An anonymous person has somehow managed to gain maintainer status of bitcoin.org and is now pushing for a defacement of the Bitcoin Whitepaper, an historical document of great importance to the bitcoin community.
In an astonishing statement, the maintainer said “my updated version of the white paper that corrects some issues is a work in progress, it should be done soon.” He further stated that “as things are right now, too many people get encouraged to read the white paper to “learn” about how Bitcoin works, and these people just come out with an incorrect interpretation of how things should be.”
Almost a year ago, the same person opened a topic on bitcoin.org’s github titled “Amendments to the Bitcoin paper” where, in a post unanimously downvoted, he stated:
“I feel like the Bitcoin described in the paper and the Bitcoin described on bitcoin.org are starting to diverge. At some point, I think the paper will start to do more harm than good, because it tricks people into believing they understand Bitcoin… Academics are also regularly citing the paper and basing some of their reasoning and arguments on this outdated paper.”
The post was made on July the 1st, so it’s not April’s fools and actually seemingly finds the support of none other than a Blockstream “contractor” and Bitcoin Core Developer, Luke-Jr, who says “sounds reasonable as long as it’s clear it isn’t the original paper.”
The maintainer’s problem with the whitepaper is probably its last paragraph, which many consider as the main invention of bitcoin that allows this currency to function. It states:
“They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.”
The maintainer obviously doesn’t like this mechanism and seemingly prefers he or some unaccountable developers with little if any incentive dictate what the rules should be as they please with the opportunities for abuse and their own enrichment at the expense of others needing no elaboration.
He says that “Core should just do soft fork upgrades without any signalling from miners required,” which means that the one person who has ultimate power on what to merge in Bitcoin Core, Wladimir J. van der Laan, should make all decisions regarding a $17 billion market.
This is on the same day that Taylor Gerring, a respected ethereum developer, said he “ceased developing for #Bitcoin after poor dev mailing list interactions [in 2013].” While Vitalik Buterin, ethereum’s inventor, has previously stated he decided to create a new chain for ethereum due to the attitude of some Bitcoin Core developers.
