Andreas (who wrote Mastering Bitcoin) was at the SMU in Singapore on Monday March 20th to talk in front of a packed auditorium.
He asked the audience: "who in this room heard about the hard fork?"
He went on to ask what are the fundamental reasons behind the current bitcoin divide. He said it essentially shows a split between 2 cultures: the culture of hardware and the culture of software.
People who develop hardware are used to long development cycles, extensive testing in order to avoid very costly recalls. People developing software -such as myself- are used to very short development cycles and higher tolerance for errors. Bugs in productions can be fixed with patches. There is a necessity for constant maintenance. Software that is not maintained eventually rots.
Trustware is a new type of development that has the tough aspects of both software and hardware: it's hard to write, hard to test and hard to maintain. Shipping a new version is painful because it requires consensus. It is also the beginning of problems that you cannot foresee until the code is live.
The workarounds you introduce with trustware (Andreas used the example of a 2011 bug fix in Bitcoin core to avoid an issue when popping 4 arguments from the stack) remain baked into the consensus rules forever.
Trustware is a new type of development that we are yet to learn about.
A few quotes
"the most secure companies online are those that are open and public". Attempting to protect data within walls is eventually futile because it gets hacked from the inside.About private blockchains:
"The market will eventually decide. Until then, let them build it, let them call it a blockchain."About ICOs:
"Don't be in it to trade, be in it to learn"
