Topic: How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People - page 4. (Read 29524 times)

That's your solution right there then.

1+  this is exactly right.  miners like myself will leave Eligius in an instant otherwise they will lose their entire investment in Bitcoin.

That would depend on how much better it would work. It only takes 3 pools to take over.

I don't think you have experience over these matters if you feel it's not necessary to talk about leaving. It certainly is. The moment the debates reached the stage that this thread was necessary, the situation went to the next level. To me it's not just about anyone leaving, it's about forcing someone out if he doesn't want to leave. Open source project or not, I certainly hope the other devs can force a dev out if it is deemed that he is doing more bad than good for the project. I believe that Luke might not stop interfering voluntarily.

I'm not happy that the situation reached this stage but talking about it like "everything is fine" is not the way to go. This needs to be resolved asap in a way that a similar situation is not possible in the future, at least not with the same individuals. And as far as Luke and his followers starting their own blockchain, I'm rolling on the floor laughing at that notion. Not only will Eligius be the only significant pool to join that attempt, Eligius will lose a significant amount of its hash power if Luke decides to go on a "war path" over this.

I moved Casascius' proposal ("BIP 22") to the Dev&Tech forum, I will respond there.

I think there is absolutely no reason to bring this disjunctive. No one has threatened to leave so why even suggesting it?

At worst, they would release competing, mutually aggressive algorithms and the popularity war would wage mining-power wise. That would be bad enough but the loser would just end up going along with the winner. I doubt anyone would leave the project as they have massive time and effort invested.

My point of view to this situation comes from years of experience in an organization which is run 100% by voluntary work. It's an activist movement so it's not the same as open source development, but the conflicts that happen in open source development are exactly the same. It's a conflict of leadership and eventually one of two things happen, either the people involved in the conflict settle their issues and everything is "back to normal" or the situation heats up and then it can only be resolved by a split of some kind.

To me it looks very unlikely that Gavin and Luke are about to settle their issues anytime soon which means that option #2 is becoming more and more likely. Happily for all of us this is unlikely to cause a real split because Luke doesn't mean much to most of the community, while Gavin is highly valued. I agree that Luke is a great coder but project lead is project lead and that is and should continue to be Gavin. We are truly in a situation where the leadership role of Gavin needs to be made clear.

Luke needs to be stripped of all decision making roles, he is the kind of person who should stay in the background and contribute to the code if he wants to. Leadership should stay where it is, Gavin has done a great job with Bitcoin and there is no reason to believe that this time is any different. Don't get me wrong though, this doesn't mean that Gavin should be a dictator that decides everything regardless of what opinions other developers have. But the fact is that Luke has been, and still is, pretty much the only developer that is strongly against BIP16.

Bottom line is that the development of Bitcoin is a team effort. Gavin is a trusted team player, Luke is not. It's as simple as that. As far as the BIP's are concerned, I'm interested to see comments on BIP22 as well. But that is a separate issue, the main issue here and now is the future development of Bitcoin and we simply can't afford to have poisonous people in central developmental roles.

You can keep hoping. Luke is a manipulative personality type who has very low communication skills and he has proven to be abusive of power and he also has strange personal goals regarding his entire involvement in Bitcoin. This manipulative behaviour is very clear if you've seen his behaviour in mediums other than this forum. He clearly sees this as a more "official" place and does his best to be as polite and level headed as possible. His posts here, especially in this thread, doesn't give you a complete picture.

I second this position.

I feel that keeping Gavin is worth more than keeping Luke.

I mean no offense to Luke, I don't know him as a person. But I feel more certain that Bitcoin is better off with Gavin, and without Luke, than the other way around.

I think it's unfortunate that it has to come to this, but in the end I think it's up to Gavin to decide. I support his decision.

I meant it in the sense that a mistake in implementation could have been costly, like literally. Huge amounts of Bitcoins could have been sucked away if things went pear-shaped. Users were hollering for this, but Gavin only released the change after a long cooling off period. My point is he's very careful, didn't bow to a quick fix, and acted in the best interest of the network.

Never said nothing else matters. If nothing else mattered, I wouldn't bet a dime on Bitcoin as its major asset right now is a non-technical one: traction/popularity.

There is a middle-ground between "right technical decisions are everything" vs "popularity contest/who would I rather let baby-sit my kids"

I don't see what's the reason not to discuss long and hard about fundamental changes in the protocol. This is not your average OS project were continuous development is necessary and features can be added and removed at will.

The whole fucking idea behind bitcoin is that the system itself doesn't need "special" people or institutions behind. This is obviously false at this point, but let's at least not exacerbate this problem. Excuse me if I don't give top priority about who's nicer and I'd rather look at the right technical decision.

Yeah, it's a heart.

I <3 Gavin, but that's an odd choice of example. The encryption procedure didn't actually remove the unencrypted private keys when it was first released.

edit: <3 is a heart right? It's not in my normal vocabulary.

i'm behind Gavin 100% (I don't understand the bip16-17 thing but that's not the point), I would lose a lot of faith in the bitcoin project if Gavin were to not lead it. 
Luke-jr seems prepared to flare up minor disagreements to cause infighting with Gavin as the target to further whatever agenda it is he has, eventually he will succeed in his goal of ousting Gavin when bitcoin gets bigger and the parasites start probing for weakness.  We're going to have to deal with real divide and conquer attempts with bitcoins growth and luke-jr is the guy that will be prepared to shaft the community to further his own goals, even if he has to make a deal with the devil to do it.

Nice video.

I had meetings that never ended in voting, ever. We stood up to 5-6 AM until a consensus was reached. Exhausting it was, so tempting to decide issues by votes. But we always stood still.

In Bitcoin, there's is a mix about discussion and vote. The changes are ultimately decided on vote, barely simple hash majority (with momentum), "always winners and losers", and that is by design.

The Bitcoin's solution against attackers or distrusted protocol changes, genjix's cathartic progress proposal, this video. Makes me remember this great history:

End of Cypherpunks -- A List Goes Down In Flames
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9702/msg00034.html

ROFL!!!!! This is what I read during my 2nd minute I woke up... You just made my day!

Are you saying then that you've met Satoshi Nakamoto?

I second that!

subscribe. not enough information to compute.

GAVIN FTW!!!!!!!!!!