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but let's recall that in FOSS, if you're just brainfarting on the bird app and medium and whatever else platform pays you for the ad/subscription revenue your content generates, you're not really contributing.
Not to nitpick, but I think this is a key point.
Btc is software for sure; it's also a social movement, and the latter is vastly more powerful than the former, although each has its own particular realm of potency. (If a node is running in the woods, and no one connects to it, is it still running?) One can contribute, deeply, foundationally, without writing a line of code. Carter has done so, certainly; as have mythical figures like Antonopoulos. Saylor himself is another good example.
Given that the active frontier of btc has moved past neckbeards mining on laptops to nation states and sovereign wealth funds, the hacker-in-basement model of contribution is an ever-smaller slice of what "contribution" means, pragmatically. Again, my goal isn't to nitpick; but if this entire class of contribution is invisible, then we'll have a skewed idea of how btc moves in the world, and for people who care about its success, it will be a distortion as grand as central planning of the price signal.
I agree, this is where the friction at. But it is also because I am talking about the protocol, not the scene. I'm really interested to learn what influence Saylor had over the protocol. Like... did he influence the blinding aspect of taproot? Did Carter design sequence locking? Did Antonopoulos in any way inspire low-S signatures?
But it is also because I am talking about the protocol, not the scene.
At the protocol level I don't think any of those people had much to do with anything. It will be interesting if that ever changes, although such things will probably be difficult to attribute.
That's what I thought too. So why are they talking about quantum algorithms and accusing people - that in a single meetup said more useful things about it than all of the influencers combined - that they are doing nothing?!?
My issue isn't with the fact that there are influencers. My issue is with them shooting from the hip about things they absolutely haven't given any meaningful thought to, yet are presenting it as fact. And then, because I have talked to Physics PHDs becomes insult to injury, as it's appeal to authority, where even the damn authority isn't authenticated.
I don't disagree with your sentiment at all, but in this particular case, I think you're defending some pretty nasty behavior. They're free to do that, and everyone is even free to repeat it. But, if they or their shills ever need something... tough luck.
Good points.
They're free to do that, and everyone is even free to repeat it. But, if they or their shills ever need something... tough luck.
Probably the shittiest outcome: crying wolf, and giving impetus to the whole practice getting swept into the "wolf-crying" category in the future.
Exactly! That's why I linked those specific minutes. Because they show that people are thinking about it but are also seeing some major challenges that need to be solved. I could have also linked the BIP-0360 PR which has been a work in progress for 15 months - and that is after many months of prior public and private discussion.
Yes, there are differing opinions about the urgency, and yeah, maybe Adam should sometimes not tweet what he thinks, because he is undeniably a dev whisperer and has bigger influence within the Bitcoin developer space than most. But Saylor or Carter cannot make this process go any faster by commenting on it, nor will it be more robust.
In the end, it doesn't really matter if QC is the threat or not. All cryptography must be assumed to eventually be broken, so ultimately, bitcoiners gaining experience with what an algo rollover looks like in a fully decentralized consensus system will benefit future generations. What an algo rollover should not look like? Endless back and forth about urgency instead of solutions.
You bring up an interesting point because if you ask me who I would want to be at the center of steering bitcoin, it seems like a vanishingly small set of people.
Someone with the technical chops to be realistic about what bitcoin can and can't do, and not just "dream big" in fanciful but unproductive ways. Thus, someone from the development community or at least adjacent to it.
But at the same time, someone with a sophisticated understanding of bitcoin's role in the world, including the risks and attack vectors presented by nation states and other economic/political actors. Thus someone from the political or economic community.
And again, at the same time, someone with a conservative, libertarian approach to things that doesn't try to solve every problem with either a technical or political solution, someone willing to let the market decide as a general first principle.
The cross section of all three of these seems like an incredibly small set.
Ultimately though, regardless of my or anyone else's opinions, bitcoin's fate is going to be determined by a free-for-all of potentially disparate interests, as with pretty much anything. It's just the nature of social consensus.
All this is what I find most fascinating about the space. The emergent reality of what happens and why it happens, how the various actors exert various kinds of force. That perspective is why I attribute such significance to these unfoldings of seemingly soft influence on an ostensibly hard technical project; and why I feel like exerting force here, in service of sensible things happening, and to enculturate useful ways of interacting, is worth doing, and more important than it seems.
I agree. Also: people change.
That's ok, but let's recall that in FOSS, if you're just brainfarting on the bird app and medium and whatever else platform pays you for the ad/subscription revenue your content generates, you're not really contributing.
Instead, the discussion precedes your action, and that's it. Telling devs what to do is lame and is the behavior of entitled little pricks. If you want change, make the change. If you get gatekept to be the forever-outsider, fork the code. It cannot be that something is an existential threat and then all one does is be a Karen about it and complain to the non-existing management.
I think the center stage of protocol development discussions used to be the dev mailing list and is now some mixture between delving and the mailing list. I do agree that it's changed, though in both places it's still relatively open and free of drama when compared to other places. I do think that the fora (bitcointalk and r/bitcoin) and especially twitter have always been a shitshow.