You are absolutely right... and it's seems very true what you said and shocking at the same time.
Below is the list of top #20 contributors (from 796 total contributors) of bitcoin on github
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/graphs/contributors.
I did not find any one among top 10 on bitcointalk except you (achow101) and in those top 20s only you are the active member.
I used the forum search members page to find these users, may be some users are present but with different names. Still this is so unfortune to see top developers are not present here and how the creators of bitcoin like Satoshi and Hal Finney were actively participating on this forum.
#1 | laanwj | not found |
#2 | MarcoFalke | not found |
#3 | sipa | not found |
#4 | practicalswift | not found |
#5 | jnewbery | not found |
#6 | TheBlueMatt | not found |
#7 | hebasto | not found |
#8 | fanquake | not found |
#9 | theuni | not found |
#10 | achow101 | found, Last Active: Today at 07:25:20PM |
#11 | jonasschnelli | found, Last Active: October 17, 2019 |
#12 | gavinandresen | found, Last Active: March 03, 2021 |
#13 | luke-jr | found, Last Active: May 14, 2021 |
#14 | ryanofsky | not found |
#15 | jonatack | not found |
#16 | dongcarl | not found |
#17 | promag | not found |
#18 | sdaftuar | not found |
#19 | non-github-bitcoin | not found |
#20 | morcos | not found |
Many of the old school developers (the guys who have been around for a long time) are on this forum, just under different names. Clearly you only searched for their github username, otherwise you would have found:
wumpus (aka laanwj):
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/wumpus-2252Pieter Wuille (aka sipa):
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/pieter-wuille-2786Matt Corallo (aka BlueMatt):
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/matt-corallo-4528cfields (aka theuni):
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/cfields-167949Note that these are either their real names, or names also used on IRC, and not github.
It should also be noted that the account "non-github-bitcoin" is applied to the commits created by Satoshi, Lasloh, and Sirius, all of whom worked on Bitcoin prior to the move to Github.
In any case, it shouldn't be that surprising that developers are not on this forum. The source code is not hosted here, the issue tracker is not hosted here, why would developer discussion be here just because it used to be?
It makes sense that discussion of actual code changes has moved to github. It's where the source code is hosted and it's where the issue tracker is. Github provides an easy way to reference code, other issues, and other developers. It allows people to comment directly on the code. It's natural that discussion of the code itself is on github because that's where the code is.
While you could argue that bitcointalk would be suitable for discussion of new innovations like how the bitcoin-dev mailing list is, if you think about it, it really isn't. Firstly, you have to make an account here in order to post, but just about everyone has an email account and can send an email to the mailing list. Then there's the difference in moderation. While bitcoin-dev similarly has few moderators, moderation is done
before the email is sent to everyone, but on Bitcointalk, moderation occurs
after the post is made. This means that many people end up reading spam and nonsense before the moderators clean it up. This makes for a bad experience when you want to have serious discussion. While it does take time for emails to make it to the bitcoin-dev mailing list, at least all of the subscribers do not have to read all of the crap sent to the list. And trusted email senders (people who have emailed the list before without being denied) don't have to wait. Lastly, a mailing list makes more sense for those discussions because of email threading. With everything in a single thread like how bitcointalk does it, side conversations and discussions that stem from the original can be distracting and break the flow of the thread. But with emails, those side conversations end up in a branch and aren't in the way of the original discussion.
Then there's IRC. A chat system is crucial for live discussions and a forum is simply not suitable for the kinds of things that can be discussed there. Things happen in real time and people can be notified when they are mentioned, whereas on the forum no such notifications exist, and reading new posts requires refreshing the page. It just simply is not possible to do live discussions on a forum.