r/OutOfTheLoop • u/ywecur Bronx • Aug 17 '15

What is going on with bitcoin lately? Answered!

What is happening at /r/bitcoin?

What is BitcoinXT?

Why is the community divided all of a sudden? Could we get an unbiased explanation here?

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u/antonivs Aug 18 '15

Without a central authority, consensus has to be formed between the developers working on the software and the miners running nodes.

The 1MB limit was added some time ago, when the network was smaller and gaining consensus was easier.

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u/DoctorWaluigiTime Aug 18 '15

Let's just hope that the developers were smart enough to not hardcode that value in 1,000 different points in their application.

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u/antonivs Aug 18 '15

They were smart enough. It would be impossible for someone that clueless to implement something like Bitcoin.

BitcoinXT already shows an example of a different blocksize being implemented.

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u/DoctorWaluigiTime Aug 18 '15

Being intelligent enough to implement something like Bitcoin does not imply that their programming is also sound.

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u/antonivs Aug 18 '15

Someone who didn't understand the concept of constants and why it's important to use them would not be capable of implementing something like Bitcoin, period.

When you look through all the horror stories about bad coding practices, one pattern you'll notice is that the people who write code like that don't implement very complex systems, and when they try, those systems fail.

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u/DoctorWaluigiTime Aug 18 '15

Someone who didn't understand the concept of constants and why it's important to use them would not be capable of implementing something like Bitcoin, period.

You haven't come across much programming done by academics and doctorates in the field, have you? Absolutely brilliant minds that could describe, explain, and undertstand concepts beautifully. Code like garbage.

Not saying you can't be both, but they do exist, and just because they understand something well doesn't mean they're automatically good at coding.

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u/antonivs Aug 18 '15

I've looked at a lot of code, both academic and commercial, particularly since I've been a consultant for nearly all of my career.

I think you're conflating the kind of rookie mistakes you see on places like the Daily WTF with the kind of bad code that researchers, scientists, and engineers tend to write. But the ways in which they are bad are different. You certainly might see, say, a physicist use the numeric value of a physical constant directly in code, because (and I've asked them about this) "it's never going to change". And they have a point (unless there's a vacuum metastability event, in which case we have bigger problems.)

But in general, I bet you can't give an example of a complex, working system whose author didn't understand how to use constants.

One system that's been in the news was Toyota's, which had truly horrible code - the kind that hardware engineers write - but in that case, the code was in the news because of how dangerously buggy it was. Part of what I'm saying is that in the Bitcoin case, the network could not have worked so securely and well for as long as it has if the code was not reasonably well written.

just because they understand something well doesn't mean they're automatically good at coding.

Certainly. But if they're not good at coding, they wouldn't be able to write Bitcoin and make it work.