Open development processes and reddit kerkluffles

It can be useful to review open source development processes from time to time.  This reddit thread[1] serves use both as a case study, and also a moment of OSS process introduction for newbies.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2pd0zy/peter_todd_is_saying_shoddy_development_on_v010/

Dirty Laundry

When building businesses or commercial software projects, outsiders typically hear little about the internals of project development.  The public only hears what the companies release, which is prepped and polished. Internal disagreements, schedule slips, engineer fistfights are all unseen.

Open source development is the opposite.  The goal is radical transparency.  Inevitably there is private chatter (0day bugs etc.), but the default is openness.  This means that is it normal practice to "air dirty laundry in public."  Engineers will disagree, sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly, sometimes rudely and with ad hominem attacks.  On the Internet, there is a pile-on effect, where informed and uninformed supporters add their 0.02 BTC.

Competing interests cloud the issues further.  Engineers are typically employed by an organization, as a technology matures.  Those organizations have different strategies and motivations.  These organizations will sponsor work they find beneficial.  Sometimes those orgs are non-profit foundations, sometimes for-profit corporations.  Sometimes that work is maintenance ("keep it running"), sometimes that work is developing new, competitive features that company feels will give it a better market position.  In a transparent development environment, all parties are hyperaware of these competing interests.  Internet natterers painstakingly document and repeat every conspiracy theory about Bitcoin Foundation, Blockstream, BitPay, various altcoin developers, and more as a result of these competing interests.

Bitcoin and altcoin development adds an interesting new dimension.  Sometimes engineers have a more direct conflict of interest, in that the technology they are developing is also potentially their road to instant $millions.  Investors, amateur and professional, have direct stakes in a certain coin or coin technology.  Engineers also have an emotional stake in technology they design and nurture.  This results in incentives where supporters of a non-bitcoin technology work very hard to thump bitcoin.  And vice versa.  Even inside bitcoin, you see "tree chains vs. side chains" threads of a similar stripe.  This can lead to a very skewed debate.

That should not distract from the engineering discussion.  Starting from first principles, Assume Good Faith[2].  Most engineers in open source tend to mean what they say.  Typically they speak for themselves first, and their employers value that engineer's freedom of opinion.  Pay attention to the engineers actually working on the technology, and less attention to the noise bubbling around the Internet like the kindergarten game of grapevine.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith

Being open and transparent means engineering disagreements happen in public.  This is normal.  Open source engineers live an aquarium life[3].
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKe-aO44R7k

What the fork?

In this case, a tweet suggests consensus bug risks, which reddit account "treeorsidechains" hyperbolizes into a dramatic headline[1].  However, the headline would seem to be the opposite of the truth.  Several changes were merged during 0.10 development which move snippets of source code into new files and new sub-directories.  The general direction of this work is creating a "libconsensus" library that carefully encapsulates consensus code in a manner usable by external projects.  This is a good thing.

The development was performed quite responsibly:  Multiple developers would verify each cosmetic change, ensuring no behavior changes had been accidentally (or maliciously!) introduced.  Each pull request receives a full multi-platform build + automated testing, over and above individual dev testing.  Comparisons at the assembly language level were sometimes made in critical areas, to ensure zero before-and-after change.  Each transformation gets the Bitcoin Core codebase to a more sustainable, more reusable state.

Certainly zero-change is the most conservative approach. Strictly speaking, that has the lowest consensus risk.  But that is a short term mentality.  Both Bitcoin Core and the larger ecosystem will benefit when the "hairball" pile of source code is cleaned up.  Progress has been made on that front in the past 2 years, and continues.   Long term, combined with the "libconsensus" work, that leads to less community-wide risk.

The key is balance.  Continue software engineering practices -- like those just mentioned above -- that enable change with least consensus risk.  Part of those practices is review at each step of the development process:  social media thought bubble, mailing list post, pull request, git merge, pre-release & release.  It probably seems chaotic at times.  In effect, git[hub] and the Internet enable a dynamic system of review and feedback, where each stage provides a check-and-balance for bad ideas and bad software changes.  It's a human process, designed to acknowledge and handle that human engineers are fallible and might make mistakes (or be coerced/under duress!).  History and field experience will be the ultimate judge, but I think Bitcoin Core is doing good on this score, all things considered.

At the end of the day, while no change is without risk, version 0.10 work was done with attention to consensus risk at multiple levels (not just short term).

Technical and social debt

Working on the Linux kernel was an interesting experience that combined git-driven parallel development and a similar source code hairball.  One of the things that quickly became apparent is that cosmetic patches, especially code movement, was hugely disruptive.  Some even termed it anti-social.  To understand why, it is important to consider how modern software changes are developed:

Developers work in parallel on their personal computers to develop XYZ change, then submit their change "upstream" as a github pull request.  Then time passes.  If code movement and refactoring changes are accepted upstream before XYZ, then the developer is forced to update XYZ -- typically trivial fixes, re-review XYZ, and re-test XYZ to ensure it remains in a known-working state.

Seemingly cosmetic changes such as code movement have a ripple effect on participating developers, and wider developer community.  Every developer who is not immediately merged upstream must bear the costs of updating their unmerged work.

Normally, this is expected.  Encouraging developers to build on top of "upstream" produces virtuous cycles.

However, a constant stream of code movement and cosmetic changes may produce a constant stream of disruption to developers working on non-trivial features that take a bit longer to develop before going upstream.  Trivial changes become encouraged, and non-trivial changes face a binary choice of (a) be merged immediately or (b) bear added re-base, re-view, re-test costs.

Taken over a timescale of months, I argue that a steady stream of cosmetic code movement changes serves as a disincentive to developers working with upstream.  Each upstream breakage has a ripple effect to all developers downstream, and imposes some added chance of newly introduced bugs on downstream developers.  I'll call this "social debt", a sort of technical debt[4] for developers.
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt

As mentioned above, the libconsensus and code movement work is a net gain.  The codebase needs cleaning up.  Each change however incurs a little bit of social debt.  Life is a little bit harder on people trying to get work into the tree.  Developers are a little bit more discouraged at the busy-work they must perform.  Non-trivial pull requests take a little bit longer to approve, because they take a little bit more work to rebase (again).

A steady flow of code movement and cosmetic breakage into the tree may be a net gain, but it also incurs a lot of social debt.  In such situations, developers find that tested, working out-of-tree code repeatedly stops working during the process of trying to get that work in-tree.  Taken over time, it discourages working on the tree.  It is rational to sit back, not work on the tree, let the breakage stop, and then pick up the pieces.

Paradox Unwound

Bitcoin Core, then, is pulled in opposite directions by a familiar problem.  It is generally agreed that the codebase needs further refactoring.  That's not just isolated engineer nit-picking.  However, for non-trivial projects, refactoring is always anti-social in the short term.  It impacts projects other than your own, projects you don't even know about. One change causes work for N developers.  Given these twin opposing goals, the key, as ever, is finding the right balance.

Much like "feature freeze" in other software projects, developing a policy that opens and closes windows for code movement and major disruptive changes seems prudent.  One week of code movement & cosmetics followed by 3 weeks without, for example.  Part of open source parallel development is social signalling:  Signal to developers when certain changes are favored or not, then trust they can handle the rest from there.

While recent code movement commits themselves are individually ACK-worthy, professionally executed and moving towards a positive goal, I think the project could strike a better balance when it comes to disruptive cosmetic changes, a balance that better encourages developers to work on more involved Bitcoin Core projects.

Survey of largest Internet companies, and bitcoin

Status report: Internet companies & bitcoin

Considering the recent news of Microsoft accepting bitcoin as payment for some digital goods, it seemed worthwhile to make a quick status check.  Wikipedia helpfully supplies a list of the largest Internet companies.  Let's take that list on a case-by-case basis.

Amazon.  As I blogged earlier, it seemed likely Amazon will be a slower mover on bitcoin.

Google.  Internally, there is factional interest.  Some internal fans, some internal critics.  Externally, very little.  Eric Schmidt has said good things about bitcoin.  Core developer Mike Hearn worked on bitcoin projects with the approval of senior management.

eBay.  Actively considering bitcoin integration.  Produced an explainer video on bitcoin.

Tencent. Nothing known.  Historical note:  Tencent, QQ, and bitcoin (CNN)

Alibaba.  Seemingly hostile, based on government pressure.  "Alibaba bans Bitcoin"

Facebook.  Nothing known.

Rakuten.  US subsidiary accepts bitcoin.

Priceline.  Nothing known.  Given that competitors Expedia and CheapAir accept bitcoin, it seems like momentum is building in that industry.

Baidu.  Presumed bitcoin-positive.  Briefly flirted with bitcoin, before government stepped in.

Yahoo.  Nothing known at the corporate level.  Their finance product displays bitcoin prices.

Salesforce.  Nothing known.  Third parties such as AltInvoice provide bitcoin integration through plugins.

Yandex. Presumed bitcoin-positive.  They launched a bitcoin conversion tool before their competitors.  Some critics suggest Yandex Money competes with bitcoin.

By my count, 6 out of 12 of the largest Internet companies have publicly indicated some level of involvement with bitcoin.

Similar lists may be produced by looking at the largest technology companies, and excluding electronics manufacturers.  Microsoft and IBM clearly top the list, both moving publicly into bitcoin and blockchain technology.

Prediction: GOP in 2014, Democrat WH in 2016

Consider today's US mid-term election results neutrally:

• When one party controls both houses of Congress, that party will become giddy with power and over-reach.
• When one party reaches minority status in both houses, that party resorts to tactics it previously condemned ("nuclear option").
• It gets ugly when one party controls Congress, and another party controls the White House.

The most recent example is Bush 43 + Democrats, but that is only the latest example.

Typical results from this sort of situation:

• An orgy of hearings.
• A raft of long-delayed "red meat for the base" bills will be passed in short order.
• Political theatre raised one level:  Congress will pass bills it knows the President will veto (and knows cannot achieve a veto override).
• A 2-house minority party becomes the obstructionist Party Of No.

A party flush with power simply cannot resist over-reach.  Democrats and Republicans both have proven this true time and again.

As such, we must consider timing.  GOP won the mid-terms, giving them two years to over-reach before the 2016 general election.  Voters will be tired of the over-reach, and the pendulum will swing back.

Predicted result:  Democrats take the White House in 2016.

If the 2014 mid-term elections had been the 2016 election, we would be looking at a full sweep, with GOP in House, Senate and White House.

Losing could be the best thing Democrats did for themselves in 2014.

P.S. Secondary prediction:  ACA will not be repealed.  ACA repeal bill will be voted upon, but will not make it to the President's desk.

What should the news write about, today?

I have always wanted to be journalist.  As a youth, it seemed terribly entertaining, jet-setting around the world chasing stories by day.  Living like Ernest Hemingway by night.  Taking [some of the first in the world] web monkey jobs at Georgia Tech's Technique and CNN gave me the opportunity to learn the news business from the inside.

Fundamentally, from an engineering perspective, the news business is out of sync with actual news events.

News events happen in real time.  There are bursts of information.  Clusters of events happen within a short span of time.  There is more news on some days, less news on others.

The news business demands content, visits, links, shares, likes, follows, trends.  Assembly line production demands regularized schedules; deadlines.  Deadlines imply a story must be written, even if there is no story to write.

Today's news business is incredibly cut throat.  Old dinosaurs are thrashing about.  Young upstarts are too.  My two young children only know of newspapers from children's storybooks, and icons on their Android tablets.  Classified ads, once a traditional revenue driver, have gone the way of the Internet.  Many "newspapers" are largely point-and-click template affairs, with a little local reporting thrown in.  Robots auto-post every press release.  Content stealing abounds.

All these inherent barriers exist for those brave few journalists left on the robot battlefield.  As usual with any industry that is being automated, the key to staying ahead is doing things that humans are good at, but robots not: creativity, inventiveness, curiosity, detective work.  Avoiding herds, cargo cults, bike shedding, conventional wisdom.

In my ideal world, news sites would post more news, look and feel a bit different, on days and weeks where there is a lot of news.  On slow news days, the site/app should feel like it's a slow news day.

The "it bleeds, it leads" pattern is worn out, and must be thrown in the rubbish.

Every day, every week, when a reporter is met with the challenge of meeting a deadline to feed the content beast, the primary question should be:  What recent trends/events impact the biggest percentage of your audience?

Pick any "mainstream" news site.  How many stories impact those beyond the immediate protagonists/antagonists/victims/authorities involved?

The news business, by its very nature, obscures and disincentivizes reporting on deep, impactful, and probably boring trends shaping our lives.  The biggest changes that happen to the human race are largely apparent in hindsight, looking back over the decades or hundreds or thousands of years.

The good stories are always the hardest to find.  Every "news maker" has the incentive to puff their accomplishments, and hide their failures.  Scientists have the same incentives (sadly):  Science needs negative feedback ("this theory/test failed!") yet there are few incentives to publish that.  Reporters must seek and tell the untold story, not the story everyone already knows.

Journalists of 20+ years ago were information gateways.  Selecting which bit of information to publish, or not, was a key editorial power.  Now, with the Internet, the practice is "publish all, sift later."  Today's journalists must reinvent themselves as modern detectives, versus the information gateways and "filters" of past decades.

Bitcoin and 51% mining power

Meta: This doesn't cover all incentives. More a high level reminder for new folks.

Tweet: #bitcoin mining market under-studied & interesting. Where else
can 50% market leaders disappear, and market adjusts in real time?
#Resilient

Explanation:

Bitcoin mining pools are entities that serve to aggregate the security services provided by bitcoin mining hardware owned by individuals all over the world.  These mining pools execute bitcoin monetary policy -- they are the key network entities that select transactions to be included in The Official Timeline of Bitcoin Transactions (the blockchain).

The companies and individuals that own bitcoin mining hardware form a second tier in the market.  These miners choose an aggregator (mining pool) to which they provide computing services, in exchange for bitcoin payments.

The unique and interesting bit is that these second tiers miners all employ software that auto-switches between mining pools based on a variety of economic factors:  pool monetary policy choices, profitability and fee structure of the pool, technical availability of the pool, collective strength of the pool (size of the aggregation) versus other pools, etc.

Thus, a large and popular mining pool, dominating the market with >50% marketshare, may disappear in an instant.  Or another pool may be more profitable.  Second tier miners all employ software that switches between first tier aggregators in real time.  Low economic friction vis a vis market entry implies that market leadership follows three trends:

1. Network effects generate large marketshares rapidly.
2. Low economic friction (low cost of entry) implies market leadership changes frequently.  Every 12 months or so.
3. The market is resilient against failure of market leaders, even those with > 50% marketshare.

It is natural and expected that miners will see a pool grow large, and switch away to other pools.  ETA:  Standard recommendation, use P2Pool.

Finally, remember that mining pools and miners are paid with tokens within the system -- bitcoins.  It is always in a miner's interest that bitcoins maintain their value.  Any behavior that harms the network as a whole will directly impact a large miner's income stream.  The larger the miner, the larger the impact.

Why I will not be joining the NSA protest

(copied from a twitter rant)

Some random points about the NSA and global surveillance:

Today, in 2014, paying low volume retail prices, it costs a DIY stalker $400/month to track every human going through a single street corner.  For a large government at mass scale, their costs will be 1/100th or 1/1000th of that, or lower.  The costs of tracking everyone on the planet is falling through the floor.

Don't blame the NSA for being the first to buy a hammer off a store shelf.

Most network engineers presumed the Internet has been tapped for all its life. The Internet was not built to be secure. The original Internet protocols all sent passwords and other sensitive data over the network in plaintext. To this day, the most popular email protocol sends email across the Internet in plaintext, ensuring at least 10 entities (routers) have a copy of your email. It was trivial for any university student to snoop your email.

The NSA's global surveillance is a commentary on the future of tech for everyone. What the NSA has today, other countries have tomorrow, everyone has next year.

Further, we are presented with the obvious paradox:  Law enforcement (LEA) needs to follow criminals, whereever they go. National defense needs to follow attackers around the world. If you build a space away from LEA, criminals go there, and LEA is tasked to follow.

Nevertheless...  Freedom of [physical] assocation, perhaps even freedom of thought is threatened by global surveillance.  Today's global surveillance is a natural consequence of technology, not the fault of the NSA.

We now live in a world where all authors, thinkers, activists, politicians, judges, attorneys are automatically recorded.

The movement and communications of all "wired" citizens on Earth are tracked. Relevant factor is how tech advances to permit NSA to "remember" ever higher percentage of daily data. Data firehose is staggeringly huge, even for NSA.

No matter the layers of process protections and personal honor defending such data, access to the movements and communications of everyone will be abused for political or petty reasons.

Consider NAACP v. Alabama in the context of a universally tracked digital world.

Globally, we must have a conversation about practical freedom and privacy limits to be placed on data collected without our knowledge.  This is much bigger than the NSA, and we should not get distracted from the bigger picture of global surveillance by breathing fire at the first organization that makes use of well known techniques and technologies.

My personal recommendation are laws in every jurisdiction regarding privacy, data retention, forced data expiration (deletion), decreasing use of secret evidence, and eventual notification of investigation targets.  We must avoid the "pre-crime" trap, where predictive models lock society into a straightjacket based on word or thought alone. Citizens must be able to spout off. Youth must be allowed to screw up and be forgiven by society, rather than curse a person with a minor youthful transgression for the rest of their lives.

We must encourage the government to be transparent, while protecting the privacy of our citizens in a global, internetworked society.

Bitcoin and the kernel-in-a-kernel security sandbox problem

When considering sandboxes and security jails, the problem space is interesting.  There is an increasingly common pattern. I call it "kernel-in-a-kernel." The problem is not really sandboxing untrusted code, but more fundamentally, sandboxing untrusted behavior.

Bitcoin sees this acutely: bitcoind manages the bitcoin P2P network. P2P network is flood-fill a la Usenet, and anyone may connect to any node. Built-in DoS protections are a must, but these are inevitably hueristics which duct-tape one problem area, while leaving another open to algorithmic attacks ("this P2P command runs an expensive query, that impacts other connected nodes").

One comprehensive solution is accounting. Account for the various resources being used by each connected party (CPU, RAM, disk b/w, ...) and verify that some connections do not starve other connections of resources. This solution is a sandbox that essentially becomes a kernel unto itself, as the solution is not merely preventing sandbox jailbreaks but at a higher level limiting algorithmic jailbreaks.

Think about the high level economics of any computing situation. You have limited resources, and various actors have valid and malicious needs of those resources.  What is the best practical model for balancing a set of limited resources, given potential malicious or buggy/haywire users of these resources?

Cost of a DIY NSA?

A core thesis of mine these days is that citizens worried about NSA surveillance are only seeing the tip of the iceberg.  Computers get cheaper and faster every year.  This puts surveillance technology within reach of just about anyone.

Let's build our own surveillance network on a street corner, with some spy cameras, and consider how much it costs.

Data point #1: Bandwidth and storage costs for a 24 hour video feed.  We'll imagine that one camera produces 1GB/day.

Data point #2: Spy cameras such as this one.  To ensure good coverage of our street corner from multiple angles, we will place 6 spy cameras at $9.00/each.

Data point #3: Amazon cloud storage.  Inbound bandwidth is free.  We are uploading 6GB/day.  Because we are super-smart and know the NSA's secret time travelling techniques, we will store 60 days worth of video.  That caps our data storage at 360 GB.  Cost: $10.80/month.

Data point #4: Open source biometrics software.  This is free.

Data point #5: Amazon cloud processing.  Being conservative and over-estimating, we will have a 3-computer cloud processing our video data for biometrics, running 24/7.  Cost @ m3.large: $302.00/month.

Data point #6: Derived data.  The data so far is just raw video.  We want to build a database of persons, cars, etc. over time.  We'll assume a 3x expansion of data storage due to this.  That increases our data storage cost to $43.20/month.  This is a conservative over-estimation, as derived data will likely be exponentially smaller than raw video.

Data point #7: Site controller, to which all the spy cameras connect.  Just need a laptop and an Internet connection.  Cost: $300.00 one time for laptop, $60.00/month for Internet.

Total non-labor costs for our street corner DIY NSA project:

• $354.00 initial
• $405.20/month

For this cost, you may obtain a wealth of biometric data:  faces, license plates, associations between people, other biometric markers such as voice or gait, product usage.  Anything that may be gleaned from audio or video by simple, legal, public observation over time may be data mined for biometrics and personal data.

Folks engaged in the NSA debate often do not realize how inexpensive and accessible is this technology to local law enforcement, private corporations, and criminals.

Cheap cloud storage and data mining has implications for freedom of association and freedom of thought.  The NSA via Snowden has made this issue starkly clearly... but the media and public miss the larger point that technology itself, not NSA abuses, are leading us to global surveillance state where we will be watched by any number of public and private parties without our knowledge or consent.

Note: This post intentionally over-estimates costs by taking retail prices, not at scale, and assuming naive software implementations.  A local law enforcement agency or Google-level corporation could easily reduce these costs by large factors (100-1000x).

On Amazon, bitcoin and Stan Lee

After experimenting with bitcoin in July 2010 ("the great slashdotting") and finding it to be a sound design, my thoughts ran in a predictable direction:  what are the implications of a global digital currency?  What are the engineering practicalities required to bootstrap a brand new digital economy from zero?

If you imagine a new currency being rolled out worldwide, the idea of how Amazon.com might implement the currency inevitably comes up.  Amazon's business has several major components that deal with payments of various types.  It is relevant to Amazon and bitcoin that we consider all of these payment types, not just the well known storefront payment flow.

• Amazon.com storefront.  Buy a book, pay with credit card, etc.
• Amazon Payments.  A bit of a Paypal clone, though they don't market it that way.  Can have a positive balance, send P2P payments in-system.
• Handling fulfillment and payout to merchants who sell goods through their systems.
• Amazon AWS Flexible Payments Service
• Amazon AWS DevPay
• In the time it took for you to read this, Amazon has probably created another cloud payment service.

While performing research related bitcoin, I examined the money transmittal space to learn which corporations maintained money transmittal licenses nationwide.  According to my research circa 2010, Amazon is one of the few Fortune 500 companies with money transmitter licensing in all US states.  Adopting bitcoin, at a minimum, probably requires Amazon to re-evaluate compliance at a time when they are also trying to lobby US states on sales tax issues.

The network effect (Amazon's size) must also be considered.  Amazon.com today is basically "the Internet store." No need to qualify further.  With upcoming local delivery efforts, that effect is even more pronounced.

Like Google or Wal-Mart, every move by a company of this size has enormous consequences, intended and unintended.  Amazon adopting bitcoin today would have a disruptive effect on bitcoin, credit card systems, and banks worldwide.  At scale, one hopes Amazon acknowledges that great power and aims to wield it responsibly.  It is a fair and rational position for a company of that size to sit back and let the market sort out which crypto-currency to adopt.

On the technical side of the equation, a new payment system at Amazon.com is likely a major undertaking.  Amazon's software is entirely homegrown, and quite complex.  So complex that their store evolved into a web services business (AWS).  Having been recruited by Amazon myself, and having friends who work at Amazon as engineers, I know that Amazon stays at the bleeding edge of computing technology.  Integrating bitcoin -- or any digital cash -- probably requires extensive software updates throughout the system.  Digital cash, after all, does not behave like a credit card or debit card.  Those behavior differences can ripple through highly custom software, increasing engineering costs.

As a bitcoin supporter, I certainly feel the aforementioned disruptive effect is a positive one for the world.  But there are many reasons why Amazon in particular would be conservative about adopting an experimental new digital cash.  Given the above factors, my prediction -- dating back to 2010 -- was always that Amazon would sit back and let others decide the bitcoin-or-not question.

Arthur C. Clarke on economic meltdowns and network congestion

Here is a fun passage from Arthur C. Clarke's Rama II fictional novel, published in 1989.  It presents an arguably realistic crash scenario for our [real world] financial systems.  Food for thought in the bitcoin economy or fiat economy both. We are incredibly dependent on computer financial databases.

In contrast, terrestrial affairs were dominated by the emerging world economic crisis. On May 1, 2134, three of the largest international banks announced that they were insolvent because of bad loans. Within two days a panic had spread around the world. The more than one billion home terminals with access to the global financial markets were used to dump individual portfolios of stocks and bonds. The communications load on the Global Network System (GNS) was immense. The data transfer machines were stretched far beyond their capabilities and design specifications. Data gridlock delayed transactions for minutes, then hours, contributing additional momentum to the panic.
 
By the end of a week two things were apparent—that over half of the world's stock value had been obliterated and that many individuals, large and small investors alike, who had used their credit options to the maximum, were now virtually penniless. The supporting data bases that kept track of personal bank accounts and automatically transferred money to cover margin calls were flashing disaster messages in almost 20 percent of the houses in the world.
 
In truth, however, the situation was much much worse. Only a small percentage of the transactions were actually clearing through all the supporting computers because the data rates in all directions were far beyond anything that had ever been anticipated. In computer language, the entire global financial system went into the "cycle slip" mode. Billions and billions of information transfers at lower priorities were postponed by the network of computers while the higher priority tasks were being serviced first.
 
The net result of these data delays was that in most cases individual electronic bank accounts were not properly debited, for hours or even days, to account for the mounting stock market losses, Once the individual investors realized what was occurring, they rushed to spend whatever was still showing in their balances before the computers completed all the transactions. By the time governments and financial institutions understood fully what was going on and acted to stop all this frenetic activity, it was too late. The confused system had crashed completely. To reconstruct what had happened required carefully dumping and interleaving the backup checkpoint files stored at a hundred or so remote centers around the world.
 
For over three weeks the electronic financial management system that governed all money transactions was inaccessible to everybody. Nobody knew how much money he had—or how much anyone else had. Since cash had long ago become obsolete, only eccentrics and collectors had enough bank notes to buy even a week's groceries. People began to barter for necessities. Pledges based on friendship and personal acquaintance enabled many people to survive temporarily. But the pain had only begun. Every time the international management organization that oversaw the global financial system would announce that they were going to try to come back on-line and would plead with people to stay off their terminals except for emergencies, their pleas would be ignored, processing requests would flood the system, and the computers would crash again.
 
It was only two more weeks before the scientists of the world agreed on an explanation for the additional brightness in the apparition of Halley's Comet. But it was over four months before people could count again on reliable data base information from the GNS. The cost to human society of the enduring chaos was incalculable. By the time normal electronic economic activity had been restored, the world was in a violent financial down-spin that would not bottom out until twelve years later. It would be well over fifty years before the Gross World Product would return to the heights reached before the Crash of 2134.

Bitcoin Core v0.9.0 release overview

The Bitcoin open source project has released a major new version, 0.9.0.  This update brings the usual basket of fixes, performance improvements, security enhancements and new features.  The Bitcoin Core Wallet (formerly Bitcoin-Qt) introduces a new direct-to-merchant payment method with the BIP 70 payment protocol and the workflow for receiving coins has been notably improved.  Under the hood, several improvements should reduce P2P network spam, enhance privacy and security, and improve performance.  For enterprise users, the wallet is made optional, introducing a blockchain-only "border router" mode.

Initial support for the BIP 70 payment protocol was added to the Bitcoin Core Wallet.  The payment protocol is an optional feature designed to upgrade the security and reliability of the customer-merchant payment process.  For the case where a direct connection between the customer and merchant already exists, such as when customer is shopping on a merchant's website, the payment protocol may be used to send payments directly from the customer's bitcoin wallet to the merchant.  This has several advantages: added security, speed, and the ability of a merchant to assist the customer in getting their transaction relayed and confirmed on the P2P network. Refund ability is also included. The goal is to make the payment process smooth and secure, and lessen dependence on everyday use of the now-familiar bitcoin addresses.

A recent trend has been the use of Bitcoin Core Server (bitcoind) in a new role.  Organizations with large bitcoin architectures will use bitcoind as a "border router" while developing their own custom wallet solutions.  This role involves bitcoind running the P2P network and distributed consensus services, providing a high quality payment firewall, while the organization manages their own keys and transactions.  The wallet, in this mode, may be disabled at compile time or runtime.  Some sites have seen memory savings of 40-200MB when running in router mode.

Many minor improvements have been made to payment network operation. Transaction relay rules have been tightened further, reducing several types of spam or malicious traffic, including the recent transaction malleability issues.  The anti-spam minimum fees have been reduced, as they were set at a time when bitcoin's price was much lower. Historically, these fees are only reduced.  Future "smart fee" work is intended to eliminate the hardcoded minimums completely.  A dynamic system and open, free fee market are the desired long term goals. Unrelated to fees, a new "reject" P2P message should provide useful feedback to nodes submitting invalid transactions.  Additional DoS and privacy protections were added.

It should be noted that this fee reduction only applies to the suggested anti-spam minimums.  The actual fee paid by users is determined by what miners are willing to include in a block.  Reducing the anti-spam minimum fee should increase the chance of a transaction being relayed across the network to various miners.  This does not imply a global network fee reduction.  Transaction fees are and continue to be set by the mining market.

Automated services and websites make use of Bitcoin Core Server's programmable RPC API.  Many new, minor features were added to RPC to facilitate blockchain queries, validate blockchain data and bitcoin addresses, and other utility features that bitcoin websites find useful.

New features for bitcoin developers include a new autotools-based build system, harmonizing bitcoin development with many other packages in the open source world.  A regression test mode has been introduced to facilitate automated bitcoin testing.  This "regtest" mode features near-zero block generation times, permitting a site to simulate thousands of test blockchain scenarios in a short amount of time.

This update also includes platform-specific improvements.  Windows client is now 64-bit, enabling better performance and stabilty.  GCC's stack smashing feature is enabled on Windows, as it already was on other platforms.  Apple OSX integration was improved.  Finally, support for the older 10.5 OSX/32-bit platform was removed.

Outside of new features, this update includes several fixes and tools designed to avoid problems with zero-confirmation malleable transactions.  (Confirmed transactions are, by definition, not malleable)

Read the full release notes at
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/release-notes/release-notes-0.9.0.md

How to support bitcoin core development

After this CoinDesk article, various fora have asked how to support bitcoin core development.  Here is a quick list, in order of personal preference.  Speaking only for myself, not my employer or other devs.

1. Grow the ecosystem.  Grow your own in-house engineering expertise. Learn open source engineering. Learn the bitcoin design (PDF), the bitcoin protocol, then contribute back to the reference implementation.  Ask questions.  We love great questions from people trying to learn (though you are expected to be self-motivated enough to google for the answers yourself, first...)

2. Help with testing.  You don't have to be a programmer, just a capable computer user with attention to detail.  We are constantly starved for real testing.  If you can help write additional tests, even better.

3. Commit the resources necessary to running a full node (bitcoind), 24/7, to help maintain the payment network.  This requires sufficient disk space and bandwidth, as well as the critical need to poke a hole in the firewall, permitting incoming TCP connections to port 8333.

Edit: OK, this doesn't have much to do with development.  It does help the network, though.  Also consider seeding the blockchain torrent.

4. Donate to the Bitcoin Foundation, which supports two core developers.

5. (Shameless plug!)  Buy things from BitPay merchants.  BitPay supports open source by employing me to work on bitcoin development.

6. I'm not bitcoin-rich nor debt-free like many other early adopters, and have a donation address at 1BrufViLKnSWtuWGkryPsKsxonV2NQ7Tcj.  But really, if you are a starving kid in Africa, don't send money, I do more than OK on a generous engineer's salary.

We all benefit when the amount of deep bitcoin knowledge is widely distributed.  It is always helpful to grow the number of technical people with deep bitcoin understanding.

Even more fundamentally, however, it is critical to understand that bitcoin is an open source project, with all that entails.

To be successful, to continue, folks who depend on bitcoin must contribute back.  As Gavin Andresen noted during the recent T.M. kerfluffle,

Do not treat the core development team as if we were a
commercial company that sold you a software library.  That is not how open
source works; if you are making a profit using the software, you are
expected to help develop, debug, test, and review it.

blackbox: Bitcoin-enabled, decentralized cloud

Rethinking data centers, one node at a time

Bittorrent and bitcoin have proven the power of peer-to-peer, decentralized networking.  Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Cloud demonstrate the market desire for cloud storage and cloud processing. Why not combine these into a single package?

The storage system Tahoe LAFS demonstrates how the data center may be inverted, making the end user the ultimate provider of data storage services.  Continue this idea writ large, and apply it to cloud storage, cloud processing, and other cloud services.

Now, boil cloud services down to their primary components, and consider a user interface that anyone, even largely computer illiterate, could manage.

blackbox: core components

Ultimately, computers provide resources.  These resources may be enumerated, and resold on the free market.  For cloud services, these resources are

• CPU cores
• Temporary memory (RAM)
• Persistent memory (SSD, hard drive)
• Internet bandwidth

To make these resources usable, further meta-resources are required,

• Amount of resource available
• Time window when resource is available
• Bitcoin address for payments
• SIN or other decentralized identity

Given these few metrics, we can conceive of "blackbox" software that connects to TradeNet, offers the above resources on the free market, and receives payment when the resources are utilized.

The user experience is as simple as it gets:  Turn on your computer, run the blackbox, and get paid.

Automated service, cost routing

blackbox is not a new idea.  These sorts of ideas are decades old.  The new twist is adding an efficient digital currency (bitcoin) with online, automated, decentralized markets.

Computing jobs, be it 24/7 real-time services ("run my website") or periodic batch processing ("balance today's accounting and sales records") will be layered on top of blackbox's low level cloud services in precisely the same manner as cloud services are used today.

Based on your service needs, nodes will be selected based on cost, reliability, reputation, geolocation, speed, and many other factors.  Requests for service will be matched with offers for service.  Contracts will be agreed upon, perhaps lasting only 24 hours, or an hour, or 60 seconds.  Payment terms may be guaranteed through multi-signature transactions, with reputation, escrow and arbitration ensuring that all parties have incentives to deliver.

Keep us online and honest

The two primary weak points of a decentralized, generalized cloud network are resource accounting and network defense.

Resource accounting includes issues such as ensuring that participants X, Y, and Z all deliver their contractually-promised resources, or are highlighted for lack of delivery.  Service delivery fails for any number of reasons:  malicious action, hardware or software failure, human error.  Ultimately the reasons for service delivery failure are not important. Nodes will develop a reputation for good or bad service over time.

Network defense will involve associating and disassociating with various parties based on their reputation.  As in Tahoe-LAFS, most consumers of computing services will communicate with layers of software 1-2 layers removed from the low-level blackbox software itself.  This offers privacy for the provider, as well as shielding blackbox users themselves from many attacks.  Other defenses will depend more on the precise P2P technologies involved in TradeNet and blackbox.

Mesh network writ large

Mesh networks provide an example of a large, useful service collectively built from tiny components.  TradeNet takes the concept further, imagining a mesh of markets.  blackbox is simply the next logical extension of thought:  once easy, automated, anyone-can-join markets exist, it becomes easy to resell one's own computing resources using modern software that combines those computing resources into a greater collective whole.

Once these P2P cloud services are available, developers will create more useful software layered on top:  web hosting, email services, video processing, all the services one can perform in the cloud today.  Presumably, with the free market at work, costs would be lowered for many, while utilizing computing power that would otherwise be sitting around idle.

With blackbox, a user enters their bitcoin address, and tells the software to make use of the computer, when the owner is away.  Computers inside data centers will run blackbox 24/7.

blackbox 2.0

All of the above may be implemented, in theory, given today's technology.  Improving the system further involves additional data, permitting additional price discovery.

Recent hardware trends have included a focus on efficiency and power usage, a welcome change from decades of counting CPU cycles/second.  blackbox 2.0 would examine local electricity prices, and determine if contributing a resource is economically viable, considering the power usage involved.