yes the kind of Mike Hearn era divisive "you should be more of a dictator" "no, not like that, you're doing it wrong, you're useless, stupid" "go away, you have too much power" abusive shit is something that took me years to heal from you can pay no one (who is able) enough to be "CEO of bitcoin", take all the legal and political and personal reputational risk, and it's something that shouldn't exist anyway, aren't we trying to do things differently? i hope none of the current maintainers experiences it like that, but it's always kind of awful too see this kind of discourse coming back
I wonder if part of the problem is that he starts the post with the phrase "leadership problem". I just glided past that and read the rest, and I saw it as a framing of "we really may no longer be in a position to do this kind of thing". Whereas if you read his whole post as about a leadership problem, then anyone directly involved in Core dev could very reasonably take it as saying the kind of thing you mention here, and I have to entirely agree that that is between unhelpful and also really, really bad. Like I said to Matt, could be a perspective thing; and seeing some of the more heated exchanges going on over there, well, I can see that this is not super-productive ...
It's nice that you bring an outside, detached perspective. I'll ponder this a bit more. One thing that was absent in the article are the crypto tricks some people are researching again with batching, aggregation, entroot, etc. As far as I can tell that is pretty much only pushed forward by core-adjacent people at the moment. The consensus cleanup is also making some progress.
i definitely agree with the part that making consensus changes has become more difficult ! i just think the framing as a bitcoin core leadership issue is way too simplistic, and i hate how he waves away all the current work done on the node software because it's not consensus changes, that's also typical 2014 playbook sorry if i overreacted, if...anything this reminds me that i shouldn't ever get involved in this stuff again and stick to code reviews 🙂