From: waxwing/ AdamISZ <ekaggata@gmail•com>
To: Bitcoin Development Mailing List <bitcoindev@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] The case for privatizing Bitcoin Core
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2025 09:53:38 -0700 (PDT) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <447c065f-aa73-463c-aa1c-60340850d24an@googlegroups.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <4ad72033-dac1-4a4d-a432-1cc525f92e6dn@googlegroups.com>
[-- Attachment #1.1: Type: text/plain, Size: 11147 bytes --]
Bryan,
If I'm honest, I realize that my commentary here was flawed in at least two
ways:
> However, my intuition is that manual, vigorous disciplined moderation
like that is difficult to execute especially across many people
1/ as you correctly picked up on here, an "extremely rigorous moderation
policy on PRs" as i was advocating sounds nice, but in what world can that
actually be done? the difficulty of turning that abstract idea into reality
might be related to point 2/ :
re:
> Nobody can stop such discussion forums from being created anywhere on
the Internet.
2/ with regard to a separate forum, mailing list (perhaps like this one)
etc. I again may have glossed over the most difficult real point: what
represents a consequential conclusion to a discussion, even if such a forum
were perfectly set up? The energy around github is IMO mostly from the
natural (partly correct?) interpretation that github is mostly where the
final decision gets made on inclusion of features into bitcoin-the-software
*AND* bitcoin-the-protocol, even if obviously the latter, if we're talking
consensus is a really non-trivial deal and in no way is it just a matter of
counting ACKs on a PR. The unpleasantly difficult-to-answer question of how
(and where) decisions get made is what's causing this.
> I don't see my original goal as "avoid conflict". It was about creating
an online space exclusively for bitcoin developers that want to work
together on bitcoin development. I posit that even with such an exclusive
space, and even if it had higher adoption than the current private
development efforts, that there would still be various online fora with
various people of all kinds (angry, confused, informed, etc), or even
cool-headed non-confused people that developers simply don't have time or
interest to individually read-- or maybe they would; who knows! But it's
separate from having a place for bitcoin development.
Good point. What I'm trying to get at is that if you just cleanly separate
the two things, with no conscious, or perhaps even existent, communication
from one (the fora) in to the other (the dev process), then nobody will
care about the former (as today probably nobody cares about opinions on
*many* bitcoin fora), which means nobody strongly motivated, will use them.
I think it'll depend on some sense of decisions not being exclusively made
on github or via private discussion, into the repository. I'm not sure your
idea of a private repo is wrong, I see where you come from, but I fear it
will exacerbate a pre-existing growing perception of "Bitcoin Core" as a
distinct entity with its own policy approach (and even politics, though
that is a false perception). Can I express for the 100th time my severe
regret that the name "Bitcoin Core" for the Satoshi client was adopted?
(Side note: does anyone actually think it was good that it got renamed to
"Bitcoin Core" because I haven't met any such person, lol).
I don't have any easy solutions to "how the decisions get made", of course,
which is the root cause of the problem, and inflammatory communications are
related mainly to that (even worse, I am leery of people trying to fully
solve it!). If making the environment tolerable and workable for people
doing the actual engineering work is possible without completely solving
that, then that is a very valid goal. But enough windbaggery from me, I
should leave the discussion from here on to people with some actual skin in
the game!
Cheers, AdamISZ/waxwing
On Monday, June 16, 2025 at 12:28:16 PM UTC-3 waxwing/ AdamISZ wrote:
> My personal opinion is that the best solution is to create a very strong
> ruleset on disallowing any non-technical contribution on github, and
> applying that rule rigorously no matter whether the content *feels*
> acceptable or not, and no matter how well respected the contributor is and
> might rightfully be given some slack. This would be for PRs; for Issues, I
> don't know how much of a similar problem you have, but templates aren't bad
> I guess.
>
> Such extreme discipline is only needed in that repo, virtually no other
> repo needs it.
>
> I also do realize this could end up a bit of a weak-sauce suggestion
> compared to others in this thread (I quite like Andrew's suggestion but,
> not sure it's exactly the right one).
>
> This would have to be accompanied by a very strong cohesion around what
> *is* the correct forum for technically-adjacent bitcoin policy discussion
> (as just one example, advocating for or against soft forks goes in this
> bucket), and also tonally to *encourage* such discussion; that
> encouragement would have to be broadcast from the github repo itself,
> certainly in messages to people whose discussion contribution is blocked.
> Obviously it would have to be noted elsewhere too like the main
> distribution website for the software.
>
> Unfortunately I don't think this mailing list *quite* fits the job, though
> it's close ... on the other hand, where else? If this list is manually
> moderated (as I believe it is), do we have a bitcoin-"policy" mailing list
> or other channel?
>
> I think the biggest problems arise when you insist that there is *no*
> place for what you see as "brigading", "sock puppetry" etc. I have seen
> several times in the past (most notably around the blocksize wars) where
> many highly respected engineers dismissed all opposing opinions as sock
> puppetry. This is not realistic, nor is it healthy. If you stuff all
> contrary opinions (uneducated or not!) into a garbage bin that you label
> "politics" (imagine the phrase "go and discuss it on bitcoin-politics" with
> the tacit assumption that no one serious is ever going to read that
> dumpster fire), it invites the exact conflict you're trying to avoid. I
> suggest "bitcoin policy" as a general title for such things, because
> bitcoin does indeed have "policies" in the general sense (not just the
> technical meaning of "policy" in bitcoin-the-software but also consensus
> itself is a flavor of policy). If it doesn't end up being a place that
> serious people talk seriously, then of course it will have failed in the
> intention.
>
> Cheers,
> AdamISZ/waxwing
>
> On Sunday, June 15, 2025 at 1:30:24 PM UTC-3 Andrew Poelstra wrote:
>
>> I have a few thoughts about this -- bearing in mind that I am a drive-by
>> contributor to Core, at best, and don't have much personal opinion other
>> than maybe "I wish it were easier to get stuff in".
>>
>> 1. I think that Antoine is correct that "it's easier and more natural"
>> is a bigger motivation for "office work" than is the fear of brigade.
>> So one thing is that any change to public processes shouldn't make it
>> _harder_ for people to collaborate online, since that could push
>> people more to in-person fora and we'd just have the worst of both
>> worlds. Or at least, anyone making such a change should have a lot of
>> confidence that the increased friendliness to earnest contributors
>> would outweigh the extra friction.
>>
>> 2. On the other hand, fear of brigades _does_ clearly have a nonzero
>> chilling effect. I certainly think about it when publicly communicating
>> near the project, and I commonly bring it up when doing things in
>> rust-bitcoin (i.e. "fortunately, we're not Core, so we can just do
>> [some change that would constrain wallet workflows, or which could
>> make ordinals particularly hard, or particularly easy, or whatever]"
>> and not have to worry about fallout.)
>>
>> So at the very least, it's a factor that discourages some external
>> developers from being bigger contributors to the project.
>>
>> 3. And of course, it's not just obvious brigades -- when one or two
>> nontechnical people show up with strong political views about
>> something which really is not a political change (or at least,
>> doesn't have the political effect they believe it does, because of
>> their own misunderstanding), it's still discouraging and sometimes
>> stressful. And this happens all the time around mempool policy,
>> even if PRs with 100+ comments that get locked are fairly rare.
>>
>> 4. However, after (ironically) discussing this email off-list with a
>> bunch of people, I think that these problems stem from a fairly small
>> cultural issue: that the Github repo appears to be a totally open
>> forum where anyone is welcome to participate, even in code review
>> threads, because technically anybody _can_ participate with no
>> obvious sense that they're leaving X and entering somebody's
>> workplace.
>>
>> And _this_, IMHO, might be solvable by something extremely simple. It
>> might be sufficient to just move from Github to Gitlab or Codeberg or
>> something where far fewer people have accounts. It would probably be
>> sufficient to just find a platform where you have to register on the
>> Core repo somehow then wait 24 hours before you can post, with the
>> implication that if you're not there to contribute technically, you
>> might lose your access. (This is true on Github but the only
>> mechanism is that you can be banned from the org, something that
>> feels heavy and scary for maintainers to use -- I really hate doing
>> this to non-bots on rust-bitcoin and I don't even have to worry that
>> they'll go on twitter to scream censorship and that I'm taking over
>> Bitcoin or whatever -- and is also more-or-less invisible to users
>> until it happens to them, so it's not an effective deterrent.)
>>
>> It would certainly be effective to put a strong technical barrier,
>> e.g. you have to produce a custom mining share to join, or a strong
>> social barrier, e.g. you need personal invitations from two people.
>>
>> But I think such tech barriers would be unnecessary and the social
>> barriers wouldn't be worth the cries of censorship and centralization
>> that they'd inevitably (and somewhat reasonably) cause.
>>
>> 5. I don't see much of benefit to making the repo *unreadable* to
>> outsiders. It sorta prevents linking on Twitter but if we expect
>> there to be mirrors, people can just link to the mirrors.
>>
>>
>> Again, it's not my project and I don't mean to advocate for anything in
>> particular. Just trying to organize thinking on the topic a bit.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Andrew Poelstra
>> Director, Blockstream Research
>> Email: apoelstra at wpsoftware.net
>> Web: https://www.wpsoftware.net/andrew
>>
>> The sun is always shining in space
>> -Justin Lewis-Webster
>>
>>
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Bitcoin Development Mailing List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to bitcoindev+unsubscribe@googlegroups•com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcoindev/447c065f-aa73-463c-aa1c-60340850d24an%40googlegroups.com.
[-- Attachment #1.2: Type: text/html, Size: 12955 bytes --]
prev parent reply other threads:[~2025-06-16 16:56 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2025-06-10 20:31 Bryan Bishop
2025-06-10 23:13 ` Dave Scotese
2025-06-11 8:38 ` [bitcoindev] " Michael Folkson
2025-06-12 16:45 ` The Case for Decentralizing Bitcoin Core Development [was Re: [bitcoindev] The case for privatizing Bitcoin Core] Christopher Allen
2025-06-14 18:29 ` [bitcoindev] The case for privatizing Bitcoin Core 'Antoine Poinsot' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List
2025-06-16 17:36 ` Bryan Bishop
2025-06-15 16:14 ` Andrew Poelstra
2025-06-16 15:14 ` waxwing/ AdamISZ
2025-06-16 16:09 ` Bryan Bishop
2025-06-16 16:53 ` waxwing/ AdamISZ [this message]
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=447c065f-aa73-463c-aa1c-60340850d24an@googlegroups.com \
--to=ekaggata@gmail$(echo .)com \
--cc=bitcoindev@googlegroups.com \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox