This is a long article (one of four that @hodlonaut promises). It spends a lot of time making the case that females were given special treatment as contributors to Core and that some people in positions of power did not have good Bitcoin values.
In the first case, the leadership of Chaincode labs, particularly Newberry, does not seem to have been particularly salubrious to Bitcoin Core.
In the second case, I do not think the political leanings or morality of a person is relevant to their ability to contribute to Bitcoin development.
I guess the next question is whether someone's values have any bearing on whether they should be in a position of authority in a Bitcoin project.
Again, I would say it doesn't matter. Perhaps as a consequence of Core's market saturation, we seem to have come to a place where we care about the values and signals of a project, not just the code and what it does.
My naive understanding of Bitcoin is that it is a permissionless system. To me, this means you run the code you want, and don't run anything else.
If Elizabeth Warren can write good code and it receives a lot of review and it fixes something in Bitcoin, I would be happy to see Pocahontas join the corps of shadowy supercoders.
If a project doesn't produce code you like, you are free to run some other project's code. If no other project exists, you can do your best to create it.
If Coinbase decides to put lots of money into bitcoin development funding and ends up funding all the people who are maintainers of Bitcoin Core, the only tool I have to resist this my choice of which software to run.
But acting like it is our business what values a project chooses to have does not make sense to me. Whoever funds the project is in charge. That's how money works. If Brink or Chaincode's donors want to see DEI and women developers, you cannot stop them from using their money to pay such developers.
But they can't make you run their software, either. Perhaps we have forgotten that part in our heavy reliance on one project.
There was one sentence in the article that very much resonated with me:
This is what networks do: the people inside them experience them as fair.
This is true. Whether Bitcoin continues to have a reference implementation that most people run, or a number of other node implementations gain real popularity, each of those projects will have this same trouble: they will be run by humans and when people are on the inside of a thing, they have a hard time seeing how their biases are clouding their vision.
This is a long article (one of four that @hodlonaut promises). It spends a lot of time making the case that females were given special treatment as contributors to Core and that some people in positions of power did not have good Bitcoin values.
In the first case, the leadership of Chaincode labs, particularly Newberry, does not seem to have been particularly salubrious to Bitcoin Core.
In the second case, I do not think the political leanings or morality of a person is relevant to their ability to contribute to Bitcoin development.
I guess the next question is whether someone's values have any bearing on whether they should be in a position of authority in a Bitcoin project.
Again, I would say it doesn't matter. Perhaps as a consequence of Core's market saturation, we seem to have come to a place where we care about the values and signals of a project, not just the code and what it does.
My naive understanding of Bitcoin is that it is a permissionless system. To me, this means you run the code you want, and don't run anything else.
If Elizabeth Warren can write good code and it receives a lot of review and it fixes something in Bitcoin, I would be happy to see Pocahontas join the corps of shadowy supercoders.
If a project doesn't produce code you like, you are free to run some other project's code. If no other project exists, you can do your best to create it.
If Coinbase decides to put lots of money into bitcoin development funding and ends up funding all the people who are maintainers of Bitcoin Core, the only tool I have to resist this my choice of which software to run.
But acting like it is our business what values a project chooses to have does not make sense to me. Whoever funds the project is in charge. That's how money works. If Brink or Chaincode's donors want to see DEI and women developers, you cannot stop them from using their money to pay such developers.
But they can't make you run their software, either. Perhaps we have forgotten that part in our heavy reliance on one project.
There was one sentence in the article that very much resonated with me:
This is true. Whether Bitcoin continues to have a reference implementation that most people run, or a number of other node implementations gain real popularity, each of those projects will have this same trouble: they will be run by humans and when people are on the inside of a thing, they have a hard time seeing how their biases are clouding their vision.