On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 4:59 PM, Amir Taaki <genjix@???> wrote:

> mike hearn says the bitcoin dev model needs to change. backing up gavin
> (chief scientist of bitcoin foundation who is actually more like a
> figurehead to legitimise the foundation)... this is his way of pushing out
> elements by formalising the dev process to stop people to participate and
> take control.

Do remember that Mike Hearn is not actually a developer for Bitcoin
Core. He talks a lot, but all in all he has only about 10 commits.

Not to say his contributions to bitcoin are not important, his project
BitcoinJ plays a large part in making bitcoin accessible to large
amounts of people. And his Lighthouse stuff may actually help
crowdfund development.

But lately he complains a lot about lack of progress in Bitcoin Core
development. Even though if you follow the git repository you can see
that there are lots of fixes and improvements every day. Then when you
push him on it, he says he means that the things *he* cares about are
not moving fast enough. Suffice to say, I'm not the only one slightly
ticked off by this.

Jeremy Allaire indeed seems to be parroting him.

> if you want to dev bitcoin, there's nothing stopping you. go write control
> or participate. don't try to assert control.

Exactly.

> it's all related, bitcoin foundation being official with their claim to
> legimitimacy but no merit to back that up.

They're nothing more official than anyone. Other people could start a
second bitcoin foundation tomorrow and it'd be exactly as official.
Despite a lot of talk I still don't see it happening. No one else is
proposing to fund Bitcoin Core development.

Which doesn't mean that the Bitcoin Foundation owns Bitcoin Core
development. There is no 'command structure' that steers the direction
from above. The BF pays me a salary but has never told me to do
anything except to be fulltime maintainer. In principle the project is
led by what happens to be contributed (just like other open source
projects).

Contributions are not vetted by bitcoin foundation membership of the
contributor but by technical merit.

Also I'm just the maintainer, I write and review code, do lots of
testing, and look at where the consensus of the contributors is going.
I don't claim to 'assert control' at all, I can't make decisions if a
large part of the other developers don't agree.

Wladimir