This post was created after I read Wladimir’s about his thoughts on the community etc.. I understand Wladimir’s sayings, and as a fellow developer I completely empathize about the distractions part. Initially thanks for your work and the work of the other Bitcoin developers.

So

I also really dislike the state of the community, it’s basically like we are on a civil war, but I look forward to the day that all this is in past and we are once again united.

But, I’ll try to objectively explain why some part of the community acts this way towards Bitcoin Core or rather an entity involved.

Cause

The main problem that spawned all this was the absence of immediate action from Bitcoin Core on the issue of scaling/transaction queues that’s crippling Bitcoin’s growth. It’s been quite sometime, it’s been debated long enough, but clearly Core has taken their decision on how to solve it.

Some Thoughts

To a lot of (mainly non-devs|people) it’s baffling why anyone wouldn’t do something that’s dead-simple in implementation and immediate to allow more time until a better solution is deployed.

This along with very close association for lack of better terminology of Core with Blockstream, sparked some conspiracy theories and further hostility.

Today

Now we have Gavin’s commit access revocation. Initially acceptable due to the hack concerns, but that cleared up. However, not reinstating of commit access to Gavin is not the core issue itself, but rather that Gavin in some sense represented the unhappy part of the community and this brings up the core issue.

The core issue is that Bitcoin Core is becoming too centralized developer-wise while to some not reacting (fast enough) to urgent needs for the health of Bitcoin.

Solution?

Bitcoin isn’t owned by anyone, and anyone or any single company making the calls is unacceptable by all (I hope).

A potential solution is clear, a technical committee and/or an open governance model with equal members from multiple respected or long-time involved companies & miners and of course the developers, without giving away majority to a single group. They would collectively decide on key issues on public record, so we can get rid of conspiracy theories and other distractions.

Something similar happened on the Node.JS fork some time ago, they now have a better model along with a Technical Committee that takes big decisions for the course of the project on public hangouts after some public discourse, no closed doors.

Transparency and decentralization of decision-making for Bitcoin.