27
votes
Are Free Software developers at risk? A potential threat to Free Software developers looms in the form of an ongoing lawsuit in the UK involving Bitcoin and its core developers.
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Are Free Software developers at risk? - FSFE
- Word count
- 1301 words
It seems like that depends on the bug. Is it a protocol change?
The right to fork is important and useful in many cases, but for Bitcoin, it seems largely besides the point, since whether a new block is accepted depends on consensus. Consensus depends on the software that most Bitcoin miners run. If we want to know who has the power to change consensus, a relevant question is how software updates are usually distributed. Are updates automatic? How hard would it be to switch?
Making your own fork of an OS or a browser is more useful, but it’s only the beginning as far as winning significant market share.
The power in this case lies with the miners. The court is completely uninformed.
Do they use that power or do they normally take automatic updates from somewhere? How many competing implementations are there?
As we’ve seen with Redis, the right to fork can be important in exceptional cases, but sometimes, there is one main implementation and people just take the updates, so whoever publishes the updates controls what gets run. For minor updates, people upgrading might not even read the release notes.
The miners use that power constantly. Changes to the Bitcoin protocol are implemented as BIPs which can be turned on and off as flags. When they mine a block they add their set of flags to that block which officially gets recorded as a vote for the BIP. If a vast majority of the last 14 days worth of blocks have a flag it's considered adopted. If it passes the remaining minority would be left behind as a blockchain fork. Bitcoin has had a few of these forks in its history (Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold).
You can also hard fork the software and start the blockchain over from scratch, with everyone having a 0 balance. That's essentially what most alt-chains and shit-coins are.
Git itself is a blockchain (git is the source code version management software used by Bitcoin). Because it's a blockchain there's resistance to starting over from scratch. But the Bitcoin blockchain holds perhaps millions of times more weight due to its monetary value. So the Bitcoin blockchain integrity is what we should think of when discussing software forks. The software chain follows the Bitcoin chain, not the other way around. And the miners, literally, write the Bitcoin blockchain.
Small correction: A blockchain prevents any point in history being modified without points between that point and the current point being modified but it provides no 'resistance' whatsoever. The resistance for Bitcoin's case comes from the proof of work algorithm. You essentially need to do enough work to surpass the amount of work others did from the point of modification, not only that but you need to work faster than the miners on chain(aka having 51% of the hash power) so you can pass their work and make people accept your chain.
Also that's why it's easy to change git history even though it's a blockchain. You can just rebase it and amend the commits. There's no separate mechanism that determines which history is genuine.
Thanks for explaining how they do voting.
Git uses a merkle tree, but it doesn’t have any of that other stuff, so I’m not sure there’s much relationship? When forking some software, you don’t need to keep its history or even use the same source control system. (Although, it would make it easier to merge patches from another fork.)
Faketoshi again? JFC this dude cannot stop shitting up everything he touches. The world would be a better place without him. He's not even a real "Dr" - he claims to have multiple PhDs, but has never submitted any evidence for any of them. (As in, he hasn't even submitted a diploma mill certificate.)
For the (blessedly) uninitiated, ALAB did a great episode on him a few years ago showing just how insane he is, though it's a obviously bit out of date at this point: https://www.alabseries.com/episodes/episode-3-faketoshi-the-perfect-client
TL;DR - This dude is a con-artist in every sense of the word who has committed some of the most brazen fraud imaginable, been called out numerous times for it (including in court, where he was spinning lies wilder than you get from Alex Jones), should be taken seriously by nobody (except a psychiatrist, because he's either faking mental illness really well for his grift or needs to be involuntarily committed), and might just destroy free software in the UK.
In the event they are found liable, I’ll use my usual question I use against uncritical GDPR stans. Presuming the developers neither live in the UK nor have UK assets, how enforceable would such a judgment be? How many nations will have the self-respect to say “cool story: we ain’t enforcing it” when the debt collector comes knocking?