Oddbean

Not really imo. Getting opinions of people who aren't even qualified to give opinions is useless. I'm not advocating for a Vladimir Putin, but we need a small pool of people who can make sound technical decisions and get shit done. As the price keeps going up, we get more and more people into Bitcoin and all of them want to have a say in what happens inside of core and yet 99% of these people aren't even close to being qualified to having a say or opinion. You cannot sit and wait to make everyone happy. It's just not going to happen.

I didn't say it's one person. I said a pool of people. It could be 100 people or 500. Soft forks don't need consensus of 1 million randos on twitter. It needs current and ex core devs, people who work on L2 protocols etc who we all know are qualified in making technical decisions. We have to figure out how to build a pool of qualified people, I'm only proposing how we approach core development going forward.

Theres no qualifications that can be written and fairly applied without centralizing. You're talking about forming a committee and coming up with criteria for membership in an exclusive governance circle. to make a long story short, its not gonna happen.

It already has happened. How do you think people get commit access to Bitcoin core? You contribute long enough to gain that power. I'm sorry, I don't think Saylor or some podcastors are qualified to hinder Bitcoin's development by cutting funding from development and not letting scaling happen. Its unacceptable imo just because those assholes have a lot of money invested in Bitcoin and yell on CNBC.

yeah, so the whole reason decentralization is favored by BTC enthusiasts and from it's brain-mothers (wikicash, bitcash, zcoin, ect. aka a bunch of dead proto-coins) was due to manipulation. Lets go with your model where only the "qualified" can speak. Who or whom sets the standard for qualifications? If that standard is set by those in power what prevents those in power from amending the standard to preserve their own power? What factors would merit the removal of one or more of these entities from control of BTC Core? Next thing you know there is a 0.1% service fee on everything to "support the bitcoin core foundation" that actually goes to line the pockets of the foundation controling party. Next thing you know 0.1% compounds over a generation or two and there is now a party composed of one or more players that control 51% and the entire network is physically useless but still used out of lack of innovation in the sector as all competition to the Core was opposed. yeah, fuck your future bro. No no and no.

We already have this today in a way, only a few people have commit access to Bitcoin core repo. Have they done any harm so far? No. You're over thinking my proposal way too much. Every software project on the planet is lead by a set of people or a foundation. It's a natural thing to do, in Bitcoin's case it's still technically core devs but they have much less power in the sense that they're too scared to make any bold decision. All I'm saying is, we raise the pool of people who can be the "core" and then start enforcing better rules. All the code is public anyway, they cannot go do insane things like changing supply cap to 42m from 21m. It's all public.