CHIP 2023-07 Network Upgrades only on Saturdays

CHIPs Process
#102

Yes this has been mentioned several times. The current counter arguments are:

  1. These Saturday upgrades are already possible on a May 15th schedule, and no one has ever complained about that. Some people seem to think that telling exchanges “May 15 just happens to fall on a Saturday” is somehow easier to swallow for exchanges than “It’s on a Saturday”, but I find that pretty weak because a Saturday is a Saturday no matter the reasoning involved from the point of view of exchange employees.
  2. If BCH is big enough that exchanges, payment processors etc. HAVE to upgrade IMMEDIATELY because the change is big enough AND BCH is a huge part of their business, then we’ve kind of already justified them going to that effort. You mention something like changing the minimum relay fee, but that’s the kind of thing that I imagine wouldn’t even be a breaking change, it just means people who are slow to upgrade pay marginally higher fees until they do. Major breaking changes are VERY rare, and if BCH is little used on their service than a day or two of delay is not a big deal. The only case it is a big deal is if BCH is a massive part of their business and we do a (rare) breaking change, in which case there’s plenty of reasoning behind the inconvenience.

But it is nevertheless true that there will be some inconvenience to exchanges etc. as a result of a Saturday upgrade, we acknowledge that in the “costs” category & obviously need to provide substantial “benefits” to outweigh it (forthcoming).

1 Like
#103

@BitcoinCashPodcast @_minisatoshi

Can you tell me honestly, what is the intention here?

What are you trying to achieve, precisely by proposing a complete nonsense change, with no clear proven justification (by your own admission), no proven benefits (also by your own admission), clear massive downsides and huge opposition?

This “proposal” is borderline trolling at this point.

Honestly, I am starting to dislike your “I know this proposal is nonsense, but we are going to keep peddling/bikeshedding it anyway” attitude.

#104

Firstly, I ask that you relax a bit. But to each his own, not going to tell you how to live your life, and it is helpful to have views like yours expressed the way you do because it cuts right to the point. But calling this “borderline trolling”? Unnecessary. Jeremy and I both are fully dedicated to BCH and doing all we can for it. We are all on the same team here.

To get to the question asked, here are two main issues (that have been laid out numerous times, to match your sass :slightly_smiling_face:):

  1. Many people that are not full time in the space that run apps and otherwise off of BCH have other jobs that make weekdays a challenge for launches, updates, troubleshooting, etc. ---- Counters to this include well those people aren’t as important, this is for the MAIN BCH full time people (to which I disagree, as we are not a global currency, yet, and the majority of things that will gain attention by the broader public will be products created by people not working full time on purely technical things (of which you have pointed out yourself)). However, I understand that this works both ways, maybe they won’t launch a product on upgrade day (though it is a hell of a good way to grab attention), but maybe they need to update their node or troubleshoot in case the upgrade affects their system(s) in some manner. And frankly, not being able to be active at upgrade time is an issue we heard from many when realizing the launch was on a weekday, not a weekend.
  2. This ties to the above, and represents a broader issue for BCH and frankly, the global economy as well. BCH has a media/hype problem. We are so contained in our own community, expanding outward is very challenging. Our hope to expand is not just the developers working to improve Bitcoin at the protocol level, but those that build products and otherwise on top of it. Media hype is a big thing. @tom had mentioned Apple product launches earlier, which was a fair point. However, what was missing, is that Apple is doing their event the same day the products are announced. Now by no means is this proposal meant just for a livestream, that would be foolish. However, a livestream for the upgrade (that does in fact get attention and sponsorships from REAL brands, a BILLION DOLLAR COMPANY included), has a lot less hype when acting as a recap, rather than an in the moment event. People pay to go to concerts because they’re more fun. Watching a YouTube recap has little attention.

Overall, if we don’t have better marketing and more outreach, even with the best product we may ultimately fail. Steve Jobs was an expert in this. He created the most valuable global brand, regardless of anyone’s opinion of it. He knew that you couldn’t make everyone happy, all of the time. He faced lots of criticism in removing “features” to ultimately improve the product and the industry. He knew the product needed to be beautiful, not just functional. And what Apple does is not self-contained, their work reverberates throughout every ecosystem they touch.

A change that could today help Bitcoin (Cash) continue expanding, gaining hype and attention, and otherwise, is absolutely worth consideration. In the end, this may not go through, or maybe it is determined that for other reasons, locking a day of the week rather than weekend may be the better choice, or nothing at all will change. But there are many benefits to this being discussed, as @BitcoinCashPodcast has already laid out. Two include:

  1. Having a discussion on what day may be best and why. the 15th is an arbitrary day, so these conversations may ultimately provide justification.
  2. The bigger one, this will ultimately provide another great example for how the CHIP process works, as it has been pointed out that the only documentation that exists for the CHIP process is basically useless and inaccurate. Furthermore, this could allow Jeremy and/or I to document how this process went and be able to provide documentation.
    –If on this point you take issue, I want to face it head on here, then that will be an exceptionally exclusionary mindset. Maybe a non-technical individual with a great idea can post more accurately with guidelines or a technical person new to this space as well. To say a documented process is dumb because everyone of importance knows how this works is exclusionary and almost cult-like.
1 Like
#105

BCHD has not even updated for the 2022 upgrade yet. Supposedly in progress, many of us donated to the flipstarter, but then the 2023 upgrade may also face similar delays. Products like PayButton and others rely on BCHD and cannot function with BCH anymore.

#106

Maybe I didn’t explain it well enough, but the analysis I wrote (copied below) had as its conclusion that a non-visible upgrade is not what people actually care about. They care about the product announcement. The in-depth explanation of this new feature that they have frankly no clue about.

The value of the upgrade-videos has never been to watch a bunch of people fill time in order to wait for the right block. It has always been about learning about what the upgrade actually did, who was behind it and what the upgrade means to them, the end-users.

In other words, a product announcement.

Swifel to the actual thing people want and stop holding onto the idea that it needs to coincide with the actual activation block, and suddenly the media presence will become a lot easier and higher value. Without needing this CHIP at all.

The power is in your (and Jeremy’s) hands!

Yes, this is a product announcement, without actually saying it in my original post, that is what I described.

1 Like
#107

to be fair, there is quite a lot of explanations on this site and things like my video above help too.
I would not claim it is undocumented.

But I’d be open to a better (actually openly discussed) documentation of the CHIP process.

Probably the biggest issue we have today is an appeal to authoritiy that made that one documentation of the process somehow seen as correct, even though nobody linked from that on this site or any actual accepted CHIP.

#108

I will answer one final time, and hopefully this can be the last such post, because honestly we would like to be able to go away and work on the proposal itself to address these concerns but instead you keep bumping the thread to ask over and over why we’re doing what we’re doing. We’ve explained several times, re-read the thread as many times as you need to to understand & please patiently wait for our upgraded proposal and research. We can’t provide you that work yet (it’s still underway) & we can’t make much progress on it either if we spend all this time telling you that it’s still underway.

Ok point by point:

  • “complete nonsense change”: No, it is not nonsense, you just don’t understand it (yet). Those are two very different things.
  • “with no clear proven justification (by your own admission)”: It does have a clear justification. ONE, Alex and I have encountered a serious problem with marketing BCH (specifically related to the upgrades) & we are investigating a schedule change as part of solving this to grow the community faster. If you don’t see or understand this problem, please start a BCH channel, do your own upgrade livestream & see how much traction it gets. I’m sure that will be quite educational. TWO, we are getting a lot of information on the CHIP process itself (for instance it’s already quite clear that the documentation around how to make a successful change is scattered at best, and more like non-existent).
  • " no proven benefits (also by your own admission )": We believe it has benefits & we have made the case for that from the start of this thread. Proven, not yet, but as I said we are trying to do the work in that regard. Please, have some patience while we do that work, instead of constantly demanding evidence that you know we don’t have yet and which we’ve said we’re working on.
  • " clear massive downsides": There are downsides, which we have also openly agreed with, but I wouldn’t characterise them as “massive”. There is some inconvenience to changing the status quo & some suggestion that employees related to BCH upgrades may prefer a weekday to a weekend (but not all of them, & none of them have complained about the current schedule which sometimes falls on a weekend either). Neither of these are a deal breaking issue with regards to a movement for billions of people though.
  • “huge opposition”: Once again, you are being hyperbolic. Yes, we agree there is opposition - in fact any CHIP will likely start with some opposition. “Huge”? Not even close. In this SPECIFIC forum, yes we have had mostly a negative response, although it is clear that even in the course of this thread some minds have moved to be more open-minded to our suggestion than where they started. Separate to that, this exact forum is only one specific sample of BCH users & in our discussions in other venues the reception has been much more positive. So please keep in mind that you are only looking at a small non-representative slice of the pie if your entire input is this thread.

Ok I have addressed each and every point.

Please, let me reiterate one more time, wait for us to come out with an updated CHIP proposal. We have received a lot of feedback & we will work on an improved version. In the meantime, complaining that we have not provided the evidence is not going to make our evidence gathering process any faster - nor does it help to demand we answer your question but then also say carrying on any conversation is trolling or counterproductive. The conversation is being carried on for your benefit, to answer the questions you are bringing. If you would like things to be quieter, please stop bumping the thread & wait patiently for when we can announce a fresh update.

#109

Some people need to be active on upgrade day, and for some others its just a fun event, which they could do without.

You could say that, but solution to that doesn’t really depend on changing the upgrade day. So why change the upgrade day - it’s a drip in the ocean. What about activities during the other 364 days? That’s where we make a difference.

Also, there’s a risk with making “a thing” out of technical upgrade days. Is it too much of a stretch to imagine perverse incentives of this: what if we don’t have anything for some upgrade year? Would people just accept it, or would you get activists trying to push random changes just to have “something”? Solutions in search of a problem?

This whole CHIP could be interpreted as marketers saying “give me something to market” when they already have more than enough to work with.

3 Likes
#110

True. However the pool of people who need to be active is very small relative to the total size of “fun” people (aka the rest of global population), so even a small percentage of “fun” people is a very important factor to take into account.

Consider at global scale:

Maybe ~100k people employed on direct BCH protocol related upgrades.
~8 billion people interested in celebrating another year of humanity’s escape from fiat currency & the ongoing age of BCH driven prosperity.

Even if only 0.1% of the “fun” people actually care, that’s still 8 million people or 80x the amount of employees involved in the upgrade. I’d guess at global scale we’ll be doing more than that. The FIFA World Cup finals can hit > 1 billion people.

Note also that on the road to global reserve currency, the “fun” percentage is essentially enormous & unchanged (in an ideal world, we could already get the attention of everyone for the 2024 stream) while the needed employees people is currently quite small & only grows slowly (certainly far less than in linear proportion to the “BCH community” broadly defined, any BCH supporting consumer service should expect to have exponentially more customers than employees).

Good question. We do obviously need to do promotion all year round & of course we do. However, marketing & promotion is biased towards critical key moments. For instance most of the world doesn’t care about America football almost always, except for the Super Bowl. Most people don’t care about the British Royalty almost always, but they’ll tune in to watch a new coronation. BCH is likely to end up with 1 or 2 key events a year that the world generally actually cares to pay attention to & we’re hoping to establish the upgrade day as that one thing.

Why the upgrade day?

  1. It has momentum. It’s the other side of the “status quo” argument. Could Alex and I invent a “Celebrate BCH day” holiday & manufacture it into relevance? Maybe. Is it far easier to build on something that already has clout & people enjoy & works? Yes.
  2. If not the upgrade day, which day would you choose from the BCH “holidays”? Bitcoin pizza day (cannot be date changed), Independence Fork day on Aug 1 (also cannot be changed), lock in day Nov 15 (related to the change we’re asking for pretty much)? There’s not many other choices.
  3. Upgrade day has a lot going for it. It’s BCH unique, not shared by our sibling forks so they’re not a “part” of that culture and it’s a great time to celebrate our success. It’s also inherently progressive, we’re celebrating an upgrade which means we embed into the community a spirit of progress & momentum which helps to avoid ossifying technically or culturally like BTC.
  4. Another great candidate would be any kind of regular BCH conference or festival type of thing. However, the BCH community so far has failed to run year-on-year any such event. The only choice is the upgrade stream, hence why that has attracted our interest.

Is there a risk that we will manufacture changes to celebrate? Obviously there’s technically SOME (even miniscule) risk to everything, but I’d say not anything significant. The idea is to have protocol innovation highlighted & celebrated, but not just that. In the end, even as protocol updates slow or become less important, most of the changes celebrated will actually be company product releases & announcements.

This has been on my mind for a long time. Hence you can see that I released my song D1$L0YAL on August 1st 2021 as an initial experiment in this, & both my song/music video Sunrise & Selene Wallet were announced/publically released on May 15th 2023. So was the EmeraldDAO & various other ecosystem things. I hope over time to build momentum with other contributors for every upgrade day to be a big announcements/hype day for the entire ecosystem, not just the protocol. Once again, network effect is king, so if we can build off the seed of the protocol upgrade to also have a ton of other announcements coming out in the 1 time of year the community is most excited / united & there are the most external eyeballs watching - we are most likely to break through on social media etc.

You might say - if (eventually) most stuff won’t be strictly upgrade dependent, why can’t we manufacture another BCH release day? See the points above. It’s possible & maybe in the end that’s what we’ll do. But culture is organic, it’s VERY hard to manufacture entirely & the upgrade day already is something people respond to. If Alex and I announced we were starting a new “BCH Release day”, would anyone who has responded so vigorously to this thread feel strongly about it? Probably not, they’d most likely just ignore it and go about their day. This strength of response proves on its face that people do have a strong emotional investment in the upgrade.

This I kind of take issue with. This is the engineers telling the marketers how to do their job. Imagine if Alex and I said “You guys don’t need an upgrade to VM limits (or blocksize), you already have more than enough to work with.” Ironically, this is exactly what happened on BTC. You might think there’s more than enough, but you’re not making BCH marketing content so your opinion in that regard is not that relevant. If you build a large, successful BCH promotion channel & have PoW doing BCH marketing, then I’d love to discuss what BCH marketing does or does not need with you but until you’ve done that I hope you can understand that you’re kind of making proclamations to the factory operators about what is and isn’t necessary from outside the factory at this point in time.

1 Like
#111

I will repeat this again:

You have no proof at all, by your own admission, that the upgrade day (May 15) has any significance or impact on whether the marketing of BCH is better or worse. Neither you have proof that it can be improved by moving the upgrade day to Saturday.

And I will ask again:

Why is this discussion still ongoing, precisely?

Maybe just mark the topic as “Closed/Solved” and make a proposal that has any sense and clear evidence that it is actually needed.

1 Like
#112

Let me be clear here:

I do not need to address the rest of your points, because what I stated above completely invalidates the basis/justification for your CHIP.

It’s done. It’s dead, Jim.

Maybe you could try and start another thread or another CHIP, because this one is completely senseless and useless and should be outright rejected without further bikeshedding.

We are wasting time on nothing here.

#113

You did not read or perhaps understand my post. Instead, you’ve ignored (or misunderstood) what’s written & doubled down on demanding we stop trying to improve BCH.

The thread stands as evidence & I’m sure others can draw from it their own conclusions.

I don’t plan to spend significant time on any of your objections to our CHIP or its discussions, at least not until you are able to actively engage with the material. I don’t expect this to be seen as unreasonable by other observers.

#114

The thing is, you are not “trying to improve BCH”. You have no proof whatsoever that your proposal will improve anything at all, by your own admission. There is a lot of proof to the contrary: that your proposal will damage BCH.

Looks to me like what you are trying to do is break the CHIP process by endless bikeshedding over complete nonsense that will clearly damage our development process.

A political play with some particular target in sight.

1 Like
#115

Oh, and this.

You misunderstand. I am well capable of arguing with every goddamn point in your posts.

But you know, I already tried that over the internet, long years ago, before Bitcoin ever existed.

Endless arguing over every possible point and countering everything and “destroying your opponent” this way does not work.

Instead, it prolonges the discussion into infinity, because no side is able to admit its mistake and instead each person keeps arguing into infinity ➔ ➔ ∞.

So what I do I find the one argument that undermines everything you have said and I apply that. It is less time consuming and more effective.

By undermining the one thing, the foundation, that gives your whole idea meaning, your house of cards falls down and your thread becomes trash. Very deservedly.

So unless you can prove that you have any hard evidence at all that moving Upgrade to Saturday can be beneficial to BCH, your whole idea should be rejected outright as nonsense.

Because we do have a lot of evidence/facts to the contrary.

Your idea is complete, absolute, utter trash :recycle:. It belongs in the trash. It’s dumpster fire :fire::fire:. Just let it die and stop prolonging the inevitable.

Not sure what is your goal here, but you should give up now.

#116

the socialist argument again. Worrysome.

Edit;

saving this one for fun, at this point this chip became undefendable:

because… you need to see the irony, right?

3 Likes
#117

Doesn’t matter. The small group’s time is not yours to redistribute. That kind of argumentation will only piss them off. Do you want Atlas to shrug? You’re supposed to be convincing people, not alienating them from the idea. The above is not the kind of argument which will help your case.

Try telling Linus Torvalds to release kernel upgrades on a Saturday so Linux fans around the world can throw a party.

4 Likes
#118

Oh boy.

I am not even touching this one of Jeremy’s nonsense arguments. It would be just too much fun :rofl: :rofl:

#119

I don’t suspect you mean otherwise, but for some clarity, I believe everyone can and should have an opinion, and should voice it, but at the same time, would be beneficial to also try to understand the perspective of the other side.

Old Apple video line: For every yes, there are a thousand no’s. I think this line can be interpreted correctly in two ways:

  1. Cream of the crop - to ensure the best result only the best of the best of ideas are taken
  2. Those no’s lead to a great final idea

I think both of the above greatly apply to the CHIP process and BCH as a whole. Maybe this idea in the end is one of those no’s. Or maybe, just maybe, the feedback and negativity will lead to a final, nearly perfected idea.

Tying back to Apple, as it’s a great example for so much (and I’m sure I mentioned this above), many of their most revolutionary changes/products came with sharp criticism by technical people.
A great clip:
Steve Jobs responding to technical naysayer - Frankly the naysayer reminds me of those in BTC

The video is an amazing example of the spirit of our proposal and arguments. Even besides this proposal, however, I hope Bitcoin (BCH) and people utilize this ideology. There’s a lot of great things here.

1 Like
#120

FYI, I have watched the video in order to be able to destroy your dumb argument better.

So, what Jobs is saying is that “you need to start from the customer’s view and see what awesome new things you can offer them, then work backward through the engineers to find out how to create the technology that does it”.

But this is not what you are doing. Here, you are proposing a nonsense change that will not (very probably) have any positive effects.

You really dare to compare yourselves to Steve Jobs? What? You think you and Jeremy are the “Jobs” now and the rest of us are the engineers?

The way I see it, you are some people who are spouting complete nonsense in some wet crazy dream hoping that randomly trying some (unproven, untested, unrealistic) marketing tricks is suddenly going to propel BCH into infinity and make it more like Apple or something?

No, you are not Steve Jobs and what you are proposing has nothing to do with what he said.

Utilizing this ideology has nothing to do with the topic. Before and after watching the video, making BCH upgrades on Saturday is just as dumb of an idea as it was before.

Because, again, making upgrades on any other day does not improve anything or make us more like Apple or Steve Jobs. Also, giving more power to marketers rather than developers also will not automatically/magically make us like Apple.

It would seem that you somehow think that you have some grand vision of how to market BCH efficiently. But you have not presented this vision anywhere, and certainly not in this topic.

Moving upgrade days to Saturday is simply a complete joke and trash of an idea, not part of some “grand vision”.

#121

@BitcoinCashPodcast @_minisatoshi

If you think you have some grand vision for BCH like Steve Jobs did for Apple and this is the reason for your nonsense idea, then how about you just do what he actually said maybe? (Because right now, this is NOT what you are doing).

He basically said “design a superior product first and then work with engineers on how to create it”.

An equivalent in BCH would be basically creating some kind of new, revolutionary GUI guidelines for Mobile apps, that somehow is not only super-easy to use (like Apple), but maybe also somehow creates prestige [or other means] to motivate people to use the product (like Apple).

That said, Apple is basically not an electronics company. It’s a Jewelry company. People want IPhones and Macs mostly for the prestige and the higher status, not for the functionality (there are many many, many better devices).

So, if you could somehow generate prestige or some kind of “sex appeal” for BCH, that would be equivalent of “put marketers before engineers” that apple does.