This is not true. I don't know too much about Luke because I don't keep up with things to that level of detail with Bitcoin. So I looked this up.
According to this site: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/segwit-segregated-witness.asp
SegWit was formulated by Bitcoin developer Pieter Wuille. Wuille is also the co-founder of Blockstream, a software company specializing in digital security for financial services.
So I looked further and found this article: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/the-long-road-to-segwit-how-bitcoins-biggest-protocol-upgrade-became-reality
Luke had discussed some of the issues before segwit came along that segwit would eventually solve and appears to have gotten involved again after Pieter kicked the discussion up and came up with a proposal. The most contribution Luke appears to have is that he suggested segwit be a soft fork.
The Intolerant Minority
While the BIP148 UASF seemed to have lost a lot of steam in favor of BIP149, not everyone had given up on this first UASF proposal completely.
Shaolinfry had proposed the concept under the assumption that it would be backed by an economic majority and thought it should be aborted before the flag day otherwise. But a group of users on the UASF Slack channel had a different idea. Some of them — including Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots developer Luke Dashjr — were contemplating activating the soft fork regardless of what the rest of the Bitcoin ecosystem would do. Even if they were a minority, and even if they’d effectively spin themselves off into a new altcoin, they would move forward with the upgrade.
I attempted to find any mention that would explain why you are attributing him with such regard, but I cannot find anything that aligns. There is no "lateral mind" at play here.
Valuable skillet is debatable at best in my opinion, but even if that is the case his skillet is not rare.
I agree. I hate that for him, I cannot rationalize this any other way. Anyone can be a core dev. I get that. But I also believe that if you decide to take that path, you should understand you no longer represent yourself. You represent Bitcoin.
So if someone who represents Bitcoin in such a privileged capacity cannot be bothered to think rationally about their OPSEC then they should distance themselves from the public view as much as possible and do something else. This is not the path for them.
I do hope to see more Bitcoiners call for Luke to step down as a core dev, if he has not already. What example are you setting for your fellow Bitcoiners, who you have volunteered to be a figurehead in some capacity for? That is part of the territory, like it or not.
I have some questions. This article documents how a server got infected that was hosted in a facility. This is literally the worst thing you can do as a Bitcoiner for custody short of tattooing your seed phrase on your arm.
Why did Luke have that much Bitcoin sitting on a server?
Couldn't moving all his legacy BTC to a hardware wallet solve his problem with some of the old coin being on private keys that existed before some BIPS? It feels like he just completely neglected to maintain this through the years. Why?
This also feels like a case of excessively complicated security practices. How does he create such a complicated security model to address threats for himself and completely skip the fundamentals?
I just don't understand. I don't think it is a psyop or anything. I genuinely believe this guy has no business being a Bitcoin core developer. Completely bizarre. I don't think this is a matter of oversight. I think this is a matter of this guy put way too much faith in whatever he put his faith in. Was he trying to prove something???
I don't understand.
A Florida-based Bitcoin developer called Luke Dashjr had figured out a hack, which made SegWit possible as a compatible (softfork) Bitcoin upgrade. Luke was regarded as one of the most extreme small blockers and was another hate figure in the large block community, alongside Gregory Maxwell. Luke was not at all scared of standing out from the crowd with his non-consensus opinions. To some extent, the committed Catholic and father-of-seven was the Cassandra of the technical community; exceptionally strident. However, Luke clearly had a very strong technical understanding of Bitcoin, and his apparent non-linear thinking, which made him see things differently from others, may have helped him conceive of this hack that the other developers couldn’t quite work out.