Oddbean

You would only push for ossification if you have never developed software. Code stops working if you don't maintain it. It starts failing at the edges and slowly migrates to the core. People will stop using it way before it gets to the core features. GM.

Good morning ✌️🧡 Software is a garden. It's a desperate battle to create order in a world of entropy. And to stop maintenance would be to let chaos take over. If your allies don't maintain the garden, your enemies will.

ossification is a stupid weasel word anyway you don't change something that works you change something that doesn't work improvements have to be weighed up against how they will be used, the block size is a good example of a case where in some measures it's an improvement but in others it is a major problem so, please, stop talking about ossification as though it's always a bad thing to never change things we still mostly use programming languages with braces around function parameters and parentheses around code blocks, and hell, how many thousand years have we been using arabic numbers? omg, arabic numbers are so ossified, we should invent some new shit for no reason

Never mind! The dumb me thought OSS in this word meant Open Source Software. This is an after-effect of consulting for corporates moving to open source software alternatives from closed source costly software. Thanks to @சாரு-秋陽 who posted a definition of this word "ossification" 🙏 My bad 😅

Some things are just changes, not "fixes". Bitcoin has changed many many times over the years, even by Satoshi. There was even a catastrophic bug that had to be patched. There was no divine gifting of perfect code.

that was 13 years ago, at least almost nothing since has been important engineering wise, bitcoin is an epic achievement when it comes to protocols, really, they are not that complex, there should not be that many fixes after some time, and the reasons for changes need to be intense to make them important front end is a different thing, but the times that an innovation in interface demanding a back end change is nearly a non-happening in history

just to be clear, imagine if every email client had to update fro "important changes" in the protocol every other month (being generous here, to compare with retarded modern shit) no, SMTP and POP have been stable since maybe as early as 1984 or so why should this be any different for #bitcoin or #nostr or anything else have you looked at how frequently XMPP has changed in the last 20 years? what about Tor? I think they made two breaking changes golang... they are super chads of design... ZERO BREAKING CHANGES i am a long time student of this stuff and this is why i am a #golang maxi and why bitcoin impresses me, it is the same reason. well designed, doesn't need additions, doesn't need changes, can do things that we didn't think of a decade ago, that we didn't realise it could do, because we didn't think it would be even feasible

Enterprise people love saying that to every software that is core of their business. But there is nothing special about Bitcoin. It's a piece of software just like any other. What users do WITH it is the special part.

Bitcoin has fucked up multiple times in the past and has recovered just fine. Hard forks have happened intentionally and not, and will very likely continue to happen especially if other Bitcoin implementations start to pop up everywhere. And this is all a feature, not a bug.

I think Saylor's point is a bit more nuanced then that. The TLDR I got out of his interview with Livera was that he does not think we should make protocol upgrades that create controversy among stakeholders (miners) or which might antagonize governments (currency monopoly). This makes sense in the context of someone who simply wants their stack to increase in value and who believes his stack will not be threatened by the state. The more I come to understand his position the more sympathetic I become, and it seems likely his views will be shared by a growing number of normy tradfi investors as their involvement increases. I think he's taking a stance that in 2017 people would have applauded: don't change Bitcoin to make your VC funded buisness plan viable. That said, I think he does not understand Bitcoin at a technical level very well or share the cyberpunk's opposition to state control and surveillance of money. If Saylor is going to be the official Bitcoin villian for 2024, he's at least a much more nuanced and interesting version than Jihan Wu, Ver or Faketoshi.

This isn't unilaterally true. some code can be frozen (especially simple, functional code. consider an "increment by 1" function). as much code as CAN be frozen, SHOULD be frozen. of course this won't be all of it. nostr:note104z2gq0aatnxduy6eqysuy3hguzl4vfgg2tnyz4rg3ccg0wyxhrsamne8y

As someone who never developed before or knows how to, what @mleku say here makes sense to me. note1as2jdjlnt39l6ck02cy2l2lrncqap2evxmnw28k9ahjlujff28zqrw22gp (if I understand correctly that this note is all about the odell/saylor/ARK talk here on nostr &X and the 'yes or no' on bitcoin opensource-development) How else did btc get it's value in the first place? Fixing or maintaining it? I don't get it. I thought it could not be F'd with unless some 51% attack. I understand btc needs to be made more user-friendly and all. Is that all what you guys are talking about? Satoshi also said something like "I leave it in good hands" before he left the scene... But I'm ignorant on the code of btc, so I DO put trust in hearing Andreas M. Antonopoulos, @Jeff Booth & @saylor explain btc and why it has value. And because I see people who are aware of the BS of the currant banking system talk bitcoin and have hope for something better. I salute you! If someone can explain to me, like I'm a 5 year old, what all this discussion is about, I'd like to know.? I'm @sking the lot of you whom I stared following over the years to help me understand 'why btc?' Should I opt-out into #gold, because some foolish ego talk on what is better for bitcoin can actually kill bitcoin? Or better go offline for a few weeks/months.. Let is alll blow over🌞 I was spared the blocksize wars I kept hearing about and got a bit of a taste of what it was reading this https://primal.net/e/note1lnwesj69dpuqf55q84ldj8q7yqmuxgwt7ra84trg6t4vgt5s270su57ls9 @ODELL @jack @jack mallers @Jameson Lopp @adam3us @maxkeiser @LynAlden @0815ff97 @NVK @BitcoinUniversity @Snowden & Andreas (does he have nostr) Or whomever that feels they capable to explain it to me. 🙏 Hard fork, soft fork, Why not pitch fork? 😉 #bitcoin #opensource #patience

Sure, but that's not what I hear when people want to ossify. They want a full stop to any change to the code. Which is just a ridiculous proposition. I would argue that if you want to keep maintaining it you should not use the word ossify. Otherwise, you will be mixed with the people that don't want any change in the code whatsoever.

To insult and demoralize plebs running uneconomic nodes. Leave my Core devs alone. They’re busy upgrading Bitcoin for all types of permissionless things. Imagine real estate on Bitcoin. Or our podcasts.

Ossification started out as a propagandistic slur against those who want only regular maintenance and the response was to embrace the term ossification as a middle-finger. It doesn't mean actual ossification.