Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Separated bitcoin-consensus mailing list (was Re: Bitcoin XT Fork)

From: Bryan Bishop <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2015 19:21:06 -0500

On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 3:59 AM, Jorge Timón <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> Apparently that existed already: http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/
> But technical people run away from noise while non-technical people
> chase them wherever their voices sounds more loud.
>

FWIW, and I mentioned this opinion in #bitcoin-dev on IRC, but I am
perfectly fine with receiving everything through a single mailing list. I
used to read the Wikipedia firehose of recent edits because I thought
that's how you were supposed to use the site. Edits per second eventually
reached beyond any reasonable estimate of human capacity and then I
realized what was going on. Any sort of "glorious future" for bitcoin with
hundreds of millions of users will also see this problem for future
developers, even if only 0.1% of that population are money-interested
programmers then that's 100,000 programmers to work with. I would never
want to turn off this raw feed. Having said that, I am somewhat surprise
that nobody has taken to weekly summaries of research and development
activity. Summarizing recent work is a valuable task that others can engage
in just by reading the mailing list and aggregating multiple thoughts
together, similar to release notes. I was also expecting to see something
like "individual developer's summaries of things they have found
interesting over the past 30-90 days or past year" digging up arcane
details from the mailing list archives, or more infrequent summaries of the
other smaller batched review emails. Digest mode mailing list consumption
is often recommended to those who are uninterested in dealing with low
signal-to-noise, but I suspect that summarizing activity would be more
valuable for this community, especially for the different cognitive niches
that have developed.

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507