To drift or not to drift: Part 2

Tuesday, July 28th, 2020

Some have implied that in announcing the Grasberg DAA, Amaury has somehow stolen the work of Mark Lundeberg and Jonathan Toomin. But I've seen him acknowledge their efforts and the amount of work they did to move this DAA forward in multiple places. What more can he do? Also, how do you steal something that's open source?

Amaury would have to be a moron (or CSW) to try and act like the Grasberg DAA was all him and no one else. Since this is all open source anyone who cares to know who made what can easily find out.

Too many people in the BCH community seem to be focused on the wrong things. Whether it's taking down Amaury, or trying to gain status for yourself, or this desire to be thanked for your contributions.

Sure, a little gratitude never hurts, but if hearing Amaury say thank you means that much, I can't help but think you need to reset your priorities. Let's say I had the money to donate the 2000 BCH they're requesting to do the Mempool Overhaul project. I hope that I wouldn't care about whether or not I got a thank you card in the mail. All I should care about is seeing that my investment was put to good use and they did what they said they were going to do. If my holdings were to become more valuable as a result of their work, I would be the one thanking them for a job well done. And if they didn't come through, then I would take my money elsewhere in the future.

I've also been hearing a lot of complaints about Phrabicator and having to meet ABC's requirements rather than having ABC be the one to go out and review work in someone else's preferred manner. If I was a developer trying to get something into ABC's code, I would fully expect to have to play by ABC's rules in order to do exactly that. Let's say that in my job I want my CEO to change certain processes within our company. I'd have to present it to him the way he desires to get him to even look at my proposal. I can't just write up some document and ask him to stop by my office and pick it up when he has the time. If anything, that'll just encourage him to find a way to ignore me.

I know Amaury isn't anyone's boss, and none of us are his employees. But he is the defacto leader of this project in the same way Vitalik Buterin is the leader of Ethereum, and Charlie Lee is the leader of Litecoin. The difference is that in those communities they actually support and help their leader lead while in BCH half of us seem to only want to tear him down. This despite the fact that in every developer meeting I've watched, it's clear that each person in the meeting values Amaury's opinion.

For over a year, Amaury has been talking about fixing the culture in BCH, about making the BCH community goal-oriented rather than status-oriented.

I believe we all share the same goal of making BCH the best version of p2p digital cash. The problem is not everyone agrees on the best way to do that. Some think it's about keeping the community together at all costs. I think it's about making the right technical and economic decisions at all costs.

Imagine if tomorrow someone came out with a proof of work protocol that could scale to billions of people, enabled privacy, proved it was censorship resistant, and allowed for quick, cheap and reliable payments. You don't think people would immediately jump on that bandwagon and start mining this imaginary coin right away? That entrepreneurs wouldn't find ways to build businesses on top of this new network? I think superior tech will find a community. I don't know that a superior community will necessarily be able to build superior tech.