Author: Bryan Bishop 2015-06-18 14:33:24
Published on: 2015-06-18T14:33:24+00:00
In an email conversation between Mike Hearn and Bryan, the topic of commit access to GitHub's repositories was discussed. Hearn had mentioned that Gavin had previously stated that he would not commit something, even though he had the ability to do so. However, Bryan pointed out that this wasn't relevant to the original email which was about commit access, not commits themselves. Bryan argued that a top-down centralized authority-based hierarchy, similar to Wikipedia, was not suitable for an open source project such as Bitcoin. Instead, every developer and user must be responsible for self-validation of the rules, checking for correctness, and validity. This is critical to avoid compromising bitcoin users through their trust in BDFLs (benevolent dictator for life) or anything else that can be compromised. In the context of contentious hard-forks, everyone individually must evaluate the rules and decide whether the software is correct or whether changes can cause catastrophic broken hard-forks. Users, companies, and developers must be aware of this because it is different from their usual expectations of how systems operate and are maintained. The anti-process leads to better decision making, but it leads to no decision making at all, which is not the same thing. Gavin and Bryan believe there is a process, and that process is a hard fork of the block chain. However, other bitcoin software maintainers may not agree with the toxic reasoning behind this approach, and contentious hard-forks are basically a weapon of war that can be used against any other collaborator on any bitcoin project.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T23:28:34.667040+00:00