Hi,

> 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.

I hate when people do this - claim, even sarcastically, to understand
what is going on in other peoples' minds. They are usually wrong.

I don't agree with what Gavin is doing, but his reasons are his and his
alone. Let's talk about what our reaction to his action will be.

> But out of this personal dimension, which is undoubtely governed by

I will let Dan Dennet speak for a while:


"When you're reading or skimming argumentative essays, especially by
philosophers, here is a quick trick that may save you much time and
effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for
"surely" in the document and check each occurrence. Not always, not even
most of the time, but often the word "surely" is as good as a blinking
light locating a weak point in the argument.

Why? Because it marks the very edge of what the author is actually sure
about and hopes readers will also be sure about. (If the author were
really sure all the readers would agree, it wouldn't be worth
mentioning.) Being at the edge, the author has had to make a judgment
call about whether or not to attempt to demonstrate the point at issue,
or provide evidence for it, and – because life is short – has decided in
favour of bald assertion, with the presumably well-grounded anticipation
of agreement. Just the sort of place to find an ill-examined "truism"
that isn't true!"

You get the similarity of surely and undoubtely....

> 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.

I really doubt value can be controlled this way. Value is subjective
perception of people participating in an exchange. Even printed paper
has value, if it buys you food.

Of course it can cause harm, which is the reason we need:
 1.) alternative implementations (thanks to Amir, bitcoin-js guys and
     others)
 2.) honest miners that won't just switch to newer version if someone
     does something stupid. (people like slush)

> 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.

I agree that there should be no Bitcoin foundation and thus no Gavin in
it.

I don't agree that Gavin should resign from the project. He has
contributed a lot of time and effort to Bitcoin, probably more than
most of us on this list. Again - if Bitcoin truly is robust and
decentralized, it should not fall or rise based on what a developer
thinks or does. If this is the case, that's what needs to be fixed,
that's the vulnerability - not kicking people out, but making sure
they can't do anything really bad systematically.

I agree he should not try to represent Bitcoin users. And I understand
that we are all sick of people trying to represent and explain what we
think to others (and then find that we are doing the same thing, which
is even worse).

> 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.

I like to think of this as creating, not fighting. Fighting has
casualties. Creating makes things better :)

(Sorry to all, that's just me trying not to endorse phrases like
"battlefield of science" or "war on evil". It's not a fucking war,
it's a distributed database of transactions - revolutionary? yes.
are people dying or suffering? no :).

> 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.

I guess we could see it, but I see value fluctuation as noise more
than anything. Noise that's coming from people's action, but I don't
think we can infer from it backwards. It's butterfly effects -
multiplied again and again and again.

I am also curious how will all of this proceed and I hope for the best,
but I don't think hacker culture is responsible for any narratives.
What's the only important thing here: Will people use it? Do people want
it? (I don't mean majority of people - I mean some people).

Bitcoin is a revolution of sorts, but completely irrelevant to 98.2%
of population so far. That does not mean it won't change the world
and it actually already changed the world a lot.

> 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)

These are your priorities :). And probably Amir's, because he has chosen
this license. I don't mind or criticize this decision, but people may
have (and usually have - because we are discussing this) different
priorities than you.

> 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.

Thanks for this, interesting project.

Sorry for being so blunt, I did not want to hurt your feelings in any
way, it's just I sometimes see the world differently and for some
strange reason I had to express it today. I love you anyway.

Peace,

     Juraj.