Just listened to today’s RHR @Marty Bent @ODELL I thought you gave the “open source drama” topic good coverage for a short segment. I enjoyed and appreciated it, thank you. 🙏
Some comments / feedback:
➡️ ODELL, I heard the exhaustion and stress in your voice through out the whole episode. I believe your heart is in the right place and you didn’t intend all the chaos.
➡️ That Saylor’s conversations were happening behind closed doors, that we shouldn’t be “reading tea leaves” and that we should “just ask Saylor” and have the conversation in the open:
It doesn’t seem like there was any attempt to speak to Saylor before the chaos, to steelman his position (until I just heard Marty do that on this podcast 👏), or to do a deep dive into the matter. Unfortunately Jack and other respected folks started posting ad hominem attacks pitting the community against each other.
➡️ That Saylor’s possible view is a “strawman” and 99% of developers are not trying to softfork bitcoin.
This appears to be misrepresenting Saylor’s intentions. Saylor’s view as presented on Livera’s podcast that he was worried about core and softforks. And it seems, from ODELL’s earlier post that he was trying to do strings attached funding. Presumably to prevent softforks and to focus on maintenance.
It seems to me that Saylor is not opposed to funding devs, but he wants to make sure his money doesn’t go to break bitcoin.
➡️ That “you have to manually update your node” and “devs are not in control”.
This statement is not the whole truth. Devs have enormous power because there is only ONE core software. To illustrate, consider inscriptions. The community fought hard for 1 MB small blocks. Did you know that we would have 4 MB blocks full of spam jpegs? I sure didn’t. How did that get in there? The whole community was surprised when huge jpegs started appearing in blocks. It snuck in and now there’s nothing we can do about it.
➡️ That “If you don’t provide developers with no strings attached funding, they will do low integrity options”.
I don’t know where to begin with this. It just isn’t true. Do you really believe that we can’t pay people to do security audits and software maintenance only?
I don’t know if you realize that you’re polarizing the community and likely reducing funding by reducing morale and goodwill. For many people, the natural reaction to seeing all the ad hominem attacks and simplistic hot takes will be “GFY”.
Let’s fix this. I think it starts with deeper long form discussions. It’s possible that Saylor won’t talk to you in public. He might view it as risky to his stock price to air dirty laundry. We might need advocates to properly represent the ossification perspective.
Anyway the RHR was a good start. Please build on that momentum. 🙏