Happy new year guys, soonish, I suppose. I just wanted to share/throw our some ideas here and as always fully welcome all comments/opinions/feedback.
It seems to me that Bitcoin Unlimited is capturing imaginations. It is this new, utterly common sense thing, which addresses all criticisms. The answer really to this hole thing. The small blockers are dumfunded, but far more importantly than that, they actually appreciate it. They are not stating so right now. They are hesitating, but that hesitation itself shows us they have no criticism to make and, I think, more deeply, shows they actually agree with the approach that BU takes.
I think we have checkmated the argument by so clearly, so common sensly, so almost childlishly simply (now with hindsight I suppose) cutting through all the obfuscation and arguments. They have not even tried to attack the developers because the bottom up approach argument is so disarming and the humbleness from myself at least leaves little to say. Yes, we need more developers, if you like the idea come join us, lets do this... there is little they can say.
My approach has somewhat developed while engaging the trenches and I have moved towards actively distancing BU from XT. There are some lost drones who seem to very ineffectively taint BU with XT and dismiss it out of hand as just an XT thing. We were of course right to try and keep BU in the XT camp when designing this thing, but XT is dead in the water right now I think and a liability. I personally, when trying to explain BU, paint both core and XT as a centralised thing... and utterly different from BU.
Now, I'm just throwing things here and hopefully my frail humane nature which gives me emotions does not make me feel hurt if I am mistaken and I hope others so take it too as mere opinion, but it seems to me that certain god complexes have developed especially between the core committers. Jeff acknowledged as much, but he seems to have limited it to the blocksize issue, rather than what seems to me to be a more ingraned division between perceivebly god like core comitters and mere mortals.
Sure, they probably busy, but, some of them more than others, fail to engage with us, and seem more busy with trying to be celebrities, than actually getting things done. Perhaps we are now testing it and (in my brutally honest fashion), in hindsight I was perhaps jumping the gun, but I suppose the character of
@theZerg had to be tested (fully unintentionally) and I feel now so much better to have other developers be equal in contribution, not superior (of course where they right etc). But humble is my point.
And more than that. We have a unique and killer approach here. While core runs as a dictatorship, while these developers have deluded themselves into god complexes, we have done the second common sense thing and by so doing giving this whole project the utmost wisdom that derives from any bottom up approach. We operate based on a constitutional democracy approach.
There is no room for egos here. Sure, respect to all, but I do not think we should in any way tolerate sharp remarks which aim to subdue, silly posturing which adds no content, snark cheap remarks which do not contribute, pr nonsense of no value, etc. Core became what it did because they fully lost touch and isolated themselves then deluded themselves into thinking they gods as is natural when contact with the users is cut of.
This is already becoming too long and it is fully a draft I have not re-red it etc, but I wanted to conclude by saying that in my opinion Desktop Linux failed for one and one reason alone. It never listened to the users. While microsoft for example makes it easy to make your printer restart printing if you have run out of pages or ink once pages or ink is added, desktop linux makes it a nightmare. While microsoft seems to allow the mouse to easily move around in linux for some reason it can be utter annoyance. There are a million of other little annoyances as the above. All utterly easily fixable, but because the devs isolated themselves and so created further and further group think thus lossing touch, very simple things that helped the user were not done.
Bitcoin risked the same before all this started. I am glad there was a catalist to review our path and I am deeply thankful our brainstorming here, our energy, our clear and common sense thinking, was able to see right through the issues, and create a technical solution, but also a social solution, in the way of our philosophy and approach, in the way of our insistence that developers become equal to us.
BU is not just the blocksize thing. Equally insightfully BU has the constitutional democracy thing where we the users keep the developers accountable and responsive to our requests, so keeping them in check and so bringing them down from their ivory towers and god complexes.
P.S. draft all this - no review - so pls be gentle
A very happy new year to you all. History may see 2015 as the year when bitcoin's future was determined and I must say I am very impressed with our decisive holistic response and very optimistic about the new year.
