Topic: Roger Ver and Jon Matonis pushed aside now that Bitcoin is becoming mainstream - page 5. (Read 46570 times)

you keep creating a strawman for the people who offer reasonable opposition to your political litmus test.

I'm a lefty liberal who grew up in Europe. I find anti-government AnCap philosophy to be very far from my experience or political leanings.

I still think Matonis is more mainstream that people on the press list, that the attempt to exclude him is odious, the criteria inconsistent and the desire to limit opinions misguided. That's even though I disagree 100% with anti-government libertarians.

You are not a moderate, sorry. Censorship by exclusion is a radical position, despite all the rationalizations we have heard.

That's my opinion, and I am non-anarchist, mainstream, tax-paying, business person who sees bitcoin as a mainstream, yet also radically disruptive technology, just like the Internet. I disagree with your attempt to exclude.

Just to clear up some confusion on this point, I don't have any direct influence over the Foundation or what it does. I'm just a member like many others. The Foundation exists was created to solve a few different problems like be able to pay Gavin, to have an umbrella org for Bitcoin supporters to chip in financially, to organise conferences and to handle cases where the system needs a central body (like owning the trademark). It doesn't have an Illuminati-like agenda or set of opinions on every possible topic.


Do I need write up an FAQ on my political and economic views, or something?

One of the reasons these debates are so tiring is the insistence people sometimes have on seeing everything as black or white. There's only "anti government freedom lovers" or "pro government snivelling permission seekers" and nothing in between. That's not how the world works.

I could write at length on my views around size of government, financial regulation and so on. You'd probably find it quite boring. Suffice it to say I think if Bitcoin were to take off, it'd place some much needed restrictions on government power. For instance, it'd prevent governments and central banks from inflating the currency to pay for short-term vote buying, which would be an improvement. It would resolve the problem of opaque government blacklists (like the US SDNL) which are merely abusive sidesteps of the judicial system. A lot of the ways government and banks are integrated is excessively bureaucratic and poses problems for civil liberties, I think Bitcoin will have impact on that too. At the same time, I don't think Bitcoin will (or should) bring about some kind of anarchist total collapse of the state. Taxes will still be collected. Judges will still judge. Police will still police.  Voters will still vote. Some people, somewhere, will have to engage in many challenging conversations with regulators and law enforcement to enable Bitcoin to thrive because these people aren't just going to go away and they cannot be "beaten" by just ignoring them.

I wrote this on the Foundation forum too, but I'll repeat it here. I think a lot of these excessively vitriolic debates boil down to a misunderstood geographical divide. Libertarianism hardly exists in Europe. Anarchism is what people do on May 1st when idiots dressed in black leather set bins on fire, it's not a political position. Agorism sounds like something people do with plants. I don't remember the last time I met someone who thought their government was oppressive or described taxation as theft. These positions are so far to the right that they're practically alien in large chunks of the world.

I grew up in the UK and now live in Switzerland, neither of which have oppressive governments. About the most oppressive thing the Swiss government does is organise street parties from time to time. Taxes are low. Business is good. The rule of law is strong. It's a pretty nice place. There's no need to overthrow any states. When people here learn about Bitcoin they tend to think, oh cool, a way to take the banks down a peg. Or maybe, great, I pay too much in credit card fees. They don't think "finally a way to bring about an anarcho-capitalist utopia!".

Unfortunately, I repeatedly see a failure to recognise this amongst some people who come to the Bitcoin community. Anyone who isn't on the extreme hard right politically "doesn't get it" or "isn't true to the cause" or whatever. This is especially ridiculous because the introduction to Satoshi's paper is not a political manifesto, it talks about the problems of accepting credit card payments online. To the extent that he cared about politics he was interested in the power of the banks and inflationary policies (one reason amongst several I suspect he might be a Brit). So it'd be nice if people chilled out and respected others views a little more.

Do you see this, folks? Can you find somebody that writes better than this guy on this forum? And he's not even on the damn press list!

Please, just remove this pity attempt of "censorship of ideas" from bitcoin.org.

Wow... totally distinct sets, huh? Anarchists don't ever form business or write software. Brilliant.

I'm sorry Mike... I strongly admire your work, you're the source of a bunch of really bright ideas in Bitcoin world. And you work hard for its improvement. I thank you for that. But this post of yours was pathetic and filled with prejudice. Perhaps the worst of yours I've read so far.


Oh no no, that's not apolitical at all, and you know it very well. All this is already a political choice - that of being a state-lover and "law-abiding" person. That's obviously a political standpoint (and imho, a sort of religious belief too).

And by the way, about "always following the law", perhaps you should read what Falkvinge has to say about it (he's a socialist statist, by the way): http://falkvinge.net/2012/07/19/debunking-the-dangerous-nothing-to-hide-nothing-to-fear/ (it's item 3 if you're in a hurry)
(I can also quote Larken Rose, but I suppose you'll discredit him right away:
I agree, pointing to a wiki page is probably not a good idea either. A true attempt of making bitcoin.org less biased would be to remove this Press Center entirely. Just remove the Press Center from bitocoin.org, and journalists will keep doing whatever they do to search for information.

I would appreciate help and beta testers for the bitcoinpresscenter.org which I am building as the inclusive alternative to the existing site. It will have only one purpose: to provide a comprehensive list of resources, packaged for press consumption (short bios, multi-res photos, attribution text, etc).

There is a way to fix this constructively and put the mess behind us. The press center I envision will have dozens of spokespeople with varying areas of expertise, a variety of roles in the community, a variety of spoken languages and a broad array of opinions. Nominations will be open and public. Votes and endorsements will be open and public.

I will have the prototype ready by Friday or Saturday this week. I could use help in testing the UX and also proposals on how to manage the registration, nomination and voting process.

Amen! +1

Moving interviewees elsewhere than bitcoin.org can help on one thing. In a space that is not perceived as being "authoritative", there is more room for diversity without controversy. Thus probably fixing the Matonis/Roger issue. But still, even if it mitigates the issue, Mike Hearn is right that it won't be fixed regardless of the approach, edit wars will happen. Choosing interviewees will always remains a challenge. And not everyone can speak of Bitcoin clearly and accurately, so a "anyone is a Bitcoin PR expert" press center doesn't make sense.

Personally, I like the idea of a dedicated community-driven press center, managed by an independant team, with transparent guidelines and discussions. And I think that as long as such a community press center is well organized, that it is clear that it is community-driven and that it has decent guidelines, we could link to it. And we could remove most interviewees from bitcoin.org and only keep a few "boring ultra-neutral technical ones" like developer, Patrick Murck for legal questions. And/or link to https://bitcoinfoundation.org/contact . I've encouraged such an idea since a few days.

That said, I would also like to point out that as Mike said, this drama appeared only after the project has been reviewed and published. Roger and Matonis were more civilized and calm themselves than most people on the forums and most moderate voices seems to be exausted. I would personally prefer to let enough time for a good solution to appear than to rush things and cause even more outcry. Because the current press center also have many supporters. And it is not arbitrary, even though the process is too selective to some.

Another thing I am confused about is why are you contributing to Bitcoin if your end goal is to have a collection of governments regulate and control it? You've effectively built a better paypal without stock options or founder credit? The whole point of having a system like bitcoin is to abstract commerce to the cloud and outside of any one government's hands. We can agree to reasonable regulation of exchanges, yet I'm getting the feeling the foundation has something broader and more government friendly in mind.

Yes I could be wrong, but why are you then using the very finite resources of the foundation to argue about media relations when you have ignored the single most important entity in this debate- the mainstream prospect. There are significant barriers to entry for normal people into our world. It makes a lot more sense to win the PR battle by focusing on removing those barriers instead of purging certain voices deem to be to extreme. Anyone can be extreme if someone doesn't understand what they are doing.

Sheriff Gogulski ?

I was about to say "Hey! What are you trying to volunteer me for!?!" but now I'm thinking more along the lines of "What sort of salary do you have in mind?"

Hear Hear!

Bitcoin is neutral. The attempts to force certain agendas on it, through exclusion are well-meant but misguided. We've done this before for the Internet and for crypto. We didn't win the arguments against broad-based availability of crypto by hiding the fringe voices, we did it by adding more, and more and more voices ,until you couldn't but see it as a mainstream activity. Once 128-bit crypto was anarchist and terrorist anathema. Now it is weak protection for grandma's pot-pourri purchase. We did that through addition, not subtraction.

I disagree with the notion that it isn't a thorn for governments. The problem is that governments issue the money and regulate it as they see fit. Bitcoin both attacks the standard economic models they tend to use for monetary policy (hurting the intellectual integrity of central banks) and also removes almost all economic controls governments can enforce upon their people. For example, wallets can't be frozen. It is incredibly difficult to measure a person's income (hurting the integrity of the tax system). There is no central agency to regulate or dominate. No one to answer for the crimes of the system as a whole.

It's a unique and difficult animal to even properly define much less integrate into the existing legal structure of money. Therefore, it is very naive in my opinion to believe governments will look kindly if only we cleaned up our act enough. They will never accept something that removes power they currently have. Thus unless we capitulate and surrender things like anonymity and free commerce, they will actively fight to destroy Bitcoin.

In my humble opinion, we have to treat bitcoin like the Internet of the 1980s and focus on bringing as many actors as possible into the system. The more people who both understand and use bitcoin; the easier it will be to prevent governments from trying to destroy bitcoin. The best way of doing this is to adopt an inclusive system and crowdsource educational efforts. 

I think an interesting solution to these arguments would be to find someone with totally extreme political views who can be absolutely trusted to talk about Bitcoin in a neutral light, and make it clear that it's a project which is made up of many people with different beliefs and backgrounds. Someone who is a hard core anarcho-capitalist but isn't going to claim Bitcoin is inherently anarchist if they're given a soapbox, or imply the point of Bitcoin is being able to evade the law, etc. Then maybe everyone can be equally annoyed together. Perhaps Mike G would take it on

Charles, I think the tea party analogy is an interesting one. Obviously I wasn't there. But perhaps you can see that your analogy is invertible. There are plenty of libertarians that are doing productive and useful stuff with Bitcoin, but there are also a people who are trying to essentially hijack Bitcoin and make it linked in peoples minds with their own agenda. You can see it in these endless threads where some of them claim Bitcoin is inherently anti-government and anyone who disagrees "doesn't get it". They just can't or won't mentally separate the two things.

This is the root cause of the desire to keep Bitcoin and bitcoin.org apolitical, which is something there's a lot of support for. The problem is how to actually do that. A wiki page won't work. Wiki pages on controversial topics just turn into exhausting edit wars in which the final result is decided by who has the most time and zealot-like dedication. That's not a way to achieve an apolitical result, as we learned the hard way with the Trade page.

We could just delete anything that some random forum poster finds controversial. That won't work either. Some people genuinely believe Bitcoin shouldn't have a website at all. Maybe one day that'll be the case (hopefully!), just like how the dollar doesn't have a website, but we're far from that state.

We can rename stuff so it seems less "official", but there's already a very obvious disclaimer on the website saying that the people there aren't official or spokespeople of any kind.

We could just abandon the entire concept of a press center, but there are reasons it was created (oddly, nobody found it controversial when I first proposed it here in this forum). Mostly that a lot of the coverage Bitcoin got was really clueless or riddled with basic errors, and could have benefited from people who knew what they were talking about being involved. It'd suck to give up on trying to fix that.

So we're left with the worst solution except for all the others - have some kind of process for submitting changes, and look for alternatives in cases where there's controversy or people who have a long track record of contribution would be uncomfortable. In this case there are plenty of people who nobody really disagrees on, so there are lots of alternatives available.

You're not exactly being fair in this assessment. Some people the community feel that decisions are being made about defining "legitimate" bitcoin versus "out of mainstream" bitcoin by a small cabal of individuals. No one should have such power or even believe they have a right to try. However, the media needs to have a singular head entity to discuss bitcoin and it is very clear the foundation is attempting to position itself for such a role.

If they are successful, then the foundation would gain the ability to exclude certain voices if they desired. While such voices can always blog, tweet, etc, they would not speak with the authority of the "official" bitcoin group and therefore be outside of the mainstream. Now, it is fair to point out the argument presupposes the foundation's intentions and media strategy, yet it is also fair to say the community should be sensitive to these issues.

I recall working for the Ron Paul campaign in 2007-8 and watching the tea party turn from a very tangible third party against the status quo into a proxy of the republican party after some incredibly well funded entities hijacked it. I really don't want to see the same thing happen to the Bitcoin movement.

You should consider reading your rants before you click "Post."


Is it yours to determine this? Or are you just hoping that through rote, crowing, shrill repetition, eventually it will become so?

Thank you Sirius.

Moving forum.bitcoin.org to bitcointalk.org was a good move that made bitcoin.org less political. I would say the same about moving the press stuff out.

Resources page (http://bitcoin.org/en/resources) is already useful for press, we don't need a separate press page. There we can add links to the interviewee wiki page and possibly other sources.

With all respect to Saivann and others who have worked with the site.

Yepp, I would think those people are the men in suits doing business...

I was responding to the suggestion of replacing the website with a wiki, not on the case of those two people. I don't think I've commented specifically on particular cases, just been pointing out why it's not implemented as a free-for-all.

For what it's worth, I actually read a lot of what Jon writes, I comment on his Google+ stream pretty often, I never met him but I hope I will at the conference and I think I'd probably like him. Heck I think I'd like Roger too. I don't think either has actually encouraged people to break the law though I don't follow everything they say closely.

Part of the reason this whole thing has blown up is that some people are projecting a grey-area decision on a couple of people as much bigger than it really is. I didn't take part in the discussion about Jon or Roger because I don't see it as very significant - they've both been big supporters of Bitcoin, they both have spent time talking to the media so those are very positive points, at the same time some other people who have done a lot of work on Bitcoin expressed concerns. There's no point in having hundreds of people up there, given the point is just to explain the project accurately. So if there is extended debate it seems a better use of time to just move on and find other people where there's no risk of upsetting key contributors. It's not personal (for me), it's not a statement about politics or democracy, it's just about the best way to use limited time and webpage space.

cypherdoc, I wasn't making a reference to you (or anyone in this thread). I was talking about the kind of people who were edit-warring the wiki in 2011 or spamming SR threads back then.

Don't bother asking for rational and consistent rules. That's the problem. It's not about "anarchists" soiling the good name of bitcoin. It's about a misguided effort to control access, based on a naive and selectively applied litmus test. For all the reasons Mike Hearn covered above, I'd suggest that jgarzik doesn't belong on the list. However, that would be applying the rule consistently.

There is no solution here other than a fork.

I'm building bitcoinpresscenter.org to be inclusive and dedicated only to press contacts.

This debate ran its course because there is no recourse, no rules, no consistency. At the end of the day, this was an effort to dictate policy to the community, based on what Hearn and Garzik and a few other believe is "moderate" while they can't even meet the standard themselves. It's arbitrary and capricious, and that's what people object to, not the specific individuals.

Game's up. bitcoin.org is not your private playground where you can pretend to speak for others or to take "the high road" which happens to coincide with your beliefs and opinions.