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Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2015 19:46:22 +0000
Message-ID: <CAAS2fgRuBwn6HXeZeth+x-R8DAdsVZmYy4nMA3kN+oJaURftgw@mail.gmail.com>
From: Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com>
To: Ricardo Filipe <ricardojdfilipe@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Cc: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Electrum 2.0 has been tagged
Precedence: list

On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 7:24 PM, Ricardo Filipe
<ricardojdfilipe@gmail.com> wrote:
> i guess you look at the glass half full :)
> even though what you say is true, we should aim for wallets not to
> require those instructions, by standardizing these things in BIPs.
> let's hope bitcoin doesn't fail in standards as our industries have in
> the past...

There are genuine principled disagreements on how some things should
be done. There are genuine differences in functionality.

We cannot expect and should not expect complete compatibility. If you
must have complete compatibility: use the same software (or maybe not
even then, considering how poor the forward compatibility of some
things has been..).

What we can hope to do, and I think the best we can hope to do, is to
minimize the amount of gratuitous incompatibility and reduce the
amount of outright flawed constructions (so if there are choices which
must be made, they're at least choices among relatively good options).