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Thank you very much for taking the time to compile and share these details.
If I try to introspect why I reposted his thread, I would say that it is because he tells a compelling story. It is a selective story, as you have demonstrated -- but it is a story that an average bitcoiner otherwise has difficulty accessing.
While I know that most of the sources (except his interviews) are public, it is a challenging task to assemble them into a coherent story. And so when someone comes along who has done that, it catches the eye.
This is some of what I've appreciated about @schmidty's reports from brink and your blogposts from localhost. They do a good job of telling a story about development in Bitcoin.
It's clear that there is a perspective of bitcoiners that sees Core (or some chunk of Core developers) as a clique, and while I'm not sure what a good way to respond to such a perspective is, I don't think not giving it the time of day is it.
All the rest of us who are not familiar with the details of the day in and day out work of developers who contribute to Core will probably never understand the reality of the decisions people make. But not talking about it means many people will give credence to insinuations rather than waiting for facts.
It is possible that I should have been more critical in my framing of his post.
FWIW, I can see how it might sound compelling, but as @schmidty also mentions, responding to these fables takes a lot of time, and “if you argue with a fool, from a distance people can’t tell who is who”. Beyond just being selective in what evidence the thread shows, it is actively misrepresenting some things.
- I listed the ACKs for the two nominations above, but also linked the chats and PRs for you to read yourself. The point that I was trying to make was that summarizing Gloria’s PR as "NACKed" and Vasil’s PR as "broadly supported" doesn’t match up with the facts and looks silly in comparison to the other nominations. I also provided evidence that calling Gloria’s PR rushed is similarly silly.
- "Dimov built Core's privacy networking from the ground up" is an exaggeration. Tor support was added in 2016 with Bitcoin Core 0.12.0 by Mara van der Laan. She also authored BIP155 in 2019. It looks like Carl Dong had started implementing BIP155 before Vasil took that over and finished it. To be clear, Dimov did do quite some work there: beyond finishing work on BIP155, Dimov added I2P and CJDNS, and put in a lot of work for the new privatebroadcast feature. Just saying that Hodlonaut probably didn’t even check that claim before making it.
- Regarding "prearranged" maintainer nominations: the regular contributors are a small group that works in the same workspace (the repository), but is loosely organized. People who are regularly active in the repo know who the most active contributors and reviewers are, but stretching out some feelers before nominating someone for maintainer is just common sense. Nominating people who then might not have support for it is prone to create disgruntlement.
This thread follows the same pattern as other writing by Hodlonaut: state a bunch of facts, then generously sprinkle insinuations that are unrelated to the facts. I don’t understand why anyone gives his writing any credence.
Early on, the repository owner would just give people merge access to contributors that had been particularly active without any big fanfare.
GlozowGlozow
Glozow’s addition was proposed by Fanquake in the 2022-06-30 IRC meeting. In the meeting, it got ACKs from Fanquake, Achow101, cfields, hebasto, instagibbs, dongcarl, Murch, sipa, b10c, Marco Falke, Martin Zumsande, Michael Folkson (for some reason?), and Luke quipped that she had no choice in becoming maintainer which I also interpret as support. Jeremy Rubin and bytes1440000 had some mild pushback in the IRC discussion that seemed mostly about procedure. The PR had some pushback from James O’Beirne, and Floppy (deleted account). Luke objected because others objected. Meanwhile, the PR had ACKs from Antoine Poinsot, Michael Folkson, Sjors, achow101, Bruno, Cory Fields, Niklas Gögge, Fanquake, hebasto, Marco Falke, 0xb10c, Pieter Wuille, Martin Zumsande, Wladimir, Josie, Antoine Riard, Jeremy Rubin, Will Clark, and myself. Glozow’s key PR was merged a little over six days after it was opened.
All of the above were nominations by existing maintainers to add another maintainer, when the maintainers felt that they could use help in a specific area or saw someone doing maintainer-like work in an area that they could use the help of an additional maintainer for. Each nomination had support from all current maintainers, broad support from contributors, and got processed in similar time frames. Hebasto was the outlier with the PR taking 12 days, all other PRs were processed faster than Gloria‘s.
VasilVasil
Vasil self-nominated in the IRC meeting on 2022-08-18. Vasil was experienced and qualified, but there was no recognized need at the time, and there were some differences of opinions on the role between Vasil and existing maintainers. He got ACKs from jarolrod, michaelfolkson, hebasto, achow101, Martin Zumsande, and a "makes sense" from Jon Atack. People referenced the process concerns from Gloria’s nomination, and suggested that further discussion should be had in a PR. A PR was opened on 2026-08-19. It got ACKs from Floppy (deleted account), Jon Atack, Zumsande, promag, Gleb Naumenko (later retracted), Marco Falke, Abubakar Nur Khalil (?), Antoine Riard, jarolrod, jamesob, aureleoules. It got pushback/NACKs from Fanquake, Niklas Gögge, yancyribbens, Jeremy Rubin, Pieter Wuille, Stickies, Achow101.
This nomination was different than previous ones, in that it was a self-nomination, was not motivated by the maintainers seeing a need for more help in a specific area, did not have support from all existing maintainers, and less support from current contributors, and was the only nomination to have pushback from several maintainers or former maintainers.
It took some time for this to be smoothed out, and it seems that there are still some strong feelings about it, but Vasil is still contributing to Bitcoin Core.
The PR being in limbo for such a long time is rightfully criticized, but Hodlonaut’s comparison of the two nominations is disingenuous.