The GitHub repository is the workspace of the Bitcoin Core contributors. We welcome constructive contributions from anyone, and spend a lot of time encouraging others to also make it their workplace.

Think of the repository like a co-working space: you can rent a desk for the day, you can work on something by yourself or collaborate, but if you hold a riot in the co-working space, shouting at people trying to do work, you are probably gonna be asked to step outside.

We use pull requests to review and evaluate proposed changes to the Bitcoin Core code base. We discuss the proposed change conceptually, evaluate the approach, and collaborate to hone the implementation of the idea. There are about 40 part-time and full-time Bitcoin Core contributors, and maybe a hundred occasional contributors.

GitHub pull requests are linear comment threads, and it is not at all designed to scale to social media level engagement. A lot of us get an email every time someone comments on a pull request we are participating in. When suddenly hundreds of people start engaging with a pull request, this quickly adds a lot of noise to our inboxes and the technical review comments quickly get lost in the flood of other comments. The moderators step in to fade out some of the repetitive or abrasive comments, in order to increase the visibility of constructive comments. Eventually someone feels mistreated and this supercharges the parallel discussion on social media.

Overall, there are probably better venues to have this sort of conversation. For example the Mailing List, Delving Bitcoin, Stacker News, or Reddit. (Twitter and Nostr seem to contribute more to the outrage, so I’m not sure discussions are all that productive there. ;))

For the Bitcoin Core repository, if you contribute relevant new arguments or other constructive comments, please by all means, go ahead. But before posting, please try to catch up on the state of the debate by reading the mailing list thread and all (visible) comments on the pull request before yours.