Some of the people on this mailing list are blindly discussing the technicalities of a soft/hard fork without realizing that is not Mike's main intention. At least I perceive (and maybe others too) something else is happening.

Let me try to clarify: the discussion has nothing to do with technical arguments. I generally like more hard forks than soft forks (but I won't explain why because this is not a technical thread), but for CLTV this is quite irrelevant (but I won't explain why..), and I want CLTV to be deployed asap.

Mike's intention is to criticize the informal governance model of Bitcoin Core development and he has strategically pushed the discussion to a dead-end where the group either:

1) ignores him, which is against the established criteria that all technical objections coming from anyone must be addressed until that person agrees, so that a change can be uncontroversial. If the group moves forward with the change, then the "uncontroversial" criteria is violated and then credibility is lost. So a new governance model would be required for which the change is within the established rules.

2) respond to his technical objections one after the other, on never ending threads, bringing the project to a standstill.

As I don't want 2) to happen, then 1) must happen, which is what Mike wants. I have nothing for or against Mike personally. I just think Mike Hearn has won this battle. But having a more formal decision making process may not be too bad for Bitcoin, maybe it can actually be good.

Best regards

from a non-developer to my dearest developer friends,

Sergio.