Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] BIP Process and Votes

From: "NxtChg" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2015 23:21:26 +0300

On 6/28/2015 at 10:05 PM, "Patrick Murck" <[email-masked]> wrote:

>Maintainer is empowered to make changes to "teh Bitcoin" but the reality is that the Core Maintainer role is really about cat
>herding and project management of Bitcoin Core the open-source software project and not the bitcoin network.

It's not about pushing a change, it's about refusing a change on the grounds of controversy.

This is _not_ an attack on Wladimir. His position in view of circumstances is perfectly reasonable: to take the safest option.

Even at the risk of stagnation, as he pointed out, at least your funds won't be expropriated. It's a noble position to defend the minority.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), the majority of power usually gets what it wants. Of course, "they will have it their way anyway" is not an appropriate reason to flip-flop on an ethical position, so nobody expects Wladimir to change his mind.

Thus, we are playing a variation of prisoner's dilemma here: the best solution would be an agreement on both sides, if only they could agree.

In reality, there's a good chance that Gavin's fork will win, creating precisely the problems and risks, which Wladimir tries to avoid, only more. And we will end up with lose-lose situation.

But we lack any other mechanism for a scenario where interests of some of those 7 committers become misaligned with interests of the majority (which seems to be the case).

And every time Bitcoin will face similar disagreement in the future we will go through it again...