How can we talk about improving Bitcoin if we don't want to talk to each other?How can we talk about improving Bitcoin if we don't want to talk to each other?
Here is an interesting debate that highlights an interesting aspect of Bitcoin development. Luke Dashjr recently reposted a gist authored by Chris Guida. The gist argues that certain elements of BIP 54 - #1428059 - are misguided.
In response, one of BIP 54's authors, Antoine Poinsot, wrote an X article. There are a number of interesting points about how Bitcoin works that you can pick up from reading Poinsot's article, but what I found most interesting is the way this debate is playing out.
Where does Bitcoin development discussion take place?Where does Bitcoin development discussion take place?
Poinsot says that Dashjr has blocked him on X. Dashjr says that the Bitcoin Mailing List is censoring him:
When it comes to discussing changes to Bitcoin block validation rules -- the rules on which we must all agree in order to stay in sync -- it is very difficult to avoid centralization.
In theory, every developer with an idea could publish their BIP on their own blog, but having any kind of discussion about things seems like it would benefit from some centralization -- one could imagine some very tedious repetition if discussion was too fractured.
But if there is only once place where discussion takes place, even the normal course of moderation will likely lead to people feeling like they are being unfairly shut out of the conversation. It is the nature of moderating a discussion forum or mailing list that human judgment will be used. This always eventually leads to tough calls.
Can competition solve this problem?Can competition solve this problem?
Bitcoin doesn't just have one venue, though: BIPs are proposed on the Bitcoin Development Mailing List and on the BIPs repo and on delving. As far as I am aware, these venues are all moderated by different people.
One might allege that even though all these various venues for discussion are moderated by different people, the moderators are all on the same "side." I imagine Bitcoin could sustain a heretics BIP repo or discussion forum (ie a fourth venue), and indeed this came up when the Ordinals BIP was closed after some years - #1455710.
But I don't imagine it would actually do much to make people feel less frustrated. It seems to me that the problem exhibited in the above example is not a problem of forum moderation so much as tribalism. Once battlelines are drawn, every decision by a moderator is seen to be for one side or the other. The problem really only goes away when discussion is segregated to separate venues for each team...which gets us right back to where we started with people not talking to each other.
I still like the idea of a heretics BIP rep, just because it is cool.
Why not a territory for such discussions?
I’d love more people chiming in on BIPs, but how much do people actually engage with BIPs here?
Taking as given the benefit of having a fourth place for discussing BIPs, is there a better candidate?
SN has a fairly diverse, knowledgeable, and interested user base.
I have no issue with adding a territory for it, I just don’t think that it would financially sustain itself after looking at Scoresby’s recent posts that mentioned BIPs, and most of them having a handful or fewer comments.
It certainly would be a more fruitful place than Xitter!
No territory is sustaining itself these days ://
~Stacker_Sports is going strong
Its world cup month. duh
And before that it was the NBA/NHL playoffs, and before that it was the Super Bowl, and soon it'll be Wimbledon and MLB playoffs, and then we'll be right back to our savior...real Football.
I'm confident that it would not financially sustain itself anytime soon, but it sounds like this is being pitched as a sort of public good.
I guess what I meant to express was that talking about BIPs in the Bitcoin territory seems to be a fine temporary solution
I agree. This is probably more of a prospective sub-territory, assuming those are still on the roadmap.
Sub territories certainly are on the roadmap (although I don't think they are next). Personally, I think a BIPs territory could work, but the founder would need to have a really good marketing plan.
It would take some nurturing on the part of whoever is interested in building it as a serious place for BIP discussion.
@k00b and @sox have been working on a way to run a SN territory on a custom subdomain, so there could be a bips.website.com and perhaps that will make it more interesting to a territory runner.
The advantage of a SN bips territory would be that it likely requires much less moderation effort than the current options.
On further consideration, it might not take much to make it viable. The pro and anti-110 people are throwing around a lot of sats on Predyx, so a similar dynamic might play out boosting and downzapping discussions.
I've been quite impressed by the predyx market on bip 110. But I don't know if that energy is the most sustainable: I am worried that it will kind of die away once bip 110 is over.
Obviously that energy isn't present for every BIP, so the territory might be a bit of feast or famine, depending on how contentious the BIPs are.
And lots of trolling and pleb-IQ noise!
I think it would be cool, but I didn't want to make the post about how SN fixes this (even though I think it does).
I've said this before, stacker.news might be a good option as a Bitcoin Mailing List. problem as always is moderation of such things. who owns the territory, what is their moderation policy, and then theres the moderation policies of stacker.news too that can intervene.
a new territory may not even be needed, we already got bitdevs
A lot of this feels very much ad hominem and drama to me. Even Poinsot's reply on the gist is toxic af. I know what I'm going to do though: I'm just going to have a bot fact check and summarize everything.
Fuck. Drama.
"Drama" is a pretty good summary of the last 6 months of Bitcoin.
Sounds like something already solved by social media. Just publish your hetics ideas on nostr or Twitter, dude 🤷🏻‍♀️
Yes.
You're right. This is what people seem to do. It gets comical though when people block each other.
I mean… if someone has you blocked and occasionally responds to your posts calling you a pedophile, it seems entirely appropriate to return the favor.
It is by the way my opinion that Luke should be removed from any and all trusted roles in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
I agree that the blocking and insulting is bonkers behavior. And it is silly for Dashjr to post something that is a critique of BIP 54 while simultaneously blocking one of the main authors.
It is some of why social media is not exactly a useful place to do technical discussion.
Socials seem like the last resort. My experience with the mailing list hasn't been pleasant either. Heck, even my Bitcoin Core release announcement spent a good in the moderation queue.
Mr. Dashjr, maybe you should stop talking about BIPs? Haven't you done enough?
FWIW, per a request for comment on the above tweet, the mailing list moderators tell me that they do not have an email from Luke regarding BIP54 in the moderation queue.
Regarding other standards bodies, I don’t see an issue with that except that it would of course mean that interested parties need to track more sources to keep abreast of everything, and probably different publication media will get a varying degree of use. There are of course also the BINANAs already, which have a much less selective publication process.
There does seem to be a group of people (BIP 110 supporters) who are very eager to see conspiracy and insult where there is none.
This is probably a human nature thing and one that won't be solved by new repos or different moderators.
Given the current trajectory, I do see a new standards body in the future of BIP110 supporters. — Altcoins are obviously not on-topic. ;)
https://twiiit.com/darosior/status/2072006046395371841
Only matters because the purpose of discussion at this point is to, somehow eventually, influence a Core change where it is the reference implementation powering an overwhelming share of the network.
As long as BIP's are defacto suggestion box slips for Core, the problem is unsolvable, or at least reflects state politics as we know them. Core is a politburo #966918.
A blog post would be a sufficient medium otherwise, assuming, that blog is of a developer with a competing implementation with meaningful network share.
On theme for this month, think the first Continental Congress after being censored from British Parliament... it only mattered once they took up arms (autonomous excercise of power).
A possible goal of a centralized alt-BIPs repo could be to unify alternate implementations, being analogous to the Continental Congress, but then who are the 13 alt implementations it could unify to effect the network? Do BTCD maintainers even show up? Seems Knots has even less friends than John Adams did at first.