Gregory Maxwell threatens to sell his bitcoins and find other things to work on

[cambda]

Fuck him! Let him sell them all. We'll be better without him.

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[Bitcoin Haber]

Everybody is selling their coins these days.

[defaced]

I am personally concerned that this would matter to anyone. Before I continue, I want to point out that gmaxwell is a great asset to Bitcoin and the community. However I don't think it should matter that one person might stop working on Bitcoin as the open source and decentralized nature of Bitcoin means that it should not rely on any one person or any one small subset of people. If the community is concerned that any one person is going to stop work on Bitcoin then we have a bigger centralization problem then anyone realizes.

It is not uncommon for people to leave a large company in the middle of a project and the project most go on. It would be unusual for no team members on a project to not get some kind of a job offer while working on a long term project.

With all that being said, I do think his concerns should be somehow addressed. I don't know if this means making major changes to the proposed fork, making minor changes or making an argument to him that this will not cause further centralization.  

watch out, if you say the project you might confuse someone.

I was just using a project with a large company as an example. Bitcoin is not a project as it has no endpoint, at least hopefully it won't.

does a project have to have a specific endpoint to be defined as a project?

My understanding projects in the business world is that they have a defined beginning and a defined end point. A business system on the other hand is something that is ongoing.

A few examples of a project would be the building of a house, the design of a specific model year car or the rebranding of a company.

A few examples of a system would be selling widgets, producing cars or internal quality controls.

You could say that the design of the forked Bitcoin protocol would be a project (it would be finished once the changed protocol is accepted by the network) while Bitcoin itself would be closer to a system (ideally "Bitcoin" would never end).

People are concerned about his potential departure because of his large amounts of contributions he has made to Bitcoin over the years.

Awesome we have different definitions of a project.

[bitbankcoin]

Another misleading title.

i agree with you!

[celestio]

Fuck him! Let him sell them all. We'll be better without him.

Wow, look at his github contributions before saying insults like that. Without him Bitcoin would be nowhere technically. I agree with Mr Maxwell, increasing the blocksize limit does nothing to fix the actual problem, it just prolongs it, as 20mb still can't scale to anywhere near VISA levels, and eventually that limit would have to be increased again and again(Which would be much harder and dangerous assuming that Bitcoin grows exponentially in the future, hardforking it would be a huge deal).

[defaced]

Gregory Maxwell should leave this project and I dare him to sell all his coins.

If you're standing in the way of the widespread adoption and success of Bitcoin you're a liability to this community and we're better off without you.

finally, someone is picking up what I was putting down. haha.

[jonald_fyookball]

Gregory Maxwell should leave this project and I dare him to sell all his coins.

If you're standing in the way of the widespread adoption and success of Bitcoin you're a liability to this community and we're better off without you.

finally, someone is picking up what I was putting down. haha.

says the guy pumping an altcoin.

[defaced]

Gregory Maxwell should leave this project and I dare him to sell all his coins.

If you're standing in the way of the widespread adoption and success of Bitcoin you're a liability to this community and we're better off without you.

finally, someone is picking up what I was putting down. haha.

says the guy pumping an altcoin.

way to fallacy, one day youll have a real argument... it doesnt seem like that is today though.

[digicoin]

We need him. However, Gregory Maxwell can quit if he wants. There are a lot of competent developers out there. His lack of hand-on experience in capacity planning for scalable systems makes me sick. We need more competent developers, not just him.

[Morecoin Freeman]

He should get rid of his beard too.

[knowhow]

well we doesnt need developers that say to community i could sell all my btc bla bla well do it let who believe and really support bitcoin get them,and all days bitcoins changes hands soo we dont know how many bitcoins a single user has ..we see some wallets around 50000 bitcoins others have more others less well all waiting a raise to sell .

[Bitcoinpro]

when any of u programmers prove u have any legimate skills to me besides Maxwell of course

[defaced]

He should get rid of his beard too.

one does not simply get rid of the beard. Now you have gone too far.

[tvbcof]

He should get rid of his beard too.

Agree.  It's not even grey so what's the point?  Being clean-shaven also might make cypherdoc like him.

[knowhow]

well he has vision and some words may be wrong understood but on this point he said he could sell his bitcoins already without no one knows it yes that is why bitcoin is bitcoin you cant know who is the btc you getting  lol

[manselr]

He probably had a bad day. He's working a lot on BTC and he just announced all those cool blockstream features. Coding wizards are human too.
If he ends up selling he'll regret doing so so he knows better.

[gentlemand]

Total scare tactic, essentially threatening to lower the price of the coin if he doesn't get his way. We have made large strides on through this debate and there is no need for childishness like this.

Hasn't he threatened this before? Or was this someone else? Whoever it was they said they had about 150 coins so it's not going to destroy life as we know it.

[imdk]

So basically this thread is full of "idea guys" who can't and never have written a line of code in their lives insulting one of the foremost technical developers/experts of Bitcoin. Oh yeah, and also wishing for his departure. Sorry boys, but ideas only get you so far. People with technical skill who know what they are talking about and can program are actually needed. This is a massive problem that has been persistent in the Bitcoin community for years now ("Someone else will build or implement it!" "Oh, he implemented it for us, but we disagree with his viewpoints, fuck him and everything he's ever done for us!" "Someone else will build it again!" On and on it goes...)

[gmaxwell]

Egads, what a boggling thread. (I will not be sending a christmas card to the mean person that sent me this link! ).

Go read the context.  Someone was asking me why I'm not doing the some PR blitz to influence people's thinking.  My response was that I don't care to win people over, that if Bitcoin's survival depends on constantly making rescuing it with a political sales pitch and a mass market PR campaign then I think that would mean that its already a failure.  I don't actually believe it is a failure but I'm not frightened of it becoming one, though I'd think it would be a bit sad to have wasted many years chasing a windmill and for the world to lose this opportunity;  but that said, I can just leave if it goes the highly centralized route, and go work on something that still has a prospect of success-- there are just too many important things that need to be done.  I don't think there is anything "threatening" or anything about that.

I care a lot about defending, protecting, and nurturing the system, but not so much that I feel compelled to go around trying to reprogram people to get my way.  To even admit that doing so would be possible is an admission that the system cannot work.   So I'm happy to continue to just communicate frankly in the forums and means that I normally communicate in and see how the experiment pans out.

[siameze]

Egads, what a boggling thread. (I will not be sending a christmas card to the mean person that sent me this link! ).

Go read the context.  Someone was asking me why I'm not doing the some PR blitz to influence people's thinking.  My response was that I don't care to win people over, that if Bitcoin's survival depends on constantly making rescuing it with a political sales pitch and a mass market PR campaign then I think that would mean that its already a failure.  I don't actually believe it is a failure but I'm not frightened of it becoming one, though I'd think it would be a bit sad to have wasted many years chasing a windmill and for the world to lose this opportunity;  but that said, I can just leave if it goes the highly centralized route, and go work on something that still has a prospect of success-- there are just too many important things that need to be done.  I don't think there is anything "threatening" or anything about that.

I care a lot about defending, protecting, and nurturing the system, but not so much that I feel compelled to go around trying to reprogram people to get my way.  To even admit that doing so would be possible is an admission that the system cannot work.   So I'm happy to continue to just communicate frankly in the forums and means that I normally communicate in and see how the experiment pans out.

In my opinion, reddit has never been the center of highly critical thinking. Lately r/bitcoin seems to be a game of "follow the leader" - much like you mentioned it appears they only wish to reprogram folks to get their way. I also agree that insane and annoying sales pitches do more harm than good.