Composability is the key to Bitcoin scaling

DEVCON1: Single Cell Design Model of Blockchain - Lucius Greg Meredith

(19 minutes in total, the link below plays the title quote from the end):

https://youtu.be/uzahKc_ukfM?t=1041

By the way, this deep philosophical, mathematical beauty always inspires and motivates me to post my opinions and advice in these forums, such as:

1. • The Ethereum EVM Yellow Paper is overly complex and arbitrary (search for “yellow” here https://np.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4pl804/solidity_is_an_implementation_language_and_the/d4malcl)

2. • C/C++ programmers are stuck in the programming paradigm, so they don’t have the vision and wisdom to understand large-scale, self-proven Bitcoin scaling. (https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4q95ri/the_day_when_the_bitcoin_community_realizes_that/)

3. • Do the math yourself (ydtm)

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I think the best way for Bitcoin to move forward is for everyone to come together to create a kind of “Super/Meta Schelling Point”:

…that is, a hard fork that is so “obviously best” that everyone automatically agrees to it.
…could also be described as a hard fork with sufficient flexibility and “built-in” on-chain governance to minimize or eliminate the need for most future hard forks.
…or rather, the Bitcoin we were promised, governed by mathematics and markets — not the Bitcoin that Greg Maxwell rules now.
What qualities does a hard fork need to be “so obviously optimal that everyone automatically agrees to it”?

(1) An “apparently best” hard fork should of course preserve the wisdom of everyone’s past Bitcoin investment decisions — and enable everyone to continue transacting Bitcoin directly on the blockchain:

1. • That is, it should maintain everyone’s existing transactions/balances on the Bitcoin global ledger from before the fork;

2. • Such an upgrade is widely known as a “spinoff” (https://bitcointalk.org /index.php?topic=563972.0) - people are already working on such a spinoff for Bitcoin (https://duckduckgo.com /?q=site%3Abitco.in%2Fforum+spinoff&ia=web): keeping everyone’s existing account balances on the ledger, allowing people to make transactions faster and cheaper.

(2) A “clearly optimal” hard fork should free up everyone’s wisdom in future Bitcoin governance decisions — allowing everyone to implement Bitcoin governance directly on the blockchain from now on.

1. • That is, we should make full use of Bitcoin’s consensus-forming mechanism, not only to reach consensus on which block to add next, but also to reach consensus on which software to install next (e.g., which rules to use, how to determine valid blocks) - while of course maintaining a primary market-based meta-system rule to increase the wealth of everyone.

2. • This is called a “self-amending” cryptographic ledger.

Requirement (1) is very simple to implement (i.e., directly use spinoff).
Requirement (2) is more difficult - but there are some very smart people working on "self-amending cryptographic ledgers".

https://tezos.com/white_paper.pdf

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EB136-Arthur Breitman: Tezos - A Self-Amending Cryptographic Ledger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mgaDpuMSc0

This independent developer's approach hits the sweet spot between theory and practice (he uses Ocaml, a language that combines high-level logic and provable correctness with low-level C++-like efficiency and control - that is, Ocaml programs can be extracted from the Coq theorem prover, and efficient executables can be written that run about a third of the speed of C++ - not a bad thing in an environment where speed is measured in orders of magnitude (10 times) - and there is an excellent (single-celled!) foreign language function interface from Ocaml to C for any low-level CPU-intensive data crunching.).

So I guess we do have decentralized development to some extent — but it’s bad for Bitcoin users because:

The truly leading, visionary developers don’t work for Core/Blockstream — most of them don’t even work on Bitcoin.

Really smart developers are naturally unable to work for a wilful tyrant like /u/nullc - they are too polite to even consider interacting with him: they instinctively avoid such people because they quickly realize that:

Greg Maxwell is just another dull C++ programmer who can’t even imagine what massive provably correct scaling on a globally distributed network would look like.

So remember, when Greg Maxwell tells you “Bitcoin doesn’t scale” — he’s actually saying: “ I don’t know how to scale Bitcoin ”.

Other programmers can develop elegant, compact, natural, provably correct ways to make Bitcoin massively, securely, and naturally scale - and all the stupid developers in Core/Blockstream can do seems to be just a hack on top of hack - the so-called Lightning Network.

This is why Core/Blockstream has become the epitome of the "worse is better" philosophy in the computer industry. They release garbage that hurts users in the hope of helping their business owners. (https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/search?q=axa&restrict_sr=on)

What we should consider doing now is to be more welcoming and encouraging to those ambitious, visionary, and talented developers who are willing to devote themselves to Bitcoin.

But none of this will be possible as long as Bitcoin remains controlled by a group of mediocre developers who are afraid of innovation and are unreliable, and is defined by "a bunch of C++ spaghetti code."
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So I think of a guy like /u/nullc as basically a "big fish in a small pond" - a villain, in other words.

As a C++ programmer with some knowledge of crypto, networking, and game theory, he can give orders to some programmers like him who are, after all, stuck in the serial programming paradigm (Core/Blockstream programmers are almost all like this) - and he can also give orders to Chinese miners, plus some people on these forums.

At the same time, if you look at the programmers who have flocked to Ethereum (I’m not talking about Gavin Wood who wrote the EVM yellow paper, or the slock.it guys who wrote the DAO — I’m talking about people like Lucius Meredith in the video at the beginning of this article, or Arthur Breitman below), you’ll find that there are a lot of talented developers who are more proficient in mathematics and provably secure distributed programs than the short-sighted people at Blockstream/Core.

Forward-thinking developers know that the future of cryptocurrency cannot follow a yellow paper filled with arbitrary and confusing design “decisions.” (Instead, it should follow naturally from the beauty of mathematics.)

And they know what the future of cryptocurrency will look like if teams like Core/Blockstream are allowed to overhaul Bitcoin's main.cpp with some unsafe spaghetti code. (Instead, it should be provably correct.)

And they know that long-term successful governance will not come from people on forums, IRC, and mailing lists. It will only come from adaptive rules that allow users (the market) to vote directly on the blockchain to reach consensus - consensus on which block to add next and consensus on what new rules to apply.

Cryptocurrencies that can be massively expanded will only be based on 4-5 lines of code (functional, truly single-cell) (see the video quoted at the beginning of this article). These codes can reflect the beauty and grandeur of the fractals of nature and the universe, can be proven correct by another set of half-page long codes, can be self-starting and self-correcting, and thus continue to evolve and improve.

A very interesting sociological/psychological perspective here is the authoritarian, anthropocentric mindset of Core/Blockstream developers - a pathological person like Luke-Jr simply cannot believe, nor comprehend, the aforementioned immanence - after all, he has never experienced anything so wonderful in person.

So, on one hand we have:

1. • Under Core/Blockstream management, that spaghetti code is being written into Bitcoin’s main.cpp (they insist on “soft fork” upgrades, so this will only get worse)

2. • Thugs like /u/nullc beat up everyone and say “Bitcoin doesn’t scale!”

3. • Authoritarians like /u/theymos believe that “Bitcoin users cannot make free decisions!”

4. • Other pessimistic sycophants associated with Core/Blockstream — people trapped in a dark worldview that fails to see how nature and mathematics self-initiate their own existence, self-correct their own evolutionary trajectories — and scale massively, metaphysically, and securely.

And, yes, these personality flaws are very common among C++ programmers.

This way of thinking leads to a low-level, imperative language where you can write implementation plans but not details, where you are so close to the machine that you are distracted by tracking pointers, allocating and reallocating memory capacity, and are always worried about the machine crashing, and where you can only "test" that your program may be correct in most cases, but can never prove that it is correct in all cases: this is the true portrayal of Blockstream/Core developers.

Meanwhile, somewhere else, we have the guys in the video — smart mathematicians and programmers who are still grounded, able to convey the beauty of fractals and the scaling of nature and the universe, especially his reference to comparing a child to a leaf on a tree — his example of a “single-cell design model for blockchains” using declarative, functional, self-provable language, his talk of a “consistent, distributed, scalable virtual machine… into which you can write an automatically constructed and correct implementation of a scalable PoS protocol” — not only self-proven, but self-starting and self-amending, which means a Bitcoin that we were promised: governed by mathematics, not by people (like Mr. Maxwell).

Remember: "self-correcting" = there will be almost no need for hard forks in the future, saving you from wasting your life arguing with others on the forum.

Open your Bitcoin client and vote for the rules you want. Bitcoin Unlimited (https://np.reddit.com/r/btc+bitcoin /search?q=bitcoin+unlimited&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all) is the first step in this direction.

It’s clear that the Core/Blockstream developers are losers who have painted themselves into a corner, and lack the mathematical imagination to find a way out.

The Core/Blockstream devs are so lost that they can’t even realize how a modest additional parameter that allowed direct signaling of simple rule voting (like Bitcoin Unlimited) would be a huge step forward after all the years of wrangling and vitriol over whether we should go from 1MB to 2MB or 4MB — and they’re so uneducated that they can’t even admit that super-thin blocks (which they renamed compact blocks) are a great scaling technology.

In order for Bitcoin to win, we must liberate ourselves from the pessimistic and mediocre programmers of Blockstream/Core and their superficial understanding of mathematics and scalability, and welcome open-minded and visionary programmers who understand that "composability is the key to scalability" (not the spaghetti code written by Core/Blockstream and hacks like Lightning Network), and have a deeper understanding of designing a distributed system that is naturally scalable, self-proven correct, self-starting(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzahKc_ukfM) and self-amending(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mgaDpuMSc0).