Topic: Roger Ver and Jon Matonis pushed aside now that Bitcoin is becoming mainstream - page 6. (Read 46570 times)

that's pretty narrow minded. 

i'm probably old enough to be your father and have my own family.  i've been around here for a while now and encourage paying your taxes, avoiding illegal activity, and being a good citizen.

perhaps you're still living in the past.  personally, i've seen an evolution in Bitcoin in more ways than one.

Are Matonis and Ver encouraging illegal activity ? If so, I've never seen it.

This thread is still going, huh.

All this is very similar to previous rounds of arguments. Let me recap two of them here.

The first dispute is the one that led to forum.bitcoin.org becoming bitcointalk.org. As a reminder, what happened there is that theymos and sirius had a moderation policy on this forum that was so lax it was virtually nonexistent. People were openly trading drugs, hacked servers and other things directly on the forum. This triggered what can only be described as a developer revolt, as none of the people who were working on Bitcoin-Qt at that time thought this was OK. The result was development talk which had previously been done all on the forum moved to a mailing list, the forums got moved off the bitcoin domain and rebranded as unofficial, and in the end a moderation policy was established anyway.

So sirius, your position on this isn't really surprising to me.

The second dispute was over the Bitcoin wiki. It has a trade page. You will notice at the top it says services illegal in the USA or Japan are not fit to be listed. That warning wasn't always there. Back in 2011 that wiki page was the subject of numerous edit wars by people who wanted links to online drug markets to be there. Someone would add Silk Road links (and other sites). Someone else would take them off. To nobodies surprise the anarchists have more time to waste on edit wars than people writing software or running companies did. I got in touch with Mark Karpeles who hosts the Bitcoin wiki, and he set the rules that links to drug trading sites were forbidden.

You can see these arguments as just a third round of the same dynamic. A bunch of anarchists turn up and want the project to explicitly support their viewpoints, often by promoting illegal activities. A bunch of other people who are actually forming businesses or writing software turn up and want the project to stay apolitical and certainly steer clear of illegal activity.

Very often these arguments are phrased as, "Bitcoin should be open and democratic and everyone should be able to put whatever they like into it because otherwise YOU ARE AGAINST FREEDOM!". We know what the result of that kind of approach is. It's that our common spaces get overrun by anarchists who spend all day engaging in edit wars and trying to spray-paint as much illegal activity over Bitcoin as they can, any way they can.

So that's why these days we have a website that tells people to pay their taxes, doesn't talk about the Silk Road, and has people listed as press contacts who have a track record of not encouraging illegal activity. That's actually as apolitical as it gets. What would NOT be apolitical, is to have a wiki page that would turn into the Trade page circa 2011 where agorists who want to overthrow their governments camp on the page and misrepresent the views of everyone else involved in the project.

Like I said.

Agreed.

bitcoin is an open source software project ...how many other OS project pages do you see with "Press Centers"? The thing was an interesting idea, if a little pretentious, and quickly got turned into a "big microphone" for political hobby horsing ... get rid of it.

Lets' keep bitcoin.org focussed on the s/ware, technical and even avoid financial. Linux.org doesn't have sections on how it is changing the world, yet linux does. bitcoin.org should be completely apolitical, like the s/ware tech. itself .... just covering the full range of clients and technical development in the space is a huge job for such a website already. I'm not even sure it should take upon itself the job of educating newcomers or any kind of public outreach of that nature, since it is easy to link to those efforts.

There is nowhere, except diverse wiki pages, that are concentrating on keeping a solid bank of documentation on the core technology ... this is correctly bitcoin.org mission imho. Provide a framework for development of the tech., everything else is fluffery and can be linked to outside groups.

Edit: if powerful groups start developing alternate clients, wanting to push s/ware changes into the core, etc, as has happened with linux kernel, bitcoin.org is going to have it's hands full just keeping up with that
e.g.
http://www.linux.org/

+1

the devs should stick to what they do best.  develop.  i would never expect to get a vote on dev matters since i'm not a developer.  but what happened the other nite on github was something entirely different, ie, a political matter.

Supported. Doing that, we could also avoid all this controversy. (at least attempt!  )

I've heard Gavin's suggested that the Foundation should control bitcoin.org as well. Very bad idea if you ask me, the more decentralized it is, the better. I would also not suggest linking to the Foundation website from the bitcoin.org site. As we can see from this thread representatives for the Foundation are largely uninterested in answering valid questions.

lured into what exactly?

upholding free speech, upholding the concept of a majority, upholding the right to a vote, upholding inclusivity vs. exclusivity?

supporting Roger Ver and Jon Matonis, probably close to the 2 most visible and hard working Bitcoin supporters of the last 4 yrs?

give me a break.

Perhaps true, but hey, pointing it to the Bitcoin Foundation seems reasonable.  If other press centers grow organically, maybe just a link.

That moves the press stuff off bitcoin.org at least, which doesn't seem unreasonable.  Many of us have been saying that bitcoin.org should focus more on the open source project and technical aspects.  Let's put those words to the test.  I certainly prefer a more apolitical bitcoin.org myself.

sirius, please reconsider what you've just been lured into doing. You're giving weight to venom, vitriol, and cruelty which is matched in its rhetorical slipperiness only by its sheer determination.

Multiple people agree that luke-jr is very heavy-handed with the wiki.

And I have no objection to any of Sirius' suggestions.

I'm afraid that the links to volunteers on the wiki will actually be the exact same problem, moved in another place. It will always seems unjust so some as long as there is any "notability requirements". And if there isn't, than you can imagine. The thing is that to some point, we can't add any links on bitcoin.org and remains just. It's just impossible. And if we don't, then we're missing a great opportunity to promote excellent Bitcoin speakers in this community. The same issue also happens with any pages that contains links, such as the choose-your-wallet page and resources page. Just to a lower level.

The list on bitcoin.org does not intend to be short and not Bitcoin representatives, there is a disclaimer to make this clear at the top. I planned to add more interviewees over time. And choosing who is on this list happens transparently on github, not in a closed press mailing list.

Max Keiser has done much for bitcoin and some people would say he's not politically correct or come to that mentally lol.

thanks for showing up.  there is no more vote according to Saivann.  it's really up to you to enforce your ownership of bitcoin.org by taking down the Press Center.  you have our support for that.


that won't work either b/c Luke is the moderator who has demonstrated even less equanimity there as here for the Press Ctr.


those might work.

Everyone in this community has to understand that 'politically correct' is always going to be impossible with a currency like bitcoin. It can't be controlled. It can't be regulated. Accounts can't be frozen. Unlimited funds can be loaded to a napkin and stored anywhere in the world for safe keeping. This isn't something any government will be comfortable with.

We should focus on education and evangelism. If we reach a critical mass, then bitcoin becomes like the internet and governments will just have to learn to accept it. I'm not comfortable with a foundation saying we need to beg regulators to write laws to control us. Governments do not make you legitimate, consensus always has.

It doesn't matter much who's in the 'press section' on the official site. Anyone who wants media attention can start seeking out the media, and the more interviews and appearances anyone gets, the more interested the media will be.

Personally I think both Roger Ver and Jon Matonis are excellent speakers for Bitcoin. They may not be what we term 'politically correct', but it's refreshing to have people thinking outside the politically correct mainstream way of thinking.

I agree it's unjust to hand-pick a small group of "bitcoin representatives" for the press page. The bitcoin-press mailing list is not very democratic or transparent either. I vote for removing it.

How about replacing the interviewee list with a link to the wiki? A wiki page where we can add all volunteers who meet some notability requirements. There should be a short description of the contact's association with bitcoin and a couple links from previous interviews.

Linking the press page to https://bitcoinfoundation.org/contact seems reasonable too.

"Pictures" and "Quotes" sections could be moved to the wiki. "Press coverage" is rather harmless, but maybe unnecessary - reporters shouldn't need help finding bitcoin related news articles. Maybe add a Twitter link?

bitcoinpresscenter.org, a redesigned fork of the press center, inclusive policy, will launch before monday

I LOLled hard

This is an excellent point refuting the complete basis for excluding Matonis and Ver based on their "radical" postions and highlighting a source of a lot of the consternation on both sides.

The simple fact is BITCOIN IS A RADICAL TECHNOLOGY.

It is impossible to have any spokeperson representing bitcoin and NOT be radical. Excluding bitcoin experts because they were perceived as being radical under the old paradigm is to ignore that these people were leading the charge precisely because they were radical thinkers and therefore early adopters of the new technology. Who better than such people as the spokespersons since these guys are the leading thinkers by definition?

tl;dr

"When things get weird, the weird turn pro!" - Hunter S. Thompson

Unleash the the pros, please.