Bitcoin Foundation Launches to ‘Standardize, Protect and Promote’ Bitcoin | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin Foundation Launches to ‘Standardize, Protect and Promote’ Bitcoin

betabeat.com

89 pointsnitashatiku27 comments

Of course, the Linux Foundation is about promoting an operating system that has been largely marginalized

Bollocks. Linux has not been marginalized. It is dominating the server market, embedded devices, and smartphones in the form of android.

whereas the Bitcoin Foundation will work to promote a cryptocurrency sometimes used for blackmarket activity.

Haven't you heard? The dollars are used for black market activities too.

I just want to clarify that kiba is criticizing the betabeat article, not the bitcoin devs.

Given that some core Bitcoin devs are also Linux kernel devs, they would not make the big mistake of saying that Linux is marginalized.

That kernel/bitcoin link is something I haven't heard of and pretty interesting, do you have any sources?

Jeff Garzik, Con Colivas. Anyone else?

Those are the only ones I can think of (and likely the only ones).

A while ago I wrote that perhaps the greatest contribution the Bitcoin experiment will make to humankind is to teach you and me and our neighbors more about the realities of economics. And now I will add that the Bitcoin experiment will also contribute to greater understanding of how nonprofit industry associations are organized to protect the economic interests of for-profit businesses. A lot of new industries have discovered that a few bad actors who screw up early can damage the reputation of the entire industry, and there are many previous examples of "competing" companies in a new industry banding together to promote consumer protection, as they say, and to promote the growth of their market. We'll see how this goes for Bitcoin.

"A lot of new industries have discovered that a few bad actors who screw up early can damage the reputation of the entire industry"

Please cite some examples. I can't come up with any, and this is intuitively false to me. Productive industries steamroll over bad actors and indiscretion. Railroads, gold-mining, and arguably social gaming were propelled by bad actors.

I think an encrypted currency base managed only by computers and the market is fairer than a system run by a few men. Also I like privacy.

I think it could be fairer or it could be a way to get stuck with a broken monetary policy forever.

Bitcoin can easily be forked and changed though.

I am not sure that is true. As small as the ecosystem is, I would not want to try to duplicate it.

In a very literal sense it can be forked: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin

You wouldn't need to try and duplicate an ecosystem. People with nodes on the network would "vote with their CPU power" to support the version they liked the best - so the best one would naturally get the most support.

the best one would naturally get the most support

I don't think so. A "better" Bitcoin fork that has no MtGox, no BitInstant, no BitPay, no blockexplorer, etc. would probably have very low adoption.

agree and disagree. if a fork is demonstrably, significantly better, then adoption will grow and eventually, in general, the better will win. this is how evolution works.

No, the most popular version will get the most support. You still have the problem that a forked chain stops being compatible, so if a node recieves coins in the new chain after the fork, the old chain won't acknowledge it. This is a big practicle barrier to implementation.

You could harvest a large number of new chain coins before you go public, and offer an exchange service, but that would involve you owning alot of new-chain bitcoin, which would be a concern to people switing in.

There are plenty of forks running already. There's "litecoin", a fork that changes the proof of work algorithm to scrypt in an attempt to make GPU's less useful for mining.

There's "PPCoin", a fork that adds "Proof of Stake" alongside "Proof of Work" in an attempt to reduce the energy consumption of the mining process.

There's others as well. Some bitcoin proponents consider these "scam" coins as they have limited use other than speculation, others consider them experiments in different approaches. But they do show that forking bitcoin is fairly easy.

Don't forget Namecoin, repurposing the Bitcoin block chain for storing DNS records!

The only monetary policy that isn't broken, is one that doesn't exist.

I don't think that's possible. Even keeping the number of BTC fixed is a policy.

True, but participation in bitcoin is voluntary, whereas participation in governmental monetary policy is not :)

Here's a list of all the anonymous donations they have received so far (doesn't include membership donations): http://blockexplorer.com/address/1BTCorgHwCg6u2YSAWKgS17qUad... (currently 26.5 BTC)

I hope we'll be publishing first-day membership numbers as well. My goal is to publish all our public keys. How cool would that be? Total financial transparency.

Here's their website:

https://www.bitcoinfoundation.org/

Looks down from here :( (and here: http://www.isup.me/www.bitcoinfoundation.org)

So it is. They also have the domain http://www.bitcoinfoundation.com/ - but no luck.

Ah, the long-storied September announcement. Pretty good idea overall. I'd be happiest seeing a set of security best-practices agreed upon and some sort of mechanism for organizations and businesses to elect for auditing.

Totally agreed; this and paying Gavin were my two main motivations upfront.

I really desire bitcointalk'ers to have some objective way to assess business quality when they consider how many percent per week return is a reasonable no-risk promise.

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