Bitcoin development and economics

[enet]

Bitcoin-dev has a failure - and that's always separating out "technical discussions" from everything else. Discussing Bitcoin development on a purely technical basis leads to the bad designs and unproductive blocksize debate we have today. It would be good to see some more research on fee markets and incentives, but as the topic of economics is banned from bitcoin-dev it is pointless even to try to raise these issues here. The moderation policy reinforces this ignorance, that Linux kernel engineers hold the sole truth on monetary systems. It's the same kind of people who then complain that Bitcoin "got political". What a surprise that a consensus system could be political.

The current designs of "scaling Bitcoin" are flawed, and there is a reason for that. Cryptographers and coders without understanding of the role of game theory and mechanism design, will simply not be able to solve this problem alone. Development should have an obligation to shareholders and users. Without that obligation its completely unclear how they could even determine what the goals for the project should be (if there is such thing as a goal anyway). On a positive note future projects can and should learn from this, also to create a better governance model. Establishing a for-profit funded was counter-productive.

[enet]

P.S. this was written as a response to the moderation policy on bitcoin-dev which is engaged in censorship in the name of technology (which is why I don't participate there anymore).

[achow101]

I do not see in the moderation policy (https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-October/011591.html) anywhere where they mention that you are not allowed to discuss the economics and such behind a proposal. You shouldn't discuss politics and economics in a thread on the mailing list, but if it is related to a proposal, I don't think it should be moderated. Can you point out some posts where posts were moderated because they were not about technical discussion but were related to a technical proposal and contributed to that discussion?

If you think their moderation policy is too strict, right now they are doing an unmoderated review of the moderation policy. You can bring this up there and get some smart answers and they may even change the policy.

The point of moderating the mailing list is to reduce the amount of crap and spam being posted that was unproductive to discussion. If you look at the previous archives, there is quite a bit of stuff that isn't related to the discussion and it gets in the way of actual useful discussion.

[enet]

You shouldn't discuss politics and economics in a thread on the mailing list, but if it is related to a proposal, I don't think it should be moderated.

"Generally discouraged: non-technical bitcoin issues"

I believe banning issues of politics and economics from development of a consensus and money system is going to lead in misguided directions where cryptographers design systems they don't understand and that are inherently not robust and flexible. Furthermore it leads to two separate communities - developers and the rest. Most of what's going on at the moment has to do with this. The social architecture doesn't work all that well. Most Bitcoin companies don't contribute to core, and core doesn't care about Bitcoin companies and users.

[achow101]

You shouldn't discuss politics and economics in a thread on the mailing list, but if it is related to a proposal, I don't think it should be moderated.

"Generally discouraged: non-technical bitcoin issues"

I believe banning issues of politics and economics from development of a consensus and money system is going to lead in misguided directions where cryptographers design systems they don't understand and that are inherently not robust and flexible. Furthermore it leads to two separate communities - developers and the rest. Most of what's going on at the moment has to do with this. The social architecture doesn't work all that well. Most Bitcoin companies don't contribute to core, and core doesn't care about Bitcoin companies and users.

Keyword "Discouraged" not banned. You can still discuss it there, it just isn't entirely wanted but if it is relevant to the topic at hand, I don't think it will be moderated. Again, they are doing a review of the moderation policy, since you clearly have a problem with it, please bring it up and discuss it on the mailing list, not here. They aren't going to see it here.