Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Concerns Regarding Threats by a Developer to Remove Commit Access from Other Developers

From: Pieter Wuille <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2015 15:50:07 +0200

On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 3:31 PM, Mike Hearn <[email-masked]> wrote:

> OK, let's agree to unpack the two things.
>
> The first issue is how are decisions made in Bitcoin Core? I struggle to
> explain this to others because I don't understand it myself. Is it a vote
> of people with commit access? Is it a 100% agreement of "core developers"
> and if so, who are these people? Is it "whoever reverts the change last"?
> Could I write down in a document a precise description of how decisions are
> made? No, and that's been a fairly frustrating problem for a long time.
>
> But let's leave it to one side for a moment.
>
> Let's focus on the other issue:   what happens if the Bitcoin Core
> decision making process goes wrong?
>

Why do you keep talking about Bitcoin Core maintainers? The means for doing
a hard fork is convincing the network to run modified code, whether that is
a new version of Bitcoin Core or a fork of it, or something else entirely.

If I see consensus about a proposed network change, I will be in favor of
implementing it in Bitcoin Core. But we're not at that point. There is no
network change proposed with consensus. There is not even a patch to be
discussed. There are working proposals, and people are talking about them.
This is good.

I think maintainers of particular software should not be, and are not those
who decide the network's rules. People running the code are. Of course
maintainers have a large influence, but so do other people - like you.

> This was a reference to a post by Gregory on Reddit where he said if
Gavin were to do a pull request for the block size change and then merge
it, he would revert it. And I fully believe he would do so!

I believe so too, and I would do the same. Because I believe implementing a
consensus rule change without having very good expectations that the
network will adopt it, is reckless from the point of view of maintainers,
for all reasons I have mentioned before.

-- 
Pieter