Like most other readers here, my initial reaction is "Thanks, I hate it." I especially hate the assertion that they're increasing customization when in reality they've steadily been removing/hiding real customization options (e.g. compact theme, UrlBar.preventClickSelectsAll).
But, on further consideration I see the value. This feature isn't for power users. The goal of this feature is to increase chances that normal everyday users will make Firefox their daily-driver browser. For many people, having a custom colored browser will be a deciding factor to keep them using Firefox. This is why they didn't call it "themes", which is a techy word that would cause many people to gloss-over and ignore it altogether.
And, in reality, Firefox is still the most customizable browser for power-users. This feature doesn't remove userChrome.css, it doesn't stop users from editing thousands of options via about:config. It doesn't prevent hardcore power users from editing omni.ja to restore preventClickSelectsAll functionality.
So frankly, I hope this feature can help increase Firefox's market share by even a little bit. The more people using Firefox - even if they're not power-users - the better for the future of the open web.
I'm curious why you chose to use the term "bcash" to refer to BCH. No exchanges or mainstream projects use that term to refer to BCH. As far as I'm aware it's primarily used as a pejorative, so it seems strange that you'd use it here.
As far as BCH's additional value: I'd suggest researching the block size debate. This debate is BCH's entire reason for existing. This article [1] from 2016 by Mike Hearn contains a good primer on the block size debate itself. He ended up quitting development of Bitcoin, but others decided to raise the blocksize limit - with or without the majority, thus creating BCH. Succinctly, BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment.
Its authors, original funders, and most exchanges originally referred to it as "BCC" which was, unfortunately, also the symbol for the Bitconnect ponzi scheme.
"Bitcoin Cash" is both a mouthful and enabler of outright fraudulent behaviour, where people are sold BCH and think they got Bitcoin at a really good price (was more common in the past but still happens now). Just about every business that accepts Bitcoin payments has continual problems with people sending BCH because they thought they had and were sending Bitcoin and BCH copied Bitcoin's address format.
In any other field a knock-off-name like "Bitcoin Cash" would be knocked flat as a trademark infringement, so the public is atypically prepared to protect itself from it.
So you can imagine that many Bitcoiners are not eager to use a purposefully deceptive name that has already created a lot of problems for actual users.
Plus in many people's view Bcash is earnestly a better name, but due to weird symmetry breaking and hateful cult like behaviour means that even though it's a perfectly fine name the BCH pumpers go all RMS-whining-about-GNU/Linux over any use of it which is just amusing.
> He ended up quitting development of Bitcoin
You've seen his side. For an uncharitable take on his contributions:
Mike's sum total contributions to the development of the bitcoin software were a half dozen commits, most of which were trivial string changes. ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1337008.0 )
Mike Hearn has a long history advocating for user hostile features in free software, for example he lobbied the Tor project extensively to add censorship. He pushed for adding centralizing features in Bitcoin like blocking all tor peers, phoning home, etc. He was a former employee of QinetiQ, a R&D organization for British intelligence and a system he created at google turned up in the snowden documents as one whos data was being leaked to the british government, shortly after that he parted ways with google. His long term view for Bitcoin security is that it would depend on (government backed) trusted institutions.
Hearn was always largely cultural outsider to Bitcoin-- which many Bitcoin users were wary of, not just on the tech side but in the community in general. There is nothing wrong with reading his perspective, but you should understand some of the context for it.
[I'm aware that this perspective is arguably not the most 'fair'-- e.g. pointing out he worked for British intelligence when I have no reason to think his efforts to centralized Bitcoin were due to anything but his own personal fetish for authority-- but I think it's a good example of how far apart culturally he was from most Bitcoiners. It's also a bit ironic: some of the attacks cited in this thread accuse me/blockstream/bitcoin-devs of being intelligence agents, but they happily ignore the person we know worked in signals intelligence. In any case, unlike the attacks that he and his supporters here lob at me, they're not falsehoods. I'm happy to support them with links.]
> Succinctly, BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment
I think that's a largely correct statement. But what that experiment shows is telling. BCH's usage is insubstantial compared to Bitcoin (even though the way it was launched forced exchanges almost universally to adopt it). As predicted it is completely unable to secure itself using fees (it typically generates less than $1 per block in fees), making it dependant on continued inflation to pay for security. Not only does the usage not exist, but it has also failed economically in the market: It has lost ~90% of its value in USD terms, and ~95% of its peak value compared Bitcoin. It currently trades at 1.2% of Bitcoin's value after years of almost monotone decline after its first few months.
[It also, sadly, is not a pure realization of the Big Block experiment. Acknowledging the tradeoffs highlighted by the Bitcoin developers, they have continued to limit the blocksize in BCH (though to levels a few times higher than Bitcoin) and introduced many other questionable and controversial changes, spawning multiple additional incompatible forks. Their changes also include an "automatic checkpoints" mechanism that totally breaks the proof of work security model. Weirdly, the "big block vision" is probably most faithfully followed by "BSV", which is a system created and promoted by people that few would disagree are outright scammers, so it too is going nowhere]
I think it's fine and good that people experiment with things (even where I think that the outcome is obvious), the world is only improved by that. But fraudulently claiming the system "is" bitcoin, or spreading malicious, false, and defamatory claims about their competition and critics and engaging in outright harassment in an effort to justify and promote their tokens is really uncool and shouldn't be rewarded.
Gold has had a widely agreed upon definition for thousands of years. Bitcoin is a ~decade old open source project with a clearly established philosophical divide between small-blockers and big-blockers. In other open source project variants, small name changes like adding/changing a suffix or prefix are common, why would Bitcoin be the exception?
Given that you accepted that BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment, your comparison of it to gold-plated tungsten is flawed. BCH has a legitimate reason to exist. Your comparison might be more apt if BCH weren't born out of the block-size debate, but that's simply not the reality.
Ultimately, the market has spoken on this issue. The Bitcoin Cash name has been accepted as valid. It's not a trademark violation and it's not fraud akin to gold-plated tungsten. It's a legitimate continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment.
The term "bcash" on the other hand is quite clearly a pejorative and a transparent attempt to manipulation language. I'd expect better on a forum like this, but of course there will be some low-brow argumentation style anywhere you go. I'm frankly surprised you're still defending its use at this point.
I disagree with your statement that bcash is manipulative language.
I now understand where you are coming from after reading your posts but there is a community out there referring to bitcoin cash as bcash since its short and succinct and easy to speak.
Also might I suggest to reflect on your posts? The tone sounds quite angry and seems to stem from frustration which can lead to reading bad intent where is none.
Open source projects often fork. To take one such example, years ago X.org forked from XFree86. Both projects considered themselves implementations of the X Window System. Can you imagine if XFree86 supporters insisted that X.org not be allowed to use "X" in their name? If these supporters invented their own name for X.org, say "Zorg", made outlandish claims that "X.org" sounded offensive to them, and that they earnestly believed that "Zorg" was a better name for the project, even though no one in the project itself referred to it by that name. Would you not agree that those using the term "Zorg" in this example are using manipulative language?
Another way to look at this: the difference between small-blockers and big-blockers is a deep philosophical divide, much like what often occurs in politics. Imagine trying to have a civil political discussion with someone that has different political beliefs than you, and that person keeps using loaded terminology, rather than neutral terminology. You can imagine that under these circumstances, it would be increasingly difficult to keep the conversation civil, and you'd be well within your rights to ask your interlocutor to use neutral terminology. If they refused, it would be a reflection on their lack of civility, not yours.
How is it even possibly pejorative? BCH has the problem that it's read by many people as "bitch", and is even used that way by by developers (the nodes software gets called BCHN 'bitching'), and more than a few people find that offensive.
> market has spoken on this issue
I just checked a half dozen exchanges-- none call it "Bitcoin Cash" in their interfaces, BCH yes. Calling it "Bitcoin Cash" has a well understood problem of tricking people so serious businesses avoid it.
And likewise, BTC fees are also at a local maximum[1]. Unfortunately, nothing has been done to actually scale the BTC blockchain since the last bull run. Onchain transactional capacity is the same as it was 2 years ago (limited to ~400k tx/day globally). Major n^2 transaction validation bottlenecks still remain within the Bitcoin Core software. With no plans to address these bottlenecks and increase onchain capacity, the fundamentals of BTC scaling haven't changed at all since the last time the market went boom and then bust.
Plenty of criticisms to be had about bitcoin's scalability but what you said isn't true.
Quite a bit has changed with the prevalance of Segwit transactions, some-to-many Lightning transactions, a lot of Liquid transactions, and transaction bundling. Specifically in reaction to how the network convulsed last bull market and correction.
Yeah it still sucks and is hardly competitive especially on the layer-2 front, but lets at least be accurate about why it sucks lol.
Wrapped Bitcoin offerings are better than native Bitcoin. There is a lot of money being made in helping people wrap and unwrap their Bitcoin for use and trade (not for custody though). It will be very prevalent this cycle. There are a lot of options for people to be unburdened by Bitcoin's layer-1 while being able to manage risk and capture alpha with the market gyrations, in unlimited amounts. All comes down to if people want to learn, this time, but the landscape is extremely different.
The honest reality is that you will want to watch is if Ethereum's capacity can keep up fast enough. If mentioning the Ethereum Network caused a convulsion, then you really need to re-evaluate what is going on. It is acting as a trading portal and center that has almost nothing to do with the Ether cryptocurrency. It has robust Layer-1 trading systems, 10 competing Layer-2 offerings that already work right now which the Layer-1 systems will very quickly upgrade to (bitcoin has 1 Layer-2 system called Lightning, in incremental progress for 5 years and it doesn't work very well), while also being in the process of updating its own Layer-1 consensus layer to increase throughput by two-three orders of magnitude.
Yes things have been done, but nothing that's effective.
Any layer-2 solution is just a dead end as you still have to pay the high fees to enter and exit. And it's funny, and sad, that you bring up Liquid as a potential solution because it's a centralized solution and we might as well be content with PayPal if we're going that route.
I don't consider it a solution, I consider it a reality.
If you want to transact in unlimited amounts very quickly, there are extremely viable options. If you then want to pay a little bit more to custody your asset in the most secure way onchain, you can do that. Let's step back and look at the criticism: we are still talking about nearly instant on-chain settlement, and by instant I mean within an hour, at any time of day any day of the week.
We are talking about fees lower than what trading commissions were for decades, but being mad that it isn't simultaneously better than merchant processing fees or for poor people all the time.
There is just a parallel world here with plenty of options, completely accessible now with atomic swaps or bonded minting/burning in a way that wasn't available even just two years ago. The exchanges are mostly irrelevant except the largest fiat onramps, which have recently expanded too.
That's where we are. If the market really wants to get frothy this time, I think the capacity is quite ready. And for things that aren't ready due to programming or people just not using them, they incentivize is there to be a catalyst.
what high fees to enter and exit. Lightning fees are very low (typically( about 0.00001 pence. Liquid is not needed for lightning. As an end user you can use a lightning wallet and enjoy fast lowest fee transactions.
You need to pay for an expensive on-chain Bitcoin transaction before you can use Lightning. You must also have enough money so you can pay for another on-chain transaction if the channel closes and you must issue a dispute to not lose your funds.
Did I mention that if you open a channel to the wrong hub, you must open yet another channel, with all associated costs?
It's ridiculous to even entertain Lightning as a viable option when there are other low-fee and fully functioning cryptocurrencies that aren't gimped by a tiny blocksize.
I am sorry. As a lighting wallet user, none of that is true anymore. The underlying channel management is abstracted away from the user. The experience is pleasant. I won't jump to another cryptocurrency as BTC with lightning ticks all the marks for me.
The only thing missing in the BTC ecosystem is smart contracts, but I am happy for that to be a separate ecosystem (ETH or otherwise).
This issue is frankly far more important than the style changes they made. It's a muscle-memory issue that drastically affects daily usage. I was so desperate to restore the sane behavior of not selecting everything on a single click that I was recompiling firefox prior to discovering this workaround.
My interpretation is they're saying that Chromium's address bar code is complex deeply integrated with many other parts of the code-base (including many parts that interact with Google's search APIs). On the other hand, Firefox's address bar code exposes a simple javascript API. This means that making and maintaining custom modifications to the address bar is easier with Firefox.
Ever since Chrome Beta users have been able to change the search engine that powers the omnibox (to include autocomplete suggestions, not just search results).
Changing the search engine that powers the omnibox is different than changing the behaviour of the omnibox, which is kind of a lot when it comes to predictive search, predictive completion and a bucket of other things that I wish you could turn off (or can be turned off for a while before Google decides you shouldn't ever need or want to turn it off). It's a target with a huge amount of churn. I agree that Firefox is a more sane target as a developer.
I'm sure you've seen the infamous "tank man" picture, which provides direct evidence that the PRC rolled tanks into Tiananmen Square. The above picture isn't as iconic, but it shows what the PRC did with those tanks: they crushed and killed anyone in their path.
If this is indicative of the depth of your knowledge about government atrocities, I suggest you stop. Worse would be to talk about reeducation camps, or organ harvesting. It's meme-like at this point and has no bearing on reality.
Things that actually happened: rural protests, corruption, razing houses by eminent domain, medical malpractice, even some obscure musician being blacklisted, things that can happen everywhere but happen with "Chinese characteristics" in a more volatile way because of the lack of rule of law and due process, often ending with violence or curtailment of basic rights. But these are not as trendy and nobody really gives a shit about how Chinese people live, people just want to feel morally superior.
Extreme Islamic is a difficult problem to deal with globally. Look at Israel, they are taking extreme measure too.
Historically, this extreme ideology comes from Western culture. Both Christian and Islamic are exclusive religions. Drives each other nuts for thousand years.
US played a very bad role in modern days and caused the situation out of control. Iraq war and other mediterranean wars, all of them are unethical anti-human-rights wars. They have destroyed so many families. That's why nobody in the world believe US's so called human rights propaganda even though there are some America truly care.
Chinese don't believe that US is able to solve their own extreme Islamic problem. They invented their own method. They believe that the fundamental reason for the extreme behavior is because they are excluded from the society and the economy. They want to reeducate them to get them involved. However, the approach is a bit harsh. Not quite sure whether they will succeed.
Frankly speaking, getting everyone involved in the society is the key for US as well. Rich people don't pay tax, don't participate in the economy, and don't care about poor guys. They have their robots. More and more poor people have left the economy completely for years. The middle class is vanishing quickly. The extreme behaviors are emerging fast these days.
Before we point our fingers at other people, we really should figure out our own issues.
The American government being wrong does not make the Chinese government right. There's actually enormous pressure on Washington, both internationally and internally, to stop these human rights violating conflicts that only serve to further inflame sectarian violence. Right now, as some call for war with Iran, there are other voices calling for peace.
This is not a competition for which country's government is more right, rather it is an effort to promote global peace, prosperity and human rights. Rather than zero-sum thinking, people of conscience seek to lift all boats.
If you look you'll always find others doing wrong. You can look historically and find for most countries some rather big wrongs.
But the question is what is happening right now. The Chinese government has rather successfully made two ethnic groups minorities in their own homelands through an intense government-stimulated migration of Han Chinese to in particular Tibet and Xinjiang. Both used to be own states that were brought into China in the creation of the PRC. What you see in Tibet and Xinjiang is a direct result of that policy of forced integration/ethnic takeover.
Israel is a perfect comparison because the Israel conflict similarly stems from the creation of Israel itself: a country was declared by the colonial power (UK) of the Palestine territory due to a 2000-year old claim of that being the Jewish homeland. This was done without any care or concern for what the current citizens of those territories wanted. And those left in the territories are massively disadvantaged in all aspects of life. That is the source of the Israel-Palestine conflict and Israel's conflict with most Muslim neighbors. And the Uighur conflict similarly stems from the annexation of those territories - with different cultural and ethnic groups - by the PRC. The religious expression of this conflict is a symptom, not the cause.
Think of Chinese resistance against the brutal Japanese occupiers. Your people, from our perspective today, were fighting heroically against an outside enemy that wanted to assimilate them and steal the territory and resources. That's how Tibetans and Uighurs see the takeover of Han-Chinese and the PRC.
There are memes that everybody hears or passes around without any critical processing, like "in China they eat dogs" or "in Alabama they marry their siblings". Is it correct or incorrect? Is it not happening? You can ask yourself the same questions. When I say it has no bearing on reality, I don't mean that it has no reality, I mean that it has no bearing on reality.
That's very shocking to hear, but I'm not entirely surprised to hear that you doubt these events. The combination of censorship and propaganda is very effective. I try to keep an unbiased perspective and I am very aware of how the hidden motives of governments and media organizations can skew the news, even in the freest of countries.
My broader point though is that you won't change your mind because your livelihood and freedom depends on you denying or ignoring the actions of your government. So just like in the VPN experiment, we can remove the wall, but you will not leave the prison. I feel sorry for you, individually and personally, though it's probably for the best that you're not interested in questioning these things too closely.
I think the other posters all provide clear evidence of the issues raised. I'm wondering if you had a look and changed it at least started to doubt your current views? If not, what would convince you?
More importantly, you seem to be quite educated and tech literate, and use ok f vpn is natural for you. What % of the population would you think is able to access vpns and outside media and sites?
Ulbricht never presented a defense for the murder-for-hire charge because the charge was dropped and never went to trial. Ulbricht has been sentenced to double-life in prison for all non-violent charges.
This isn't right - his attempted hits directly led to a longer prison sentence and he could have refuted the factual allegations if he had a defense for them.
Looking at libgcrypt's patch [1], it looks like the mitigation technique they're using is to blind the private key and message hash with a random number before performing point addition, and then unblinding the result of the point addition. This unfortunately requires an extra 3 point multiplication operations, so it probably isn't a good solution where performance is critical.
According to the article, the private key information is leaked through memory caches, so it looks like libgcrypt's solution just ensures that the data written to memory caches is random, rather than leaking the private key.
Also according to the article, libsecp256k1 isn't vulnerable, and they still only do 2 point multiplications [2] (compared to libgcrypt's 5 point multiplications). So it is possible to mitigate this attack efficiently.
These are the same tired arguments that have been brought many times before in the previous few years. What's the point of an article like this that contributes nothing to the discourse?
> It’s the job of the SEC and other regulators to protect ordinary investors from misleading and fraudulent schemes. It’s time we gave them the legislative authority to do their job.
Ah, I see, it looks like he's trying to drum up support for regulations that would help the banking-industrial complex that he's a part of.
> They actively censored and silenced people who were complaining.
Forget the issues with design. The active censorship by both Reddit admins and power-hungry moderators is the real issue that Reddit is facing. Reddit used to be a bastion of free-flowing ideas and discussion. Now it's a hive of groupthink and curated brand-friendly content.
I still frequent Reddit because it has enough network-effect to still be worthwhile to me. But that can change on a dime, often triggered by something unrelated, like a UI re-design (e.g. like what happened Digg).
I'm surprised the article didn't call out what happened to Digg during their redesign and subsequent flood of users leaving for Reddit. I figured that's why Reddit thought it was worth the money of hiring 20 designers.
But, on further consideration I see the value. This feature isn't for power users. The goal of this feature is to increase chances that normal everyday users will make Firefox their daily-driver browser. For many people, having a custom colored browser will be a deciding factor to keep them using Firefox. This is why they didn't call it "themes", which is a techy word that would cause many people to gloss-over and ignore it altogether.
And, in reality, Firefox is still the most customizable browser for power-users. This feature doesn't remove userChrome.css, it doesn't stop users from editing thousands of options via about:config. It doesn't prevent hardcore power users from editing omni.ja to restore preventClickSelectsAll functionality.
So frankly, I hope this feature can help increase Firefox's market share by even a little bit. The more people using Firefox - even if they're not power-users - the better for the future of the open web.