Topic: Roger Ver and Jon Matonis pushed aside now that Bitcoin is becoming mainstream - page 11. (Read 46570 times)

It's listed right on the Bitcoin.org site, click developers.

Obviously Satoshi is not so active anymore.

Please spare some patience and some courtesy for people who are spending their time trying to improve things. I think he's been doing a good job listening trying to balance various views and he does not deserve the hostility being directed at him in this thread.

As I understand you only got involved because you were able to supply better graphics for the website.

What I don't understand is how you became the arbiter (and instigator) of what is a decidedly divisive debate in the bitcoin community? Are you even equipped to be involved in this decision? Maybe stick to graphics unitl you establish some credentials in the bitcoin world?

tl;dr you've been played for your naivete by some schemers.

Most of this is right. I am Saïvann, and I speak on my own without Gavin instructions, hoping to allows him to stay concentrated on the code. He's already busy enough.

However to make things clear, I didn't close/reject Pelle's suggestion (issue still open). Nor did I reject Roger or Matonis forever. I pushed the Press Center without them simply because people didn't agree on them. To allows these discussions to happen seperately without blocking the whole project. And before we really had an opportunity to go any further on these matters, this thread appeared and created interference with various unverified claims and drama. Though it also generated interesting points of views. I'm reading everything, but I can't satisfy everyone.

Meanwhile, I'm keeping things on hold until it calms down. And I'm trying to see what can be done to achieve a better consensus. Dropping all the interviewees list is a drastic change and is likely to create more outcry and confusion if we do it right now. And I still believe that we can find a better solution.

Ha coincidentally found this thread when I was googling my name (not something I am normally in a habit of doing) because I talked to a journalist a few weeks ago and I wanted to check if he mangled my technical explanation or worse; btw he didnt mention my name, even better, win!)

My exchange with Satoshi was early but very brief.  I understand the tech ok and much of the precursor tech with various ecash technology.  Theres a lot that happened since Satoshis paper in altcoin so I am in catch mode for a bit.

But I am not a good public speaker - I am allowed that luxury because I'm a crypto geek not an ex-CEO. 

There are people who are masters at sounding cool, moderate, responsive and informative when faced with Bill O'reilly type verbal rough ups, and while covering controversial topics.  ie Politicians and professional PR & and spokespeople.  Rick Falkvinge is very impressive.  Or for example watch Kim DotKom in this interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF48PjCtW4k  Awesome "Well you have to understand blah blah.."  sounds so reasonable.  (Yeah ok it a friendly interview, but there are a few talented people who are amazing at sounding more reasonable than the presenter under fire). 
Kristinn Hrafnsson holds his cool really well - and given the wikileaks controversies he gets to face up to the worst of it.

I always find Matonis fun, and his mix of ex-hushmail CEO and ex-VISA exec background seems hard to match in terms of bridging credentials.  He does like to push the libertarian angle which is amusing to crypto-libertarian types but might not always look so amusing or bitcoin credibility inspiring to the business people and regulators, but he's still really good.

The main media do seem to more enjoy sensationalizing about the fringe users doing naughty and titilating things with bitcoin that they could just as well use paper notes in the snail for.  Bitcoin isnt even anonymous for example as Shamir et al showed with their statistical analysis paper on the bitcoin public ledger - its less anonymous than paper cash - you dont get that kind of transparency and flow analysis with paper cash or physical banks handling of paper cash.  And as far as that goes HSBC were found guilty of laundering getting on for a trillion dollars ($880 bil) and accepted paying $1.2 billion fine.  Thats probably a slap on the wrist at their scale.  No one went to jail, no one had banking licences revoked etc.  Barclays did something similar.  Maybe the regulators should start with real problems, they say HSBC laundering covered mexican drug cartels and even terror funding.

I always thought Ian Brown does pretty well for a tech guy - you see him on Al Jazeera sometimes for tech commentary.

Also I gotta write code, man, and stop getting sucked into blathering about politics fun though it is.

Adam

It is not unusual to host website source repositories on GitHub and to use the provided issue tracker and pull requests to facilitate collaboration in developing a website. To programmers (I am one myself), it's all just code, even if non-programmers might perhaps be inclined to draw sharper delineations between a website versus software as such.

That doesn't mean that GitHub tickets are necessarily the most appropriate place for questions of basic policy, of course. GitHub is perhaps better suited to matters regarding mechanism (the "how") than policy (the "what" and "why"). Where such matters ought to be discussed is in and of itself a question of developer policy, however. In this case, it was certainly to all our benefit that the OP raised the matter here on the forums, ensuring that it is now getting the attention it merits.

As for your other questions, I don't have the answers. Hopefully somebody does.

That will never happen, you do realize they have been in existence for a while and have yet to do anything. If you think they are going to be come a Government lobby group you misunderstood of what the foundation is suppose to be and they can't even do that right.

This is a good question. I wondered about where the buck stops, too; looking into it a little bit, my current understanding is that the source code for the Bitcoin.org website is hosted at https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.org, wherein it is at the moment largely maintained by Saivann Carignan. This authority was apparently delegated to him by Gavin Andresen fairly recently.

From the discussions at GitHub, it's a bit unclear at this point whether or not Saivann speaks with Gavin's approval in his confident decisions to exclude Matonis and Ver, or his decision more recently to reject Pelle's proposed resolution to the matter. Perhaps Gavin might be so kind as to clarify these matters.

I think an idea that should be considered is to take the collection of all Bitcoin-community people who have done media already, and invite them each to opt in or out. If Garzik, Maxwell, Luke et al. want to do "strategic messaging visioning" or whatever-the-fuck, let them do it by persuading the folks who are already talking to the media about Bitcoin, rather than just drawing exclusionary lines. There should be dozens of people on that list, not a hand-picked few.

At the same time, I think removing the list entirely is a profoundly bad idea. If doing this right is too difficult for the people at it now, the correct response is not to just abandon the effort, but to get people who can do it properly involved.

Instead of discussing who should be on this list, I think it's much more pertinent to discuss if we need that list.

I think it is a grave error to list representatives there. Regardless of the disclaimer, these are going to be considered representatives.

Lets just leave the politics out of bitcoin.org and remove it. I have created a pull request here, which I hope will put the whole issue to rest:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.org/pull/152

This is nothing against anyone on or off the list. It's just that this is a bad move and is bad for the community and the project as a whole.

Jon has a piece today on Forbes on this topic:

Bitcoin Foundation Expands Global Media Opportunities


http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2013/04/22/bitcoin-foundation-expands-global-media-opportunities/

Also didn't BitTorrent's Bram Cohen offer free copyrighted porn so people would beta test his software? I don't know if it is true or just a legend of the tech world.

Uhhm not exactly - there was a HUGE ARMS RACE (ie. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1989931) between
BT users, ISPs, and content "owners". I don't remember the exact order that these measures/countermeasures were implemented:

* Malicious/spying host blacklisting
* Fake torrents / honey pots
* Port blocking
* Port randomization
* Insane litigation / grandma arrests
* VPNs
* Changes to host discovery (DHT, UDP or something?)
* Trackers takedowns / jail for webmasters
* ISP bandwidth throttling
* Protocol encryption
* Media campaigns from both sides

In the end, I don't think anybody really cared what BRAM posted on his blog or whatever.

I hope we won't have to use such measures to secure bitcoin...

John Matonis speaks about this subject quite eloquently.

And that's the reason why they have never tried to fight it. Oh wait ...

One day we are going to destroy the central currencies of this world. But we have to wait and be patient. Our time will come

One does not simply grovel lobby for freedom. The two approaches to life (serfdom vs. freedom) are antithetical.

It should probably be pointed out that BitTorrent has survived mainly because the public faces only used it legally and never promoted illegal use...

Exactly. That's how BitTorrent grew into what it is today. Oh wait...

That will never happen. Bitcoin's continued existence is threat to the reputation of all central banks. The European Central Bank said as much last fall:


Bitcoin will always be a threat to central banks. For 100 years, banks have told us that we need them. Bitcoin proves them wrong. Everyday that the Bitcoin network is in operation is another piece of the central banks' reputation chipped away.

While I agree that the main reason was to get Gavin Salary, if that was smart or not will be decided later, but the foundation has all these intelligent members that should be coming together to make bitcoin better from so many different avenues. Plus having board members that compliment each other, is a huge failure of foundation. I think having Roger Ver and Jon Matonis removed from bitcoin.org press page another failure. Just too many failure for that foundation, but a win of getting Gavin a salary which shouldn't be only win.

This is so false, sounds like someone needs to read the wiki... Don't spread FUD


First and only stage is we need to get people to do there own research on bitcoin, it is impossible to introduction a complex bitcoin in a news piece, but instead allow people to go on there own and do research and experiment on there own with bitcoins.


We could easily create another platform, but they have control of the bitcoin.org, and the bitcoin client it be a uphill battle the entire way up.


Again no, for the same reasons above.