Mr. Hearn, very sorry to read this article. I couldn’t disagree more with your entire perspective and I’d really like to know how it is that our interpretations diverged so completely.

My primary concern is existential risk — that some bug/attack causes BTC to be lost/censored (ending the Bitcoin project). Yes, we should aim for maximizing user-experience and minimizing costs, conditional on Bitcoin existing. I’m happiest knowing that Bitcoin held up under the years of SilkRoad, when powerful people were actively attempting to break it down (a perspective originally voiced by Gavin).

With my priority in mind, perhaps you can help me follow you from the “forwards compatibility” point to the “entire purpose of running a node” point. Forwards compatibility, being a filtration of what was (and NOT an addition of anything new), preserves the cumulative stability of the Bitcoin software, because it only shrinks Bitcoin’s phase space. In contrast, a hard fork makes new states possible. With soft forks, each change can be ignored, but with hard forks, each change must be re-compared against all of the lines of code with which it interacts, and all possible new (nonlinear, chaotic) software-states must be re-compared to the nearly-infinite variety of practical circumstances under which the Bitcoin service might be interrupted. My understanding was that there was a 100% consensus that this kind of Research Capacity is possessed by no one (see SilkRoad comment, supra).

Let me provide an analogy to illustrate my concern: my first born child lives on a giant chessboard. I know that certain spaces of the chessboard have deadly land mines, and have banned my child from traveling there. We also find it more fun to impose other rules on certain spaces, like a ‘soccer field space’ where a certain type of ball cannot be touched with hands, or a ‘library space’ where no one can make noise. …then you wander in and tell me that my policy of never visiting a banned space is a bad one because “the auditors … can arrive at the wrong answer”. I don’t really care about “answers” (if such things exist), or if they are “wrong” according to Some Guy.

I’m not saying that we should never ever try to visit those banned spaces, but a 90%+ consensus does sound reasonable to me (as does creeping out from those spaces very slowly).

-Paul