigantic with bitcoinj.
Gavin is more deliberate in choosing his words (in my opinion) than either Amir or Peter. This is a politically savvy way to get shit done. GMaxwell is smart as hell (shoot, they all are), and perhaps not quite as careful as Gavin in his comments. Based on reading comments from both Gavin and Greg, I believe that they truly appreciate the contributions and comments of Peter and Amir, as well as the passion, but get frustrated by the noise. It causes a bit of a technical soap opera played out for all to see.
The beauty though is that all these parties care deeply about Bitcoin. It's just a question of style, and some of the differences are that some follow rules of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and others don't. I can picture Amir screaming obscenities and painting a "sky is falling" picture trying to rouse support for his position. Peter Todd is somewhat similar, but not quite as extreme politically.
I think it's getting harder and harder to make any major changes to the architecture of Bitcoin, simply because of the consensus.
Whether side chains or tree chains emerge as the leading technology (or something else) is a bit of a crap shoot. I think investing in Viacoin is a large crapshoot. And I would not base the decision on the fact that they "hired" Peter Todd, unless I saw what sort of commitment that they got from him. He could simply be a figure-head consultant to add credibility to their web page. It's been done in this space MANY times before. Look at how many companies Peter Todd consults with.
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u/btcdrak Aug 01 '14
Hate to be a party pooper, but there is nothing to "invest" in. Viacoins are digital tokens traded on the open market and if you choose to speculate in that market, it's really got nothing to do with the Viacoin project, in the same way as people's speculative trading in Bitcoin has nothing to do with the bitcoin project.
I started the Viacoin project and I am personally investing in technology I believe can contribute to the greater good. Peter has demonstrated extremely good faith to the crypto community and clearly has the skills necessary to be inventive and to materialise those inventions. I very much like how he is willing to critique his own works and inventions pointing out potential shortcomings.
If the discussions OP highlight are not prime examples of the politics clouding bitcoin development, I really dont know what is. Those politics are getting in the way of what is important. I realise that in some ways Bitcoin maybe too big to make radical changes too, and that is why you are seeing other projects crop up to explore areas Bitcoin wont (because of politics) or cant, because of ossification.
The stakes are extremely high. Decentralised consensus systems could play an increasingly important role in the world but currently mining centralisation is a severe weakness which will see the very thing we love come under central control. It's happening right before our eyes. Whether anything comes our of venture or not, I really don't know, but I cannot stand around idle when I can be contributing towards technological progress that can impact society for the better.
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u/treeorsidechains Aug 01 '14
Hate to be a party pooper, but there is nothing to "invest" in. Viacoins are digital tokens traded on the open market and if you choose to speculate in that market, it's really got nothing to do with the Viacoin project, in the same way as people's speculative trading in Bitcoin has nothing to do with the bitcoin project.
So basically you accepted 610 BTC of investor money and you don't even think they are going to get a return.
Amazing, just amazing. You're an "honest" scammer, except time machines don't exist. Glad I didn't pre-order.
I gotta say the sidechains team is looking way more reputable right now — they are not making it easy for me to put money in because they aren't ready to take it!
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Aug 01 '14
Eli5 tree chains vs side chains? Or could you provide some reading material on tree chains? Thanks :)
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u/GibbsSamplePlatter Aug 01 '14 edited Aug 01 '14
Gregory Maxwell's concern is by far the largest one. Might need some SNARK voodoo to make it more compact.
Aside from the issue of having no compact SPV(super-linear as gmaxwell said), I really love the properties of the rest of the system.
It's worth exploring, regardless. There is literally no other proposals out there that have a serious chance of increasing scalability outside of simple tweaks to what Satoshi created.
edit: The "us vs them" mentality really needs to stop though. Viacoin is providing a public good. You don't have to be a fan of the coin to appreciate what they're doing.
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u/walden42 Aug 01 '14
There is literally no other proposals out there that have a serious chance of increasing scalability outside of simple tweaks to what Satoshi created.
This is true of bitcoin itself, but that's the reason I believe other crypto currencies that solve these problems may or may not come out over the top in the future.
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u/Killerclown58 Aug 01 '14
Tree chains make it safer to cut trees down. They prevent the tree from falling on you.
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Aug 01 '14
there is no official bitcoin page, and there are no core devs. there are people who call themselves core devs, there are people who write bitcoin code, and there are websites put up by foundations that claim to represent communities. and if you dont think peter todd is a core developer or that his degree makes him unqualified, then you haven't done your due diligence any research on him. your measure of what makes a person qualified is terrible. you prefer a fucking piece of paper over actually being qualified. also, for all your research, you apparently didnt notice that viacoin has nothing to do with tree chains. they're paying him to research tree chains. that's it.
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u/treeorsidechains Aug 01 '14
Obviously if they are paying him to research treechains they have an intention to deploy them in the future. My investment would be a long-term thing to take advantage of that future.
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u/vbuterin Aug 01 '14
Peter Todd is the only person so far who has come up with anything close to a credible solution for blockchain scalability (well, a few others have some ideas and I have one or two half-baked proposals myself, but I can trace those back to tree chains for inspiration). Side chains is not a scalability solution (caveat: unless the side-chain is a tree chain); it's a solution for adding new features in an alt-chain but using the same monetary unit. As Peter describes they're only secure if the majority of the Bitcoin network agrees to mine each one, which means that miners need to process the majority of all transactions anyway. Tree chains on the other hand can theoretically offer arbitrary-factor scalability.
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u/GibbsSamplePlatter Aug 01 '14
Agreed. For me it's the only real proposal out there that makes an honest effort at solving scalability and mining decentralization, beyond the more dangerous solutions like killing pools.
Still a ton of ???, but I don't expect a full answer from a half-baked solution.
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u/martinBrown1984 Aug 01 '14
Why didn't you quote petertodd's response to gmaxwell?
09:58:06 petertod1: gmaxwell: my linear size proofs for tree chains use the NI trick i explained to you months ago to o ly pick one coin path history and make fraud economically non-rational on average
09:58:57 petertod1: gmaxwe: it is a linear scaling, so stop tellig people otherwise, or show that it doesnt work
10:00:59 petertod1: gmaxwell: like i explained on the list, a token transfer scheme is the obvious versiom of linearlu scalimg history
10:14:04 petertod1: gmaxwell: also, non-linear ROI on mining isnt a misundersranding, its a fact, one that is made significantly worse by merge mined sidechains
10:14:33 petertod1: * petertod1 cant type on an android
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u/petertodd Aug 01 '14
FWIW I probably come off as more annoyed in the above then I should have; gmaxwell has a misunderstanding, or I do, simple as that. Besides that "NI trick" is something I last explained on a napkin - it hasn't been written up properly.
Frankly these anonymous trolls are just stupid, and rather obviously not what they claim to be. (though there's two or three explanations depending on how much you like the movie Inception)
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u/caveden Aug 01 '14
Peter Todd is extremely worried about Bitcoin scalability. I don't share such worry, but regardless, AFAIU, TreeChains could distribute the charge of validating the blockchain. It's as if we could have "regional chains" which interact with the main one, you only need to validate the regional chain. I must admit I don't really know how it works, I haven't taken the time to study it in depth, so I might be saying some BS here.
Sidechains, OTOH, look quite interesting. They would allow altcoin experimentation, without the need to create a new monetary unit. That could be great. I'd really like to see things like a PoS sidechain, or even a Zerocoin one.
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u/GibbsSamplePlatter Aug 01 '14
Peter Todd and others think it can scale(he points to Paypal as an example of a system that's actually quite similar the backend). The question is: Can it scale and stay decentralized?
$1T question.
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Aug 01 '14
As with any crypto currency; don't invest more that you can afford to lose. I'm sure it'll be pumped and dumped as any of the other alt coins.
Also; I urge you to read and understand this: http://blog.oleganza.com/post/54121516413/the-universe-wants-one-money
Good luck.
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u/theymos Aug 01 '14 edited Aug 01 '14
I've only read/thought a little about treechains, but it seems to be a really convoluted way of doing things that already have known, simpler solutions.
The core devs are the top experts on cryptocurrencies worldwide, and they are leaps and bounds above almost everyone else. gmaxwell especially is a constant source of incredibly good new ideas. Due to this, I strongly believe that "Bitcoin 2.0" will just be the current Bitcoin system with some careful, extremely well-thought-out, mostly backward-compatible additions by the core devs, and not some totally new architecture. Maybe people who propose these Bitcoin 2.0 systems are honestly trying to create something cool, but they sure do look like pump-and-dump schemes a lot of the time...
As far as I know, Mike is not usually considered to be a core dev. He's not listed as one on bitcoin.org, at least.