I have a feeling I'll be writing a lot more about this topic in general for the foreseeable future, but the philosophical and existential crisis currently facing the Bitcoin space over what constitutes “spam” is starting to have massive second-order implications and consequences throughout the various Bitcoin communities.
I want to focus specifically on the reaction to this debate that extends into what could charitably be construed as a debate with Core developers, but in most cases has in fact taken the form of what can only be called harassment. This can be a very subtle and nuanced aspect of how Bitcoin works, as the relationship between the “customers” who actually use Bitcoin and the developers who work to maintain, improve, and improve the protocol and the tools built on top of it is not clear. Cut class separation. Many people who use Bitcoin are developers, and many developers are Bitcoin users. There is no strict line of distinction between the two, and anyone can become one or the other over time. In the same regard, people who fall into both categories can stop doing this and simply become just developers or just users. This is the first thing to understand, the line between users and developers is completely arbitrary, with constant overlap and the possibility of this overlap growing and shrinking at any time.
However, what about users who are not developers? What is their relationship with the people who actually write and maintain the software? There is no clear and obvious answer, but I can tell you what the relationship is not: an employer/employee relationship.
Developers don't work for us. a point. They are not our employees. We don't pay their bills, we don't fund their work, and they have no contractual or legal obligations to us at all. We're not product managers, we don't provide them with a project roadmap and we don't tell them which pieces to work on, how to work on them, in what order, what those pieces should be or how they should work.
Free yourself from any notion that this ecosystem works in any way remotely. It didn't happen. Developers freely choose to contribute their time to a fully open source protocol on their own terms. They decide how much time they will spend, what they will spend it on, and how they actually implement what they choose to work on. a point. They have complete and unrestricted autonomy in everything regarding how they interact with Bitcoin as a project.
Now flip that over to look at the users. Bitcoin users are under no obligation at all to adopt a change or tool produced by the developers. Nothing forces users to change the software they run, or adopt new tools that developers build on top of Bitcoin. Having a Netflix subscription does not require you to watch a single piece of the content you produce, nor does it require you to consume any specific volume of content. You can watch as much or as little as you want, and you can even cancel your subscription if you want. Netflix has no control over how you interact with it at all except through the power of voluntary persuasion.
This is how Bitcoin works. Harassing developers on GitHub won't change that. It won't magically turn your relationship with developers into an employee/employer relationship. Crying over GitHub will do absolutely nothing in creating or realizing the power dynamic that many Bitcoin users seem to want to bring into existence, but It does not achieve anything productive at all. I say this as someone who has personally discussed many issues with developers over the years, and has confirmed many times that developers are wrong about some issue or plan of action they think is best suited to take.
GitHub is not the place to debate the existential purpose or raison d'être of Bitcoin. It is a place for narrow discussion of concept, implementation and criticism, For the express purpose of improving any technical proposal submitted. Whether this leads to the proposal being incorporated into Bitcoin, or being rejected from Bitcoin, It should be entirely up to the outcome of a purely rational and logical discussion.
Even in the case where you have a truly rational argument or contribution, will you actually go ahead and contribute or participate in the development process constantly? Or are you basically just driving through review or input on a specific issue to get rid of it? Yes? So, even with a rational argument, GitHub is not the place for those discussions. We have Twitter, we have Reddit, we have spaces, we have many other places to discuss and work to reach consensus on things Without actively interfering in nonsense and philosophical debates about semantics in the development process.
I repeat, I am someone who has spent an inordinate amount of time in this field making arguments about why a particular direction of development is or is not a good idea, and backing up those arguments with actual thinking and rationale. I will probably never contribute in any meaningful and consistent way to the development of Bitcoin, So I don't try to bring my arguments, opinions and ideas directly into the development process itself.
I present these arguments to the broader community, or when presented to developers, in forums or other media besides GitHub or platforms whose specific purpose and function is Developers To coordinate the development process. If my arguments actually have merit, they will convince users. They will convince developers to go out of scope from places like GitHub. Eventually, an argument of merit will grow and create consensus around it to the point that it provides a meaningful public signal that developers can choose, if they want, to incorporate into their own thinking about Bitcoin and what they choose to spend their time and efforts on. done to improve it.
In the end, it doesn't matter whether you look at these issues and this dynamic from the lens of developers or from the lens of users: you have no power or influence at all except the power of persuasion.
If developers produce something that the vast majority of users don't want or find no value in, they can simply ignore it. If developers find that the vast majority of users are demanding something completely irrational in terms of incentive alignment, engineering facts, or anything like that, they can simply ignore them.
Bitcoin is a self-regulating system. Bad tools produced by developers will not be supported. Users who demand incoherent or malicious stuff can't have developers build it for them, but they can ramp up and build it themselves if they want to. truly You want this thing. No one works for anyone else here in this dynamic, it is a completely voluntary process regulated by market forces. So you either go ahead and try to be convincing, do it yourself, or cry some more. You will not succeed in trying to force someone to do something they do not want to do.
You can find the fork button in the top right corner here.
