rsi_oww

"Known restrictions...No standard libs...Not all methods of builtin types are there by default...No iterator, generator, xrange stuff."

There's also the fact that everything is still, at the core, pure javascript. For example you can't print("string" * 10) or even iterate over a dictionary.

I'm not saying this to put down the project - I am very interested in it - but it cannot parse pure python, and that isn't the goal of the project.

But you can't do that with Transcrypt, either. Both are "not quite python" and won't run regular python code. There is very little difference between the goal of the two projects.

"The reports of Bitcoin's problems are greatly exaggerated".

There is a small group who seem really good at spreading a message of "Bitcoin is about to collapse". They are doing this either because they control a lot of competing currency (Ethereum), or because they think it will help adoption of their Bitcoin fork.

The reality is, 95% of Bitcoiners are very happy with the team working on the protocol, and the market seems happy too (the price has gone up +68% over the last 6 months.)

But you absolutely should not take some random internet person's word for it. You'll have to invest large amounts of time reading bitcointalk, reddit and the like to make a sound decision. Luckily it's pretty fascinating reading. In time when Bitcoin's future is clearer, it will either be worth much more, or nearly nothing. But I think you can get great insight into where it is going by following it closely today.

Yes, the pro-fork group say they simply want to change the limit of megabytes per block from 1MB to 2MB. Somehow this is worth forking the network over.

This may not sound like much, but also keep in mind eight months ago it was 20MB, with an eventual jump into the GB range, that they were pushing for. Also, recently they are talking about removing any limit altogether.

This change seems small but the consequences would not be, since it limits who can run a full client and centralizes control to those who can (companies, not individuals).

There are better ways to achieve the same goal and keep the decentralization, but they are not so simple, and need to be fully tested before rolling out. One exciting thing in the pipeline, is a caching layer that sits on top of bitcoin, which allows instant, true microtransactions. In the short term there's "segwit" which also brings all sorts of other advantages.

That is true, because /r/bitcoin is about bitcoin.

If you want to promote Ethereum, you can do so on /r/ethereum/.

I am sure promoting dog ownership over cats is frowned upon by /r/cats readers, too.

Everyone needs to follow the One True Ledger, or you can't know if Bob really sent you $100 of Bitcoins that will be accepted by Joe.

There are already competing implementations like btcd written in Go. That's not the issue.

This post is from a developer who is part of a small group in the bitcoin world, who want to change the rules of the protocol. Anyone that did not follow those rule changes would see a different ledger.

That's not something that should be done in bitcoin - changes this big should be very hard to pull off, and require consensus of all parties. Most are strongly against these changes because it does not really do much, makes the network more centralized, and mainly because there are much better options to reach the same goal (that are being worked on right now).

I don't understand why people buy baseball cards, either. But if I could send those baseball cards over the internet nearly as easily as an email, I could see it becoming a small niche currency (small as in millions of people).

You can discuss it all you want. You can't promote it just as you can't promote Litecoin or any other different protocol and ledger.

Basically the only thing you see on /r/bitcoin for the last 10 months is discussion on this issue, constantly.

Yeah, people who say "Developer Joe blow is a fraud, download the superior Bitcoin classic" get their posts removed. That's moderation. (And it is moderation that actually didn't happen for many months before things got so out of control.)

You are wrong about the CSS. What was happening was: the brigades of pro-fork users would downvote anyone who disagreed with them.

Reddit hides posts that score -5 or lower. So, the moderators changed the CSS to show all posts (even < -5 posts) as an anti-censorship tool. The reddit.com administrators are aware of this.

As for sorting by Controversial - same concept. The pro-fork brigades would force popular posts to the bottom, now the moderators use the built-in Reddit sort tool to make those appear higher up, in threads where vote manipulation happens.

Because reddit lets anyone create an account in about 3 seconds, it is easy to game and control what gets seen and what does not. Hacker news does the right thing by not giving everyone a downvote button on the first day.