pull down to refresh
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.
reply
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.