CHIP 2023-07 Network Upgrades only on Saturdays

CHIPs Process
#61

Because a de-sync’d, non-live event will not have the same emotive appeal to the vast majority of people on the planet.

It’s like saying “Well, Christmas/New Year/The Superbowl/Election Night/any other major societal event falls on ||inconvenient day or time||, why don’t all the TV channels just run their coverage on ||more convenient day or time before/after the event||?”

Things are live when they’re live, and people want to watch & be involved in live events - not some awkwardly offput alternative for scheduling reasons.

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#62

It’s ok if the sole argument for not changing is “status quo”, I agree that is a strong reason, but at this point I am simply trying to establish that that IS the only reason.

This sets the standard firmly so that if/when we provide a good enough case to override status quo, there is not sudden goalpost moving to “but what about --insert fresh list of goalpost moving reasons–.” If those reasons exist, let’s hear them now from those against this proposal so that we can appropriately consider & address each up front rather than playing whack-a-mole with people who are irrationally wedded to their position.

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#63

This is a complete contradiction - seems like we cannot win.

On one hand, the general advice for a CHIP seems to be “build in public, showcase things well ahead of time, avoid surprises, give long lead times for people to discuss & work through objections publically”. This is exactly what we are trying to do. For instance, see the Recommended CHIP process

In order to minimize its risks, a proposal needs sufficient time between its publication and possible activation in order for its assertions to be widely verified and agreed upon. If activation is agreed upon, sufficient time must be allowed for wider circles of stakeholders to test and deploy the changes. The consequence of insufficient evaluation time has been evident throughout BCH’s history, and should be wisely avoided.

Or another widely known essay on Decentralised collaboration on Bitcoin Cash

1. Communicate early and clearly
Stating your intentions publicly as soon as they are formed in a clear fashion. This helps with building reputation and credibility. Reach out to the ecosystem.
Changing your position is fine when presented with new evidence, but erratic behavior is hard to interpret as honest.

1a. Specifically: no surprises

Shock-and-awe strategies need to be recognized as hostile. Actors repeatedly engaging in such behavior signal different, hidden interests not aligned with win-win-win outcomes of furthering peer to peer electronic cash.
Businesses specifically require stability to plan their path. Surprises on the consensus-level kill prosperity.

2. Brainstorm in good faith

Be ready to ask and answer a lot of questions in detail. It’s a good idea to make past conversation public to point to previously discussed topic.
We’ll also need to deal with the occasional troll, but that’s the easy part. When in doubt a couple of well placed questions will reveal if a newcomer’s intention is to genuinely understand or drain energy. Be welcoming, but not naive.
Also, there are possibly other things being worked on that could be more urgent. While non-consensus changes can go in parallel, and don’t require the same level of cooperation, the ecosystem can handle just so many consensus changes in a year. Asses priorities with other actors, and be prepared to postpone some of the changes.

In adopting this strategy though (building in public, as early as possible), as highly recommended, we are now facing criticism for “why didn’t you talk behind the scenes to stakeholders before bringing it to the public?”

Completely unreasonable.

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#64

It is no contradiction.
It is based on the fact that a single person most of the time does not create a well formed proposal out of thin air. They need to debate, discuss and toss ideas around. You don’t do that in public because that is an utter waste of your (and everyone else’s) time.
Edit: it doesn’t have to be private, mind you. Hope you get my point.

Only when you have a mostly coherent proposal that has a baseline of support do you go and find a broader base of supporters in the form of a CHIP.

In practice, this is only followed for things like the deadlines and others. It hasn’t really been followed in the last couple of years. Notice that one not having a single supporting statement. It is not an accepted process (nor actually discussed or acted on here, really).

It is like this,

if you propose a new law that affects 100000 people, you should have consulted with a small sample to get a representative feeling or even statement from them on this. Because otherwise you are wasting everyone’s time with making it into an “official” proposal, because when the time comes to gather supporting statements you need those same people to support you.

So, please stop looking at that misguided “chip guidelines”, it is written by someone that loves process and such but has no actual experience.

#65

The problem is, there is no “live event” here.

BCH upgrades are boring upgrades that just open doors to some capabilities and do not do much by themselves.

That makes this whole discussion unnecessary and this CHIP pointless.

I would also recommend to close this CHIP process and reopen a new one titled “CHIP Network Upgrades only on Mondays/Tuesdays/Wednesdays/Thursdays” to avoid unnecessary confusion.

#66

There’s also:

No formal process can be established for consensus changes, otherwise we’ll be taken over by lawyers and career politicians in a matter of weeks.
We cannot appeal to a central authority either, as we refuse to nominate one. The ecosystem is decentralized and should stay that way.

which was recognized by Tom here and inspired my actions from my very beginning. In my own words, I described the risk like this:

Following the process is no guarantee of success, and not following it doesn’t mean it can’t get implemented, and that it is a recommendation, not a rigid thing. We are not a corporate, we are FOSS grass-roots project which really cares about avoiding dictator capture or “process lawyers” appearing, like: “I followed the process, therefore you MUST do X.” or “He didn’t follow the process, therefore we MUST dismiss it just because.”

How I see it, there is no formal process. The steps are a guideline. Following them doesn’t mean you get what you want. They either help you convince everyone, and then a CHIP goes through, or you fail to convince everyone and nothing happens.
So far, you followed the steps, but you didn’t convince anyone, so nothing will change. No change is the default.
Every change has a cost, and if the change isn’t attractive enough to “pay” for the costs, then why should people bother with doing or supporting the change?

CHIP getting through is not the only possible outcome.

Take my Group CHIP as an example. It didn’t go through but it was still useful because all my public interactions and actions as the CHIP’s owner helped build consensus for something that would come later (CashTokens). I then yielded to CashTokens, and then used my energy and momentum created by the Group CHIP to help the CashTokens CHIP because I saw it as better solution for BCH and then that one got activated, not the one I owned, and it was a great success!

I also made some early drafts for stuff which was discussed somewhere, but really got nowhere, like extracting features of now dropped PMv3:

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#67

This is a great point that I didn’t touch upon. Seems unfortunate that there is criticism for putting forth such an idea (that did have public support, mind others here) for discussion and get told we should’ve talked to stakeholders first, as though we have a centralized system/set leaders.

Then why does this exist, @tom ? It should be removed or revised.

We have. That’s where the idea to propose this came from.

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#68

The CHIP owner should identify who the affected stakeholders are considering the scope of the change, it’s not a fixed set, it depends on nature of the change, and it is CHIP’s owner duty to sample them and demonstrate that the change is worth the +/- to various stakeholder groups, and people have to be convinced by the analysis, just assigning +/- points in a self-serving way won’t work.

“talking to stakeholders” can just mean talking about the change in whatever public group where they hang out, or it can mean reaching out directly through e-mail or whatever. Chatting in public is better, since then it makes others aware of the idea and talks being done.

This CHIP has the problem that the proposed benefit is speculative and not convincing, so why should anyone accept to pay any price for it?

What if the idea is the problem, not the process? For ideas that aren’t so good, they should be stuck. If the ideas don’t have a convincing cost/benefit then status quo is the best.

Do people complaining here about the idea of changing from a fixed date don’t count as “stakeholders”, or do you just cherry pick some who gave you a thumbs up because sure they’d watch a podcast on a Sunday, it’s no cost to them, so why not, right? What about stakeholders who’d have to pay the price of making that change?

When I was working on Group CHIP I tried to categorize various stakeholders, see here to get an idea.

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#69

I am mindblown that with the intelligent BCH community we have, everyone is getting so lost on the specifics.

Yes, we know we haven’t made a convincing case for the benefits yet.

Yes, we know the default is no change.

Yes, we know the “recommended” process is no guarantee of an idea making progress, the idea has to stand on its merits.

Yes, we know we haven’t talked to a huge majority of stakeholders.

All we are trying to do, is to the best of our ability and with the best intentions, bring an idea for discussion to the public in order to scope out potential appetite or opposition to the idea, in order that we can further refine and build a strong case for this change.

Everyone acting as if the process is totally clear (it isn’t), we should know exactly how a CHIP process works and have done it before (we don’t and haven’t), we’re doing things wrong by working in public (… ok, sorry for being transparent - as everyone said we should be) & we’ve made a final convincing case from which we are not brooking any discussion (no, we are scoping out the opposition in order to progress our proposal from this VERY early stage).

My ONLY goal at this stage is to establish any serious objections. We will then take those into consideration for the next version of our proposal.

SO FAR, the only objections raised seem to be these two:

  • I’m an engineer / I know an engineer that doesn’t like working on Saturdays. EDIT: As suggested by @bitcoincashautist this can perhaps be read as “I am or know someone professionally involved in a BCH upgrade”, slightly broader scope than just engineers.
  • May 15 is the status quo, you need to make a strong case to change that

If anyone has any objections or issues that do NOT fall into one of those categories, now would be a good time to raise them. If not, we will take that as a strong initial signal that those are the main objections (there may be others we discover in the process, but those would clearly be more peripheral as no one brought them up initially or repeatedly like those two).

We will take those (and any other objections) into consideration in our next iteration of the CHIP proposal.

Any other dismissals or attacks on our proposal that do not clearly understand this context are far less relevant. There will be plenty of time & opportunity to debate the merits of the idea once we have come back with a stronger case addressing the points raised so far.

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#70

There is a live event. If there were not, why have I been requested to do a live event stream for one?

Not only is there clearly a significant cultural moment (past streams & interest in May 15th demonstrate this), but it could & will likely become more & more significant as the community & movement grows. Perhaps not from a technical point of view, those changes are likely to get smaller as time goes on & things tend to ossification, but from a cultural & historic point of view.

As mentioned previously, we didn’t do a great job of explaining the significance & importance of this & that will be addressed in our next iteration. However, it is also clear that people are thinking more in terms of technical bits & bytes rather than in the correct mindset of a global social revolution which is needed to ensure BCH’s success & global adoption.

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#71

No, that’s not all of it. It’s not just engineers affected by the day. It’s everyone who for professional reasons must be at alert during the few hours of transitioning from old rules to new rules.
And since this is open-source, it can mean that for some engineers it’s easier to manage that on a weekend (because they’d be busy with their real jobs during a workday) and for some engineers it’s easier to manage during a workday (because, say, they work for an exchange’s technical department).

Same is for people who watch podcasts, some may prefer it on a weekday. With a fixed date, at least sometimes you get your preference. You fix the day, you ensure that some group always gets their preference, and some other group never does.

Status quo is the best here.

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#72

Perfect, so we agree that it’s not universally the case that a weekend is better or worse (specifically with regards to engineers). Previously people were trying to say that engineers overwhelmingly preferred the week day, but here we have acknowledgement that it’s actually far more individual and varied than that.

There is a high bar to change things, but pretending that May 15th is a cosmically determined optimum (fortuitously picked exactly correct by chance) is ludicrous. Dismissing any discussion or investigation of alternatives is giving up potentially a huge improvement for BCH on the grounds of being close-minded.

#73

The question is really the reverse. If Alex and I have talked to and found among the community general sentiment in support of our CHIP, perhaps people not represented on this particular forum, do they not count?

We make no claim we have universal support & of course we don’t.

However, we are being told that we did not consult with stakeholders or do any initial feeling out for others in the community that agree with our sentiment, when in fact we did. It’s just perhaps not the same stakeholders.

We are raising this CHIP because of finding a need for it & hearing that need supported by others. Yes, we will work to make that feedback & support clearer in future (and more convincing to doubters), but for the purposes of an initial proposal we were satisfied that this was not something that merely the two of us felt worthy of discussion.

Claims that we have not talked to stakeholders are incorrect & presuming both a set of stakeholders & impossible knowledge of all the conversations Alex & I have had.

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#74

I hope soon the owners of this CHIP will read this back and realize that every single person that commented here was trying to be helpful and assist in moving this along.

No blame is being assigned, nobody is standing on procedure and generally speaking I don’t think anyone should be upset today.

My opening words still stand and probably bear repeating as they still go directly to the core of CHIPs and how they work. Here they are again:

Thank you all!

#75

It’s like talking to a brick wall.

If you would like to help move the discussion forward, please help like this:

What guidelines are we supposed to follow then? I found the best most authoriative source I could, acted accordingly & was criticised for apparently not following the right process.

Where is the right process? Is there any documentation or any guidelines anywhere? How would anyone know where to find them?

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#76

It’s more like, no developer really wants this change, and you guys(you and minisatoshi) are not developers.

It’s developers that will be dealing with the inevitable consequences of your proposal. And they do not want it.

What you are trying to do here is to improse a change that is not really necessary for any important reason, neither is it a technical improvement, nor is it required/wanted by developers.

So I do not understand what is it you are actually doing here.

#77

Also, I forgot to add: This discussion is very confusing because of the thread title.

Are we still talking about Saturdays? Or Thursday? Wednesday?

EDIT:
In many countries, Poland included, there are celebration days that have moving weekdays and are date-dependent. They can happen on any weekday.

So why can’t you just make your Podcast Celebration event on May 14-15?

It’s easier for you to make this change rather than for all developers and entire ecosystem to change.

#78

We’ve been over this already several times. We can, and have, done the Podcast celebration on May 15th. But it sucked because of that & was emblematic of why the BCH scene has never had really any kind of noteworthy marketing success or promotion.

I am not trying to make things easier for myself (& everyone involved in trying to promote the BCH message) out of selfishness. I am trying to make things easier for end users, the people this is ALL about, by making sure celebrations & important cultural & marketing events happen at a time most likely to break through to them. Why can’t we just have a big marketing event at some other non-upgrade time? Because that’s not how culture works, it starts organically & you need to lean into it & the organic culture finds BCH upgrades to be of quite large significance.

I’ve exhausted the ability to rehash these same arguments in this forum for the time being. I will, as promised, work on a fresh & more compelling case because it’s going in circles trying to get any traction or even acknowledgement that there might be something of value here.

#79

Maybe the best answer I can give is this video which explains the process much better than we have been able to do so, so far.

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#80

I don’t fully comprehend this argument.

Your Podcast Celebration sucked because it wasn’t done on a Saturday? Really?

Do you have any convincing concrete evidence of this? How can you know for certain it sucked only because it was not done on a specific weekday? Did you do a deep social study or something?

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