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

From: Milly Bitcoin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2015 08:34:52 -0400

Without looking up specific links I am confident people like Mircea 
Popescu will oppose just about any change.  Maybe they don't post their 
objection to Github but the point I am making is that no matter what 
change you make someone, somewhere will be against it.  Some of the 
developers think that Github is the only place that matters and that the 
only opinions that matter is a tiny group of insiders.  I don't think 
that way which is the reasoning behind my statement.

I am saying that after all the concerns are addressed as far as 
reasonably possible someone, somewhere has to decide whether or not to 
commit the changes to the official release.  Right now the only person 
who makes that decision if the version manager.  I agree it should not 
fall onto the shoulders of one person who is also very busy doing other 
things.  I am saying there should be some process to move forward and 
make decisions when needed.

Also, you already saw one of the Core developers calling me a "troll" 
and telling others to ignore my messages.  I have heard of several 
people who just drop out of the github discussions because of stuff like 
that.  They also delete message from Gihub discussions so that archive 
is not 100% credible.  I have seen things like a Github discussion 
between 3 or 4 people and then Garzik send out a tweet that there is 
near universal approval for the proposed change as it nobody is allowed 
to question it.  After watching the github process for a couple years I 
simply don't trust it because the developers in charge have a 
dictatorial style and they shut out many stakeholders instead of 
soliciting their opinions.  I view the Github system as the biggest 
centralized choke-point in Bitcoin and probably its biggest threat to 
its continued survival.  Anyone can come in and hire a couple core 
developers and veto any change they don't want.

Russ

On 6/26/2015 7:13 AM, Jorge Timón wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 2:42 PM, Milly Bitcoin <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> "Cultish" means making claims without any supporting facts.
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 5:19 AM, Milly Bitcoin <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> As for developers, the consensus on code changes are almost never 100% and
>> someone has to make the decision about what is an a acceptable consensus.
> This statement seems "cultish" by your own definition.
> I'm going to make the opposite statement:  the consensus on code
> changes is almost always 100%.
> Mark has already given a couple examples of changes to consensus rules
> (the most risky type of change), here's a few thousand other examples
> of changes to the bitcoin core's code that had no opposition:
>
> https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits/master
>
> Can you please point us to a few examples were changes were made with
> opposition to them?
> In those cases (which you assure is what happens almost always), would
> you say that the result of letting a decider decide instead of fixing
> or addressing all the concerns (either by changing the proposed code
> or explaining it) better in restrospective?
>