On Sat, 15 Jun 2013, Mike Gogulski wrote:

> This all goes to prove, in my mind and the minds of some others around
> me, that even nominal control of the canonical Bitcoin codebase needs to
> be wrested away, by hook or by crook, from @BTCFoundation, and
> especially from Gavin and Garzik, and/or supplanted by something else.

My perception of Gavin's position is that he is valuing his own
continued success as "chief scientist" on top of everyone's freedom.
Most likely before bitcoin was born he was quite frustrated waiting for
a big project to be on top and now that he has found it, even if its not
his own, he will not let go - he probably sees it as his life project.

But out of this personal dimension, which is undoubtely governed by
ambition rather than anything else, anyone developing tools for
independent sovereignty within the boundaries of an imperialist state,
just like anyone developing a tool like bitcoin, will be forced to stop
or collaborate by inserting backdoors.

by "imperialist state" I don't mean just any government that aims to
control the totality of life within its boundaries, but - and this is
the case of bitcoin - to control all value transactions happening even
outside its territory. In such a scenario a tool like Bitcoin, in which
many have seen a chance for liberation, will transform in its nemesis, a
rapacious tool for the global control of value transactions by the
central entity pulling its strings.

The most important thing for all of us now is that the code stays open
source, so that others can challenge this process. Another important
thing would be indeed that Gaving resigns from his role because unable
to fulfill the mission of bitcoin, rather than betraying it and at the
same time fostering its usage among many people who don't know.

But the above will likely not happen.

The Ripple alternative is already seing large investments deployed to
create a closed source project (as such configuring itself as a pyramid
scheme), while Bitcoino - an invention that hails the disappearance of
its own author and of leadership and control - was always governed by a
centralized hierarchy among its developers since its very early days...
its almost romantic today to note how a few have fought this situation
since the beginning, among them Amir.

The main question I'm interested to have answered now is whether the
hacker culture at large, which bootstrapped Bitcoin to its size today,
will be able to steer this narrative in other directions, or will let it
be appropriated by some centralizing foundation or venture capital
scams. I guess in our case the answer might be visible in graphs of
value fluctuations.

> libbitcoin is one possibility, Amir, but as we've discussed the license
> is limiting and there needs to be a native C API rather than C++.

the GNU GPL license is granting that all code should stay open source,
this is a very important condition for everyone involved. while adopting
MIT/BSD could be an option, I advice against it since enlarging the user
base by permitting closed source distributions is a secondary priority
to that of keeping it all open source (I've sketched the reasons above)

regarding the C API, jgarzik has packed together an excellent codebase
with picocoin that lets one operate on blockchains and such, its worth a
look.

ciao