Why I support Gavin's practice

Chapter 0 Introduction

Regarding Bitcoin block expansion, Gavin and Mike recently led the XT version of the expansion fork plan. On the day of the XT version release, I was very anxious to read the information on xtnodes, and eagerly consulted @币看老刘 and @比太 on WeChat, and calculated the pros and cons.

After understanding how XT forked, I started to go over the firewall to read Gavin’s Twitter and blog. I hoped to find out a little about the evil and good of human nature at the bottom of this fork.

But so far, the community has been almost overwhelmingly against XT and has been deeply and thoroughly critical of Gavin.

I don't care about XT, but I admire Gavin's work. This article is intended to defend Gavin, and you are welcome to criticize.

Chapter 1: Unity of Knowledge and Action

Let me tell you a story first, a true story of my own.

In 2012, I worked on a project and designed a gas burning device. You can imagine it as the iron parts of the gas stove at home. After the design was completed, it was also processed. But the operation effect was not good. The company rejected this design and did not allow further testing. I was not convinced and tried my best to persuade the company to try again. I made improvements and tried it again, but the effect was still not good. Then the company refused to let me try it. I was still determined. Half a year later, I took the opportunity of a business trip and took the equipment to the site to try it again. The result was still not good. But I found the reason, and the matter was over.

If a person has knowledge but does not put it into practice, he will be suffocated to death. The anxiety caused by the divergence between knowledge and action can only be resolved through the unity of knowledge and action, either by changing my knowledge system through reasoning, or by verifying or falsifying my knowledge system through practice.

I read Gavin’s tweets from now on in chronological order. He has been thinking about block size expansion. The following one is from May 6th.

Blockchain expansion keeps this guy awake at night.

I read his tweet in March.

For half a year, he has been thinking about block expansion. During this period, he conducted block capacity tests, built data models, and analyzed stress tests. In his knowledge system, expansion is theoretically mature and imperative. Then he gave speeches everywhere to persuade the community to accept his expansion ideas.

An engineer has determined something based on his own theoretical framework. More importantly, this engineer is not just an engineer for nothing. The reason why an engineer is an engineer is that he has the ability to realize a product. Such an engineer has both theoretical and practical abilities. When the theory is mature, what can stop him from practicing? He must do it.

This is what is called "The ultimate action is knowledge, and the ultimate knowledge is action." The unity of knowledge and action is also an important condition for a person's words to be trustworthy.

Furthermore, when a person has talent and ability, who the hell cares about your opinion? He always thinks about his inner ideal.

Gavin advocated the release of Bitcoin XT. This is a practice that a knowledgeable and capable engineer must do to verify his knowledge. This is the most reasonable inference I have drawn after reading enough information. I have not found any evidence of conspiracy.

Chapter 2 The Essence of Decentralization

Decentralization means that everyone can speak, and everyone can choose to listen or not listen or speak.

Centralization means that a few certified guests are speaking and others are listening. What others can say can only be called feedback or asking questions.

Centralization means that only a relatively small number of people can become the followers of the majority of people. This small number of people is the central node, or the leader, whose expression can often greatly influence the community. The vast majority of people here can be called the bottom users. The opinions of the bottom users are extremely unimportant in the community, but they can be lazy. As long as the central node is correct, users can enjoy the fruits of their labor. Because in a centralized community, the bottom lacks access to the central node, and no one has a chance, so the bottom users often choose to be lazy and enjoy obedience until chaos occurs.

In a decentralized world, everyone can make their voice heard, and everyone can choose who to follow. Capable users can grow quickly, gain enough fans, and rise to the top in a flat world. This is the decentralized rebuilding center phenomenon.

But for the bottom-level users of decentralization, they are faced with multiple centers to choose from and must make a choice, which requires users to have the ability to think for themselves.

Decentralized communities will definitely rebuild centers, and multiple centers will coexist. So what is the essential difference between this and centralization?

There is such a conclusion in KK's loss of control.

"In every important and scientific sense, an insect colony is not just like an organism, it is an organism. Like a cell or a person, it behaves as a unitary whole, maintaining its own characteristics in space to resist disintegration... It is neither a thing nor a concept, but a continuous surge or process. It is a whole composed of 20,000 swarms." (Excerpt from Out of Control 2.1 The Way of Bees: Distributed Management)

To put it bluntly, the bee colony KK is talking about is an organism as a group. The bee colony is a life. When the central node of the bee colony dies, such as the queen bee, the worker bees will select an ordinary bee pupa to feed, and then develop it into a queen bee.

A decentralized community, as KK said, is a living organism. Every individual in it will spontaneously resist the disintegration of the entire community and expand outward.

Centralized communities are the opposite. The central node is most active in maintaining the unity of the community, while the bottom users are only willing to enjoy the fruits of their labor. If the center is destroyed, the community will be doomed.

The Bitcoin community is decentralized and a complete organism. Gavin is a central point in the community. A decentralized community allows every individual to make a voice, whether that voice is against the community's purpose or strengthens the community. As a node, Gavin makes his voice heard, and there is nothing wrong with it.

The attack on Gavin this time is a normal psychological reaction of the decentralized community to rebuild centralization.

What I mean by this is: this is not a big deal. The entire community will not be split because of this. At most, Gavin will be annihilated as a central node, or Gavin will rise to become a larger central node (if XT succeeds). The Bitcoin community is a living organism, which will spontaneously resist its own disintegration and spontaneously expand outward.

Just like on Weibo, a certain big V was abused and abandoned by fans because of some inappropriate remarks. The Weibo community will not disappear because of this.

Chapter 3 Community consensus is not the optimal solution

The loudest criticism against Gavin is that he “ignored community consensus.” But what I want to say is that community consensus is not the optimal solution. Here are four pieces of evidence.

1. A voting process is required to reach a community consensus. Who is eligible to vote? Is it the core development team members? Is it the exchange owner? Is it the mining pool CEO? There are no rules for these. (Using computing power to vote is completely different from the community consensus mentioned here. Computing power voting is the act of computing power following the consensus after consensus is reached. The computing power itself does not participate in the decision-making of consensus. Not to mention using computing power to vote. But this obviously does not take into account the opinions of ordinary coin holders, and ordinary coin holders are the ones who ultimately give Bitcoin value.)

2. The setting of the voting procedure may not necessarily reflect the problem. Nobel Prize winner in economics Arrow proved that as long as the candidate scheme is cleverly designed, the voting results can be effectively manipulated. Trying to please everyone is destined to not make anyone completely happy. This determines that what one person one vote gets is often not anyone's favorite, but the least hated by the majority. For example, Gavin demonstrated through network testing and data patterns that a block size of 20M is very appropriate. But as soon as it was proposed, the Chinese community came up with a compromise solution - 8M. How did this 8M come about? I don't know, it is most likely calculated based on China's network speed. If Gavin said it was 200M at the beginning, the Chinese community might have launched a compromise solution of 20M.

3. Community voting neither reflects costs nor directly affects market behavior. People who participate in voting, such as Gavin, are most likely to consider verifying their own knowledge. The engineer who plays the side chain is mainly concerned that the survival space of the side chain will be squeezed by large blocks. And ordinary coin holders are concerned about the fluctuation of coin prices. It can be said that people in the community have their own ulterior motives. How do you want the community to reach a consensus?

4. Community consensus is not the optimal solution. Another key factor is the timing of the fork. Perhaps when the Bitcoin transaction volume increases to 1M, the capacity will be blocked and the community will be forced to turn to expansion fork. But this is at the expense of Bitcoin's development time. This was the result of the first Bitcoin fork, and the problem was not solved until it occurred.

In fact, the most common reason I see for the condemnation of Gavin this time is that XT has the potential to cause a market decline. The stable upward trend of the currency value is a real community consensus, at least more than 99% of the consensus.

Today, Bitcoin has become the king of digital cryptocurrencies, winning over many currencies (all of which can be seen as forks of Bitcoin). The value of Bitcoin has reached billions of dollars. Why? It relies on market selection and the evolution of Bitcoin.

Gavin proposed an evolutionary direction and gave Bitcoin the power to evolve, ignoring the impossible "community consensus" under the premise that Bitcoin had no problems, and considering himself a member of the decentralized community. However, this evolutionary direction was not recognized by the community, and I think there is no problem with not recognizing the XT chain, and it should be left to the market to choose. But I think it is too much to curse the planner.

Depriving members of their freedom and restricting speech in a decentralized community will only breed greater chaos. The stability you are pursuing now may be bred with the risk of returning to zero.

In other words, "talking, commenting, and cursing" do not pay the cost, "doing" requires time and money. Now the vast majority of people in the community claim to support expansion and the BIP101 plan, but no one has written the code. There is no point in talking nonsense. Those who do nothing should feel ashamed when someone does something, and that is the attitude they should have, not the other way around.

Chapter 4 XT Chain: A Capacity Expansion Test Chain

Gavin’s biggest mistake was claiming XT was an alternative to Bitcoin, instead of lowering the bar and saying, “I provided a testing solution for Bitcoin.”

But Gavin's arrogance does not change the essence of XT as a testing chain.

1. Bitcoin is open source, and the XT chain is also open source. Anyone can study the Bitcoin XT code, supplement and improve the code, and even integrate it into their own code.

2. Gavin and Mike claim that it doesn’t matter what XT is, the final choice is up to the user. Now people say that XT is a copycat coin, or some kind of conspiracy coin, it does not change the function of XT - to improve Bitcoin.

3. The Bip 101 expansion plan has not been finalized yet, so it is not a bad thing to implement expansion testing on XT first. Perhaps if the Bip 101 plan is finalized first, then Bip 101 will become a test plan.

I think that at present, all market participants should focus on researching and testing XT, rather than rushing to express their support or opposition to the XT chain, or even expressing anger towards Gavin.

Any software may (and will) have bugs. Something as important as the Bitcoin expansion fork must be tested for a long enough time. Currently, XT will start collecting data and determining the fork on January 1, 2016. There are less than 5 months left, so market participants should hurry up and test it.

Exchanges, mining pools, and wallets should all simulate the large block nodes implemented on XT as soon as possible, find problems, and broadcast them to the community. We will strive to improve the Bip 101 plan.

For ordinary users, it is imperative to keep the private key in their own hands. All coins must be sent to the address where you hold the private key before December 30, 2015. If you do not have the private key, you give up the right to choose the fork.

In particular, exchanges and financial management companies should be prepared for a run before the scheduled fork activation time.

Chapter 5 Answering Several Questions Directly

1. Blocking . After the XT chain was released, the community was furious. BTT even completely blocked the discussion of XT, and Reddit also tried to follow suit.

This kind of thing reminds me of two things.

One was at the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences in Beijing, where school rules explicitly prohibited discussions on the merits of Chinese and Western medicine.

One time, the Chinese authorities erected a wall to directly block Western ideas from the people.

Is Bitcoin going to become traditional Chinese medicine? Is the Bitcoin community going to enter the Party Committee? Why don’t you block OneCoin or a certain Litecoin pyramid scheme fund…

2. Arrogance . This is a criticism of Gavin. I think this criticism is correct. Gavin did not consider the factors of many users and investors and forced the expansion of large blocks. But I don’t think he is too arrogant. As mentioned earlier, this is the result of an engineer’s unity of knowledge and action, and the result of the development of a decentralized community.

3. Politics and dictatorship . This is what Gavin did, which is called politically motivated. Politics here is a derogatory term, meaning that some people use public opinion, even deceive public opinion, mobilize people's power, and unite to fight against dissidents to achieve their own goals. It is really too much to criticize Gavin like this. Chairman Mao launched the Rectification Movement and the Cultural Revolution, this is politics. Chairman Mao joined the Korean War regardless of the lives of the Chinese people, this is dictatorship. Xi Dada fights tigers (the way to fight corruption should be to reduce government approval, rule of law and empower the people) and fight dissidents, this is politics.

Gavin used his own time and money to launch a test chain. He did not tempt you to switch your computing power to it, nor did he show that he was attacking the Core chain to show the superiority of the XT chain. He did not imply that the coin price on the XT chain was higher, while the coin value on the Core chain would return to zero. How can this be called a political struggle? Why did Gavin do this for power? I only saw that he loved doing this and loved his Bitcoin business.

4. Deception . After Bitcoin XT was released, someone found out that it had a code to collect user IP addresses. They used this to attack Gavin and Mike for deceiving users. This is also debatable. XT is open source. Can open source really deceive people? It's like a writer wrote a book with 100 viewpoints. Then at the press conference, he talked about 10 viewpoints. When users got the book, they saw that there were 90 viewpoints that you didn't talk about at the press conference. You are cheating! Isn't this nonsense?

5. Misleading . There are a lot of articles saying that Gavin only talked about the benefits of XT, but not the disadvantages of XT, such as the trend of centralization, which led to a reduction in complete nodes, etc. In fact, people who understand it can see at a glance that the trend of centralization and the reduction in nodes are the result of the increase in block capacity, and the increase in capacity is considered a community consensus. XT will be like this, and Bip 101 will also be like this.

Chapter 6 Conclusion

The above is my opinion. It may make you angry, but I can't help it. If you agree with it, or if you disagree and add something, I will be very happy.

Thank you @走势明道@火星人 for giving me tips in the previous article. You are the cutest people.

If you find the article useful, please give me some Bitcoin to encourage me to continue writing.