Three things:

1) Hostility is generally the result of perceived hostility. If you assume the best intentions of another person, you will eventually find yourself in one of two places. Either you will find truth with that person (becuase they are also seeking it), or you will drive them away (because you will ask questions that can't be answered by someone trying to deceive).

2) The Wiki says "The current Core developers are Wladimir J. van der Laan, Gavin Andresen, Jeff Garzik, Gregory Maxwell, and Pieter Wuille." I've seen no hostility from any of these people.

3) The people who are threatened by Bitcoin aren't stupid enough to ignore #1. Can anyone imagine that they have not hired highly skilled psychological warfare agnts to do everything they can to "help" assault what we decentralization enthusiasts have been working for?

About #2: I'm actually blind to hostility, and that is an intentional affectation in response to my recognition of #1 and #3 together. If you feel another person has expressed a bad idea, just ignore it. If you feel they might be misleading others, post a reply about what you know to clear up any possible misconceptions. There is no point in identifying individuals who are being hostile, or pointing out hostility, or being divisive. Let the rest of us recognize it on our own. Maybe send something like what I'm writing now.

PS: If anyone is interested in conspiracy theories, I had written this into my gmail compose window and (presumably) hit a wrong key which caused the thread to be marked as spam and deleted my whole reply. It hadn't even saved a draft. I've never seen gmail not save a draft before.

On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 9:55 AM, Eric Lombrozo via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

I should add that in the interest of peace and goodwill, I extend an offer to both Mike and Gavin to make their grievances heard…but only on the condition that we make a good effort to avoid misrepresentation and misreading of the other side’s intentions.

On Aug 17, 2015, at 9:37 AM, Eric Lombrozo <elombrozo@gmail.com> wrote:

On Aug 17, 2015, at 6:34 AM, NxtChg via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

Great, so how about you go tell theymos to stop censoring XT posts and banning the other side on /r/Bitcoin?

Let users decide what Bitcoin is or isn't.

FWIW,

I don’t think what theymos did is very constructive.I understand his position…but it only hurts the cause, unfortunately - the PR battle is not the same thing as a discussion on technical merits. He hurts the PR battle and plays into Mike’s hand by doing that. The actual underlying issue actually has little to do with block size - it has to do with Mike and Gavin feeling that the core devs are being obstructionist.

Regardless of the technical merits of XT, the fact that we’ve never done a hard fork before, not even for things some other devs have wanted…and not due to any malice on anyone’s part but because simply that’s just the nature of decentralized consensus with well-defined settlement guarantees…this is the problem - Mike and Gavin think they’re somehow special and their fork should be pushed while the rest of us resist pushing our own controversial pet ideas because we want civility and understand that at this stage in Bitcoin’s development trying to fork the blockchain over highly divisive issues is counterproductive and destructive.

But the fact of the matter is that in the PR battle, arguments against the fork actually play into Mike’s hand, and that’s the problem.

The whole block size thing is too nuanced and too easily spun simplistically. It’s too easy to spin resistance to bigger blocks (even though the resistance is actually much more towards untested hardforking mechanisms and serious security concerns) as “obstructionism” and it’s too easy to spin bigger blocks as “scalability” because most of the people can’t tell the fucking difference.

The fact is most of the people don’t really understand the fundamental issue and are taking sides based on charismatic leadership and authority which is actually entirely counter to the spirit of decentralized consensus. It’s beyond ironic.

If you guys want to win the PR battle, the key is to make it clear that you are not obstructionist and are giving everyone equal treatment…Bitcoin was designed such that changing the rules is *hard* and this is a feature. Bitcoin simply does not have a reliable and tested hard forking mechanism…and a hard fork for such a politically divisive issue will almost certainly lead to a lack of cooperation and refusal to work together out of spite. All of us would like to be able to process more transactions on the network. It’s not a matter of whether we think higher capacity is a bad thing - it’s more that some of us are concerned that Bitcoin is not sufficiently mature to be able to handle such a schism with so much hostility.

Let’s face it, folks - from a PR standpoint, the block size issue is irrelevant. Nobody really understands it except for a handful of people - I’ve tried to explain it, I’ve even written articles about it - but most people just don’t get it. Most people don’t really get scalability either - they seem to think that scalability is just doing the same thing you’ve always done manyfold.

Block size is an especially dangerous issue politically because it’s one of those that requires deep understanding yet superficially sounds really simple. It’s perfect Dunning-Kruger bait.

So let’s be a little smarter about this.

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