Sorry, I am not sure Bitcoin can be a niche currency. It needs to be big enough to survive.
If most people prefer to use other crypto instead then Bitcoin may fall into a death spiral:
...lower the demand for bitcoins -> lower the price of bitcoin AND lower amount of bitcoin transactions -> less profitable the mining -> less secure the network -> lower the demand for bitcoins....
True, but we are not there yet. Bitcoin can probably scale 20x times without a problem. That would be 20 times lower transaction fees and 20 times more people using it.
Most large blockers are running businesses that depend on no/low fees, plus the reddit mob that goes with whatever argument sounds most conspiratorial (aka Blockstream sabotaging Bitcoin for sidechains).
Thanks for the article. But I don't see where it says that Bitcoin can't scale 20x without decentralization problems.
I see that "the block size should not exceed 4MB for X=90%; and 38MB for X=50%", but I don't think that 50% reduction of number of nodes would be a serious decentralization problem (we've seen a similar reduction already due to the implementation of SPV clients).
Mining centralization could be a bigger problem, but with headers-first mining the block size wouldn't contribute to it.
Also the authors of the article assume the use of Bitcoin’s current peer-to-peer overlay network, that can be drastically optimized.
I've chosen 20x because Gavin had conducted 20Mb tests more than a year ago, before many optimizations took place.
There is nothing bad in the low fees. Low fees is the marketing strategy to boost the usage of Bitcoin and create the large enough ecosystem. Miners are being subsidised by bitcoin holders for a reason.
Larger the blocks while preserving a reasonable degree of decentralization -> lower the fees per transaction -> more people use Bitcoin -> more valuable the bitcoin ecosystem is -> higher the price of bitcoin -> mining is more profitable -> stable and secure infrastructure for the new global economy.
First, I want to apologize. We have received a lot of negative feedback suddenly and I can assure you that we take it seriously.
I temporary disabled ALL the email notifications (even though I don't think they were a real problem) and added a warning that we are not affiliated with project owners. When my teammate is online he will probably also some of the other issues.
Perhaps some people just misunderstand the project and hate it.
Also I think that it is normal that developers try to understand the motivation of users and ask questions in order to find a better solution, please don't take it as offence or reluctance to change.
We are going to resolve every issue or close the project.
Please don't take this the wrong way, but tip4commit is a poisonous project that does more harm than good. You should shut the whole thing down.
Providing monetary incentives gamifies the development process, which is not a good thing. It has been shown that providing monetary incentives below a threshold decreases both the quality and quantity of contributions. For more information about this I suggest reading Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink.
Tip4commit was started for the bitcoin project. I'm a bitcoin developer. We don't like tip4commit. What results in practice is that we end up with ill-formed, poorly thought out, excessively large, trivial, time wasting pull requests to review, which takes time away from beneficial development.
Your service is not helping open source software. It is hurting it. You are paying people to provide distractions which slow down development. Please stop.
I think that implementing "opt-in" is the natural solution and yet the maintainer writes that it will "brake everything". I don't understand this extreme reluctance of Tip4Commit to acknowledge the right of owners of projects to control things tightly related to the projects they own.
For what it's worth, I don't believe maintainers have a moral or legal right to control what happens between third parties - that is, contributors to their project and those who wish to support them.
I wouldn't be opposed to implementing opt-out at a project level... but it's not my project.
As I told you on reddit, I'm going through hell trying to opt-out as an individual. I know for a fact that they harvested and have been using information about me from GitHub without my permission and in violation of GitHub's terms of service. Since your comments consistently resort to legalism, how do you resolve that conundrum? I'm honestly trying very hard to not just go with the nuclear option of starting to seek enforcement of service-provider terms to shut down tip4commit, but they aren't exactly leaving tons of other options.
If they're violating Github's T&C, that seems like a good place to start. You've obviously given them plenty of notice of your discontent - they've had ample opportunity to work with you to resolve it.
I guess they still have a moral right to ask their contributors to be up front about the incentives involved in their contributions (they can't demand disclosure, but they could still refuse contributions where they don't feel they have enough understanding of the incentives involved).
The point being, setting the thing up behind their back brings a lot of risk of poisoning the relationship between the contributor and the project.
Maybe it's stupid for a project to act like that, but once it turns into a hair splitting exercise, you might as well split all of them.
Devil's advocate: If you wish to tightly control everything related to your project then perhaps use a private CVS rather than a public repo on Github. By using Github's free and very social oriented service you are implicitly giving up some control over the project.
If opt-in would kill your project, it's probably a bad project. Much in the same way that if your business can't survive without exploiting people, it's a bad business.
Opt-in doesn't mean they couldn't inform projects when someone actually wants to donate. First donation just needs to be framed as an invitation to use tip4commit with no being a valid (and default) option.
Because instead of having a million projects, you'd have 3. The power of defaults and opt-out is pretty well-understood to the point I'd call it non-controversial.
So what? That is a typical use case for an opt-in platform with possible good outcomes. If you do it opt-out, it's unsolicited, unwelcomed and just badly setup. This discussion and the one on Github itself is a perfect example why.
You can't blame someone else for not having a responsible (e.g. opt-in) growth engine...
They would have projects from people who are interested in their services, and interested in having them accept money on the projects behalf. If that number is 3, so be it.
The point of your service as it stands right now is that people give you money in exchange for a promise to make it reach other people, who have no idea that you are collecting it on their behalf. If you can not reach them, this money remains with you (as the "donation pool" is under your control). You are very likely to run into legal trouble beause of this, sooner rather than later, so IMHO it is in your best interest to stop the service in its current form.
You have to work with the community rather than against it. If there are maintainers out there that really want this, collaborate with them and grow from there.
The objection is you're committing fraud. You're soliciting 'donations' for a third party (everyone committing to a project) without their consent. Unbeknownst to the donaters you're then keeping these 'donations' because the third-party has no interest in taking them. This is pretty shaky ground to be on, and it only takes one person to decide to take legal action against you.
They should simply state and then execute that refused donations will be sent to other projects or returned. I don't think this is that big of a problem.
You could have avoided the entire controversy by taking the entirely reasonable step of honoring the initial request to be opted out.
I think sticking with opt-out is ok since it will be the difference in having a million projects or 3 projects. But, it means you have to be more considerate of the project owners requests. Thinking that the emails "weren't that bad" is more evidence that you aren't listening very well.
> "I think sticking with opt-out is ok since it will be the difference in having a million projects or 3 projects.
There is a difference between "right" and "convenient for tip4commit". Assuming that no project maintainer wants to be part of tip4commit, should they all be made to opt-out? I'd argue that it is tip4commit that have to make a case for themselves and convince stakeholders of their benefits. Avoiding marketing by choosing defaults that are convenient for you but possibly a nuisance to your stakeholders is a very arrogant and short-sighted position to take.
I don't know if this happens often but I would like to take a moment and point out that after hearing a strong negative reaponse, It's nice to see that the developer is willing to work through the problems with the community to change his/her project to a better state.
Could you add a few more words to explain your interpretations of those terms in practice here?
The rest of the folks in the thread and on the Github issue are exploring what those terms mean. I'm not seeing you provide much insight or rationale into your interpretations beyond a simple "No, we are not."
How are we failing to make clear the reasons behind the reaction to your work?
How are we failing to make clear the various suggestions for making your work actually useful instead of potentially harmful to the projects you claim to be trying to help?
Thank you very much! I am quite surprised because I remember fixing this issue in the same day patch became available and I run update recently. Upgrading the distro, hopefully it fixes the problem.
Upgrading the distro is likely insufficient, as your private key has potentially (likely, at this point) been compromised. At a minimum you need a new key and cert.
We don't impersonate anybody. We just provide additional way to reward project's contributors and perhaps attract more of them. We'll make it more explicit with https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/136
Firstly, you need to make abundantly obvious and clear promises as to what happens to money left it accounts. There is no reason to trust your escrow, let alone your ability to manage or secure it. I honestly still can't find it spelled out clearly, and even then it'd be hard to trust.
I suggest you pull your site before this PR gets even further out of hand, then reboot. If you continue to pursue your project, partner with a couple projects that opt-in (free publicity for you both) and work to their needs. Once you have things in order, then you can think about something more automated.
> I assumed "the project" meant that the tip goes back into a general pool still dedicated to the particular project the tip was originally designated for.
If by now you don't understand that this project is a bad idea, you are going to get a reputation of being not intelligent. That's not a good reputation for a coder.
Why is it a bad idea?
Maybe people have already stated the reasons. And you (wrongly) think you have effectively refuted them. You are being, to choose a mild word, dense.
Sometimes it's best to just look at how mad you are making people, and draw your conclusions from that.
I think tip4commit is a pretty hostile project itself. It deserves a hostile reprimand. And since the creator refuses to even opt-out (let alone opt-in) projects, I really can't feel sorry for them.
If most people prefer to use other crypto instead then Bitcoin may fall into a death spiral:
...lower the demand for bitcoins -> lower the price of bitcoin AND lower amount of bitcoin transactions -> less profitable the mining -> less secure the network -> lower the demand for bitcoins....