[0:00]This is Matthew Kratter's Bitcoin University. Today I want to talk about a Bitcoin core insider who's been recently spelling the beans. Now, if you've been following my channel over the past nine months, you've already seen my ongoing investigative work in which I've sought to uncover and document all the nepotism at Bitcoin Core. The in-group out-group social dynamics at Bitcoin Core as well as other deep structural problems that have contributed to core's many mistakes over the past three years, especially their refusal to fight Bitcoin spam. I'll put a link to these videos if you want to catch up. The first one is called Bitcoin Core, Nepotism and Commit Access. The second one, relaying Bitcoin Core arbitrary data. Now recently many of my suspicions seem to have been confirmed by one of the more prolific Bitcoin core devs really of all time. And that is John Attack, and we're going to be talking about and listening to a bit of the presentation he did at Plan B in El Salvador a few weeks ago. But if we take a look at his contributions to Bitcoin Core over the years, this is the list of all the contributions. At the top we can see all the lead maintainers like Vlad Vanderlan, Aichu, Cipa, et cetera, Gavin Andresen. And then if we scroll down, we can see that John Attack is at number 12. So this is quite impressive considering he only worked there from 2019 to the present. 739 commits, which puts him ahead of Luke Dash. So this is the presentation, John's been a Bitcoin core developer since February of 2019. Seems like a really smart guy. Multilingual, speaks French, English, German, Russian, learning Spanish, currently living in El Salvador, so that makes sense. Self-taught programmer, he has a product management background as well as a CTO background working for European multinationals. I'll put a link to his presentation in the description notes below, so you can see all these pictures. You can see him working with people in El Salvador, as well as the house that he's been working on, which is I, which as I understand, is meant to be a Bitcoin development and research center as well. But we can see how gorgeous it is where he's living in El Salvador. So I wanted to play his presentation or part of his presentation, about 13 minutes of his presentation that he gave in El Salvador. And then I'll be commenting on it, and you will be able to see especially if you've been following my videos over the past six months or so, you'll be able to see that many of the things that I've been trying to piece together. It would seem that he is confirming. So let's listen to this and I will pause it and comment when necessary. We're just going to be listening to the middle 10 minutes roughly, if you tune in, I'll put a link to this in the description notes below, the beginning actually has some interesting stuff about Bitcoin Core, about a BIP, being a BIP editor and how to submit BIPs, et cetera. So I'll put a link to that, but for now let's just start listening at about the 10 minute mark. Core. So I've been involved full-time on Bitcoin core since 2019, though in the past two years I've my activity in Bitcoin core has gone way down for various reasons. Bitcoin Core has different entities. You have the developers, on a given day you might see five to 15 people active on the GitHub repository. Generally, there has been between four and six maintainers, and generally I believe we're we've been stable at around four project owners. I could be wrong. That's not that's more context. You have to really be watching to know who the project owners are. I'm not going to say who they are. But someone who's a keen observer uh will know. Um, personally, I've found that the social dynamics are critically important on a project like this. And so since the beginning in 2019, I have made it my business to follow all the human interactions and try to understand the human process and social dynamics of what is going on. Because open source is fairly political. Um, and that hasn't changed. In fact, it's maybe gotten worse in the recent years and we might get into that a little bit gently. Finally, you have funding organizations and you have offices and they are run by CEOs or some of them also sort of take on the role of a project manager with respect to Bitcoin. So they might influence funding, they influence who. And this is definitely the last thing we need in Bitcoin is someone from a corporate office who's a product manager. I'd encourage you to stick with this. It starts off a little bit slow, but you will see that there's some real gold in this speech. So let's keep listening. who can work full-time in their offices, giving them credibility, and they might even provide direction or amplify the views of the the the few core developers who they are close to, who they use as trucks, as trusted proxies to know who is good or not and what is going on or not. And amplify those views into action. And a handful of these organized what are called the core development private conferences, um, which in my opinion, gives them a fair bit of power, centralization, power. I'm not going to get into that further for now. As you'll see in this presentation, John is very understated and very careful and seems like a very kind and gentle person. But you can see him kind of roll his eyes as he thought about these boondoggle trips and the power dynamics involved where you have to be sort of in the in group to get invited to these vacations. But Core Devs basically are meetings twice a year where all the they're private, where all the core developers who are sort of appreciated, are invited to a private summit. And those organized by these funding organizations and offices, so they have influence, money, and who is invited to these events. Bitcoin Core for about a decade had what was called a lead maintainer. This person, um, the the last lead maintainer since 2014, in April 2014, Vladimir Vanderlan was made lead maintainer replacing Gavin Andresen. My personal inspiration for working on Bitcoin Core came from Vladimir. Uh, he was a role model to me. Uh, he set the tone and leadership style of the project. He held the overall group disparate group together. He arbitrated, he made decisions of last resort. So basically in the history of Bitcoin, we've only had a few people who have had commit access and have been lead maintainers. So obviously Satoshi followed by Gavin Andresen, followed by Vladimir Vanderlan, who is the the last lead maintainer, and currently we have a series of five or six maintainers. But there's been no lead maintainer since since Vlad. the buck stops here and he handled the release management. Um, he was burning out. It was clear for years that he was burning out. He'd been there a full decade, the weight of as the stakes have grown increasingly higher with the with Bitcoin's value in the world, the weight on his shoulders were stronger as well as the continual attacks by a certain fake Toshi, which did not help. He's talking about Craig Wright obviously suing all the Bitcoin Core devs. caused a lot of distress among the people who were named. I personally was named in the last round, but some people like Luke, and I believe Peter Todd is in the room, have been named for years and years and years on these on these legal attacks. Um, and that weighed on on that person as well as well as other core developers. So we lost our lead maintainer in 2022 and the decision was sort of informally made not to have any more lead maintainer. Um, and that in my opinion, people saw for years and years that this was coming, and there was no formal transition set up. But there was in behind the scenes a lot of, I would say knife sharpening for who would grab the power when that person stepped down as they saw it becoming one day.
[7:48]And this is how organizations always devolve into this. You never have pure democracies or some sort of pure equality of voting. We talked both about in previous videos, we talked about the the Iron Law of oligarchy, and this obviously applies here where people could see Vlad, uh, if see from the horizon, see him coming to step down. And then everyone positioning themselves, the power dynamics positioning themselves to try to get some power to fill that vacuum. And so it sounds like to me, like most organizations, Bitcoin Core really is an oligarchy at this point, and it transitioned to that when Vlad retired. changed completely over time. When I joined in 2019, we had basically maintainers were loan individuals spread out all over the world. We had one in Holland, one in Switzerland, one in New Zealand, a German who for a time was in New York. And again, a maintainer is someone who has commit commit access who can actually uh, write has right access to the Bitcoin core code. So it's a very important. It's a very important thing. It's supposed to be janitorial, as he's as he's going to talk about, but in practice, it leads to these unequal power dynamics. And now as in the Nordic countries, but no longer a maintainer. Uh, one from Belgium, who was in San Francisco at the time, and a new one named in June 2019 from Australia. So Holland, Switzerland, New Zealand, Germany, Belgium, Australia, not terribly Americanized, spread all over the world. That has completely changed. Every one of these maintainers has since stepped down. In their replacement has been mostly uh, Americans. And they have been centralized at one point three out of four were working in one office in London. Now that's a bit more spread out. There is one in San Francisco, um, uh, there were two in in New York and two in London. So now we have this concentration of maintainers, as he's saying in the large woke blue American cities, which is a complete sort of political change, I would say, to being distribute these these maintainers being distributed all over the world. been a centralization. People no longer working from homes, but out all over the world from lots of different countries. It was more similar culture in offices. And one of them that was in that is in London was originally in the Ukraine as well. I forgot to mention the Ukraine in the list of countries. So what happened? We had a leadership transition. OGs who'd been lead maintainers or maintainers since 2011, 2014, whatever, 20 the mid-20s, 2020s, were burning out, which is human, which is natural. And who was going to take their place? Was the question. And for example, Peter Warelo was a maintainer, the legendary developer Peter Warelo was a maintainer, but he was the last two years before stepping down, he was not using, he was not merging, he was more interested merging, he was not doing the role of a maintainer per se. He was more interested in doing research, taking a backstage, more research and development orientation, which I believe fits him. So we had a transition of leadership. But where are the replacements like Wampus, which was Vladimir Vanderlan, Sipa, Peter Walo, Gregory Maxwell, AJ Towns, these these OGs, people like Luke, um, where where are these the replacements for the individual sovereign individuals who were there in the early days, who maybe had a good Bitcoin stack. You have these new young people coming in, but what have you selected for and I think that plays a a role in why we don't have similar stature of leaders now while the stakes are much higher. So what happened was a leadership transition needed done and what what was selected for was basically people willing to come in and work in the offices in the large blue cities of New York City and later in San Francisco, mainly New York City. Um, Chaincode Labs was leader in working on the developer pipeline. I my I was personally myself trained at Chaincode Labs in New York City in June 2019, along with about a dozen other developers. Um, there was a centralization. I would consider it the baseball training league. The organizer of that program was previously a town scout in baseball. So the analogy fits, but um, basically they were scouting who was going to be good. There was two, there were two women and there were there were about 10 men, 12 men. And right before that program began in June 2019, in May 2019, the Blue Mat, Matt Corralo and others started online on tweeting about a DEI push and need for diversity. So we had a cultural change that began right as I was invited for the first time as a new developer. And this is obviously a huge departure from Bitcoin Core's history as being a pure meritocracy or at least as close to meritocracy as possible. Once DEI enters something, that's when you get the real corruption and we can, we can sort of visualize who was brought in as part of the DEI, if you've been following the story. for two Chaincode Labs in New York City, and I saw with my own eyes how things were becoming Americanized. It was about diversity, uh, your gender mattered, your your things you couldn't change about your. He's basically talking about Gloria Shaw, if you can tell. yourself, your skin color suddenly became important and we all know what happened. The DEI push of the last five years, half decade, which is maybe on the way now since since a year or two. But what that happened was that created a few people that were funded, the red carpet was rolled out for them and they got funding immediately. While the others who didn't fit the identity characteristics struggled very, very mightily. I have, it took me a year to get funding. I have friends who took three or four years to get funding, who are still actively on Bitcoin Core. Um, while other people they were funded immediately and they had OG mentors leading them, grooming them to become essentially main future maintainers and leaders. So he's basically saying that Gloria was was groomed from the beginning to become a maintainer. So that's what happened. Um, people like to say that maintainers are just janitors or code gardeners pulling up the weeds. And sure, that would be nice and that that's often been a valuable description for the role. But in Bitcoin Core, it has much more power than that. There are dynastic effects. People stay until they burn out and step down. They don't, there's not a regular rotation like you do at like jury duty for a year or six months and then you pass the torch on. There's no passing of the torch plan. People stay until they burn out. That creates dynastic effects where people hoping to get their changes approved and merge. They treat maintainers with much more deference and respect and I've personally seen that when you become a core developer, your whole life changes when you get your first serious funding. Then you're taken much more seriously and the work, that things work much more easily for you. And later on if you become a maintainer, um, you're taking, you're given another level of respect. And I suppose that sounds logical, but that means that there are dynastic effects. Um, it has, it was brought up several times, whether there should be more of a jury duty role instead, where basically maintainers don't write code, they just review other people's code, which is mostly what Vladimir Vanderlan was doing the last few years. He was essentially reviewing and merging. And that could be boring for people who don't who prefer writing code to doing review. Um, but it could be three to six months or a year of selfless service and then go back to being a writing code and making proposing changes. I don't think that gain traction. It has been proposed for the the BIPs maintainers, but not yet seriously for the Bitcoin Core maintainers. So I've seen people, I've seen different analogies for how this ends up being in terms of power structure. You have a little click of power. Um, sometimes I see it like the King's Court. Other people see it as an ant colony. I guess the Ant colony would be Gloria as the queen Ant and uh, at least before she left. Uh, I saw a presentation two weeks ago where someone suggested there was a core commit Bureau. They likened it to that, but these power structures do affect your ability to contribute and progress depending on your in or out group status. And if you're a favorite being groomed to be a leader or if you're expected to just be a supporter. The COVID reaction during 202022 made another schism. Uh, about 85% of core contributors, I would estimate, took the COVID side of masking and getting the repeatedly getting boosted and injected and all that. And about 15% or maybe less, um, didn't do that. And this is quite ironic too when you think back about how Bitcoin not supporters were always uh, analogized by the Bitcoin core side as being the sort of pro vaxers, if you want to use that metaphor. When in fact, uh, it seems like everyone who worked at chaincode or was in these big offices, in these large blue cities as you would expect, uh, at least 85% of them were vax. So this is quite quite ironic given the accusations against not supporters of the vaccine. So you had core dev meetings where they were in separate housing, for years, someone like me who didn't do the the vaccines, um, would not be able to visit offices or to. And you have a real problem when these these prominent Bitcoin Core devs are all pro vax and are listening to what uh, what normies are doing. This is just, it's unbelievable to hear. developers were were working because they required you to be boosted and updated with your. So that that created another schism and there was a bit of heavy judgment going on. Why aren't you vax? Why aren't you boosted? Why aren't you? So that created further separation and I would say the 15% were the more independent people working alone and the 85% were the ones in the big city offices to generalize. Another thing that changed, one of the maintainers repeatedly mentioned the importance of collectivist action, of collectivism in the weekly meetings. Um, which I found that to be very strange for Bitcoin Core. And John doesn't say who this pusher of collectivism was, but given her background at UC Berkeley, I would imagine this was Gloria unless I hear otherwise. When I pushed back on that, I was sold, well, I said, no, we were ad hoc process that wasn't collectivist. The people don't have to agree, we don't have to all sign these same things, and I I was I got dunked down on that for questioning that. It got to the point where wagons would circle if you would question the wrong people or report a bug created by the wrong person. If someone friendly to that person had to find the bug and report it. It was all about wagon circling, gaslighting, all that's not a bug, and then someone else would fix it quietly or, and. This is absolutely terrifying to hear about the reference implementation that even something as serious as a software bug would be treated in a political manner like this. And this is one of the problems, this is one of the reasons that Bitcoin Core itself probably cannot be reformed. It probably has to be burned to the ground and all the developers go elsewhere to different projects at some point. Also, how maintainers were chosen, there's a um a pretense of of a democracy. Someone is nominated by an existing maintainer in a meeting, and people would say yes, yes, yes, yes, or someone might question, say, well, I have concerns on the pull request or in the meeting. And we I you systematically with these people that they're after pushed away from the project for not being supportive of the nomination. What we did see with one nomination that was a self-nomination, people immediately all approved during the meeting, and then when the pull request was opened, it was left open for seven months to rot. While they found a way to shut it down. So in fact, maintainerships are pre-decided. It's not based on a vote of the people at the IRC meeting. It's to become a maintainer, you have to be approved by the existing maintainers. It's it's a little club. So rather than being a meritocracy, becoming a maintainer at Bitcoin Core, it's more like a monarchy or some special selection where you have to be chosen by a previous maintainer. And if you question or criticize that, you're not a supportive person and and we've seen these people. And how did they get moved out of the project? Oh, I'm running out of time. Okay, I'm going to skip forward. Meetings changed. So I think we'll stop there. You can take a look at the presentation and uh find some some more of the details. So at the end of the lecture here, he goes on to how we can improve Bitcoin Core and basically some of the things he talked about. For example, core should be less snarky. Uh core should be a little more decentralized. They shouldn't be in these centralized offices in large blue cities. Where there's a lot of group think and there's a lot of social factors. Um, but those are the those are the suggestions he offered for the improvement. This is interesting because especially when Gloria left, uh left Bitcoin Core, we had people like Murch saying, uh, couldn't disagree more. Her stepping back, Gloria's stepping back is a huge loss for Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin. The incessant bullying in the past year and subsequent victim blaming has been disgusting. And then Giacomo has a has a funny reply here in which he pretends to misunderstand Murch saying basically, yes, the personal abuse and ostracism non-aligned OG developers like Luke Dasher, as well as more recently active ones like John Attack, have been subject to is a disgrace. I did speak up against that. We can see now sort of the ostracism dynamics described in John's speech and all the interior internal power plays occurring at Bitcoin Core. But I would say this video is a good reminder that Bitcoin Core is not a homogeneous monolith. There are still good Bitcoiners like John Attack who have been contributing to the project and who may not share the beliefs or vision of that small cabal of devs who are friendly to spam or trying to turn Bitcoin into Ethereum or just trying to play power games and rise up in the institution. I would personally love to hear more from John Attack about the problems at Bitcoin Core in future podcasts or conference presentations. I don't really do interviews, but it would be great to see one of the interviewers in the Bitcoin podcast space reach out to John and allow him to tell more of his story. If you want a link to all the slides from that keynote, I'll put a link to his tweet here in which he uh shares that as well his as his his GitHub, jonattack.github.io. In which he writes, I'm concerned about human rights and freedom, decentralization of power, individual empowerment, privacy and self-sovereignty. As well as this interesting article that shows his house that he's building in El Salvador. Some great pictures as well as speaking uh about his background, his his love of surfing, his love of riding motorcycles in El Salvador, et cetera. So I'll put a link to all this in the description notes below and you can also follow him on X @jonattack. So I will put links to all these. Hope you enjoyed this video. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to leave a like, hit the subscribe button, leave a comment or question in the comment section below. And thanks a lot for watching and I'll see you in the next video.
