“So tell me, why should I embrace these white knights coming to legitimise Bitcoin with their surveillance and censorship palming it off with their gibberish newspeak. These people are real motherfuckers and what motivates them primarily is greed at your expense.
They don’t see Bitcoin as empowerment. They see Bitcoin as convenience, and are willing to compromise the empowerment aspect for more convenience. Bitcoin will grow, but the question is in which direction.
[…]
It’s funny because all this talk of Bitcoin as being politically-neutral is a way of downplaying the values I’ve been talking about above. You can never be politically neutral. That’s a fantasy. Technology embodies values. Satoshi had values.”
“If you still don’t believe that features can be developed that are against small business, p2p transfers and the blackmarket, but pro consumers and corporations then see Mike Hearn’s last proposal for improving the security of 0conf payments with the unfortunate side effect of enabling miner blacklists.
And this is just the most malicious and prescient example. The vast majority of proposals are non-controversial and non-noticeable to most people. But don’t forget, it’s the sum of those decisions that affects Bitcoin. And it’s not enough that Bitcoin is opensource. We actually need participating developers who understand these issues deeply. That’s why I’m so glad we have people like Peter Todd, who really see things deep and understand the true social, political and technical ramifications of our decisions that the 99% majority of developers (myself included) don’t see.”