Bitcoin is a free and open source project by its very nature. And the way open source project have historically been developed has since forever been mailing lists.
Mailing lists as platforms for coordination of development have many virtues. They're easy to access without an account, easy to filter incoming participation before publication and also easy to track your own responses with a personal configuration that needs to be no more than a mailing client.
Mailing lists have their disadvantages tooHowever, to the outside observer, they have quite a few disadvantages as well. For one, archiving of mailing lists, which is the main tool an observer can use to catch up with messages, have their own issues which are plenty, but no point in getting all these now. Needless to say however that the UI/UX experience is very outdated for today's standards. Another one is that it's not really that universal. While it might not require an account with a new password, it surely requires email, and email itself is not very universal as of lately, given that most providers ask for phone number registration and only accept a selection of phone providers from certain countries, or maybe they block certain territories outright. Perhaps even governments will outright block access to such services.
Bitcoin-dev mailing list under the Linux foundation coming to an endThe main issue with mailing lists however, is that someone has to host and maintain them. As highlighted by bitcoin dev achow101
in his response here, the maintaining and hosting for these mailing lists was done by a non-profit, and it's now been announced that they will cease to do so very soon.
And now developers are faced with the issue of having to decide how and if the mailing list should be replaced. Having the project's mailing list under the Linux foundation provided bitcoin devs with the ease of not having to worry about also developing and hosting a dedicated mailing list.
IncentiveAnother issue here is that bitcoin's development isn't exactly funded by a specific dedicated organization and there are no dedicated endowments. Certain companies and organizations make grant contributions towards certain bitcoin-supporting initiatives and developers, but there's no active bitcoin foundation per se.
So for hosting a mailing list, neutrality can also be a concern. For instance, some bitcoin developers might not appreciate a certain grant-making organization's actions. We've seen this happen quite often actually, a recent example is how some developers have expressed skepticism towards how
Satoshi Labs publishes external improvement proposals for bitcoin (so called SLIPs).
Satoshi's approach(!?)It's always interesting to see what satoshi's approach was on certain issues. So on the subject of development discussion, satoshi always allowed for discussion on an open forum. When bitcoin was hosted in sourcforge, the platform had its own hosted forum. Later, a dedicated bitcoin forum was created and satoshi himself would maintain it alongside some people that offered to help like theymos. So it's important to note that ever since bitcoin's creation there has always been a dedicated forum for discussion of its development.
Of course, satoshi left since 2011 and interest in bitcoin has soared since then, but the openness and ease of use to participate in discussion related to bitcoin are important takeaways. Some might argue that with the increased interest in bitcoin, keeping access to dev discussion a little harder might be a feature.
Time for a comeback of bitcoin dev discusison on bitcointalk.org?Surprisingly or not, bitcointalk solves most of the above issues.
It's hosted and maintained by people trusted by the community, it's dedicated to bitcoin, already hosted and adapted to the needs of bitcoin development and relevant discussion, and also it has its own dedicated funding and moderation.
Maybe now with mailing lists on the Linux foundation being no longer supported, a comeback could be a win-win. So will development discussion come back to this more modern but already familiar platform.
