Guys like Wladimir, Pieter, Gavin, Cory Fields, Gregory Maxwell and Luke Jr have a voice because they’ve contributed many thousands of lines of code. (Lines of code are only a proxy for impact).
You may have noticed Mike Hearn isn’t in the top 100 contributors list. He is the primary author of the Java implementation of a bitcoin library:
https://github.com/bitcoinj/bitcoinj
He started it in 2011, definitely early. But a substantial amount of bitcoin core work had already set the path. There are also similar implementations in many different languages but they are not the primary reference implementation for full nodes.
According to Hearn’s blog post:
“I’ve talked about Bitcoin on Sky TV and BBC News. I have been repeatedly cited by the Economist as a Bitcoin expert and prominent developer. I have explained Bitcoin to the SEC, to bankers and to ordinary people I met at cafes.”
Being cited by journalists is not the same as being a primary contributor.
The disagreement between Hearn and the other developers isn’t about whether to increase capacity, it’s about how. Many of the primary full-node contributors believe a hard-blockchain-fork is a risky approach. Lots of work is being done to explore better options, like segregated witness (http://gavinandresen.ninja/segregated-witness-is-cool).
Mike Hearn tried to (very aggressively) push the idea of increasing the block size with a hard fork. In fact the patch allows node operators to vote and 75% adoption is needed. When it looked like that wasn’t going to pan out, he created Bitcoin XT where “Decisions are made through agreement between Mike and Gavin, with Mike making the final call if a serious dispute were to arise.”
So the claim that Hearn not being able to take over decision making power for the bitcoin community is evidence that bitcoin has failed seems to show something slightly different. It shows that open source software methodology of forking and adoption lets the best implementation win and prevents hostile takeovers.
Mike Hearn is not as impactful to bitcoin development as he or recent news would indicate. Mike leaving the bitcoin community has little impact on the future success or failure of bitcoin.
> You may have noticed Mike Hearn isn’t in the top 100 contributors list.
I've also noticed, there are no any Satoshi Nakomotos in the list of contributors. Does that mean he (Satoshi) was "not impactful to the development"?
P.S.: I'm not following the Bitcoin news. Is Satoshi a nickname of one of those top contributors or the initial author just didn't use version control system? Or am I missing something?
Yeah I was using that as a transition to talk about Mike's other contributions. His bitcoinj contributions are hundreds of thousands of lines. Also I said "Lines of code are only a proxy for impact" and unfortunately there's probably no realistic measure.
I'm not a bitcoind contributor and this is more of a generic observation about how open source projects are controlled in general.
Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym used by Bitcoin's creator and first developer. Anyway, I believe that if Nakamoto never made a GitHub account then they wouldn't show up in the list, even if they had commits.
Yeah that's exactly what I think. Software forking (and even blockchain forking) allow us to "vote with our feet" so we don't need to mandate central control.
Not knowing who he was I didn't get the impression he was trying to say Bitcoin would be in serious trouble without him, only that he had enough involvement to have a good handle on the issue (ignoring if his view was pro/con).
In open source communities, impactful contributions yield influence. Here are the top 100 bitcoin contributors: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/graphs/contributors
Guys like Wladimir, Pieter, Gavin, Cory Fields, Gregory Maxwell and Luke Jr have a voice because they’ve contributed many thousands of lines of code. (Lines of code are only a proxy for impact).
You may have noticed Mike Hearn isn’t in the top 100 contributors list. He is the primary author of the Java implementation of a bitcoin library: https://github.com/bitcoinj/bitcoinj
He started it in 2011, definitely early. But a substantial amount of bitcoin core work had already set the path. There are also similar implementations in many different languages but they are not the primary reference implementation for full nodes.
According to Hearn’s blog post: “I’ve talked about Bitcoin on Sky TV and BBC News. I have been repeatedly cited by the Economist as a Bitcoin expert and prominent developer. I have explained Bitcoin to the SEC, to bankers and to ordinary people I met at cafes.”
Being cited by journalists is not the same as being a primary contributor.
The disagreement between Hearn and the other developers isn’t about whether to increase capacity, it’s about how. Many of the primary full-node contributors believe a hard-blockchain-fork is a risky approach. Lots of work is being done to explore better options, like segregated witness (http://gavinandresen.ninja/segregated-witness-is-cool).
Mike Hearn tried to (very aggressively) push the idea of increasing the block size with a hard fork. In fact the patch allows node operators to vote and 75% adoption is needed. When it looked like that wasn’t going to pan out, he created Bitcoin XT where “Decisions are made through agreement between Mike and Gavin, with Mike making the final call if a serious dispute were to arise.”
So the claim that Hearn not being able to take over decision making power for the bitcoin community is evidence that bitcoin has failed seems to show something slightly different. It shows that open source software methodology of forking and adoption lets the best implementation win and prevents hostile takeovers.
Mike Hearn is not as impactful to bitcoin development as he or recent news would indicate. Mike leaving the bitcoin community has little impact on the future success or failure of bitcoin.