It has forked before.
In theory, like almost all open source projects, Core has a “maintainer”. The job of a maintainer is to shepherd the project and make decisions about what goes in and what doesn’t. The maintainer is the boss. A good maintainer gathers feedback, weighs arguments and then makes decisions.
This is the author’s unsupported, unsubstantiated personal model of the way he thinks the world works. It's rather unfortunate for him that i) it doesn’t match up to reality and ii) he appears to be oblivious to the mismatch.
gavin once
dismissed an appeal for help in constructing a genesis block:
“You really have no business creating your own block chain if you don't understand the code well enough to figure out how to mine a new genesis block without somebody else's help.”I'll rephrase that for the current circumstances:
“You really have no business creating your own cryptocurrency if you don't understand psychology well enough to figure out how to work with a community without fragmenting it into partisan blocs.”The Bitcoin community, like so many other cryptocurrency communities is indulging itself in a misconceived cult of the developer/programmer. I've lost count of how many really top-notch programmer/devs I've seen come to serious grief when they step outside their domain of expertise. I don’t doubt Mike Hearn’s programming/software engineering skills but the posting merely demonstrates that his skillset does not serve him at all well when he’s on unfamiliar and shaky ground.
I hold out no hope whatsoever for an epiphany but it’s long past the time for the Bitcoin devs to face up to the fact that professional-grade marketing and UX/UI skills are seriously and damagingly under-represented in their collective skillset.
Bitcoin cannot “fail” per se because the intellectual heavyweights behind the idea didn't actually get as far as laying down any failure criteria, that’s why everyone (quite properly) has their own idiosyncratic idea of how Bitcoin’s future should run.
I’m quite sure Mike Hearn’s technical skillset is admirable and I'm content to extend that perception to embrace all the committers. However ... good at programming != good at everything else. In fact rather the opposite, especially in domains that do not inherently offer detailed models with precise predictions.
I spent most of my R&D career (Marconi AI Lab & HP Labs Bristol) working alongside an able mathematician and world-class programmer/software engineer. We‘re the best of friends but have been known to spend the entire afternoon screaming at each other over the partition wall until it’s dawned on one us of that, e.g. we have
completely different meanings for the word “model”.
As as psychologist, I'm familiar with the frustrations of trying to work with imprecise terms and ostensive definitions so I will clutch at any even vaguely descriptive straw (the brain is like a telephone exchange, etc.) whereas anything that hopes to be a model in my pal’s mental landscape had better be capable of making testable predictions.
I retail this fragment as context for something he said to me once: “I don’t know how you can think with those models.” It wasn’t a dismissal, it was a statement of (okay, grudging but then that's mathematicians for you) resignation. We worked together on
deliverable projects, the technology is just one component of success, another major component is what used to be (more usefully) known as “human factors”.
My talent was/is to see how people and the technology fit together and that means
successfully reasoning with weak, informal and ill-formed models. This is something that is a fuckton harder than it looks from other disciplines, as innumerable devs of now-inactive altcoins could have (but probably didn't) learn to their cost and which Bitcoin devs are bemusedly facing right now.
Boil it all down, Bitcoin's a peer2peer app, not really any different to Spreadcoin or Gnutella. That's all she wrote. Anything else is your own baggage --- are you
absolutely sure that you packed it yourself?
Cheers
Graham
