Zhao cites Hughes and arrives at a different conclusion: "the right to privacy must be respected and protected by the empowered." That is a regulatory, institutionalist argument. She is calling for the powerful to protect people, not for individuals to protect themselves through technical means. The cypherpunk reads the panopticon and builds a tunnel. Zhao reads it and writes to the prison governor about his obligations.
This is a stretch. It's like you saying "End the Fed," and I say, "well a real cypherpunk doesn't concern itself with the Fed, therefore you must respect their power." The charitable interpretation is that Zhao saw herself as the empowered, a person capable of being a prison governor or a jail breaker, and was calling for other empowered people to choose the jail breaker path with her.
There are important things to say about this saga, but it's not very helpful imo to continue the brainrot witch hunt from X. If anything is clear, it's that Zhao and Uttarwar didn't seek the responsibilities they were given. It's fair to point out evidence of special treatment, and evidence that they perhaps weren't ready for certain responsibilities. But digging up a college essay arguing for privacy and implying that makes her politically misaligned is fucking lame.
Look guys, if you squint from this angle, she's slightly off target. Get her!
The "article" also keeps stressing a "cold email", when it reports that glozow had applied to the residency the year before. How is following up from a prior application a "cold email"?
Even within their frame, it's cowardly. They spend ample time on Zhao and Uttarwar, then while attempting to rationalize their hand waves, unintentionally acquit them of wrong doing. Then they go relatively soft on people they conclude as responsible. There's no need to attack the conscripts when you can attack the generals. Unless, of course, you're reasoning from emotion and want to hurt people for sport.
This article was in no way malicious or spiteful or emotional. The fact that she made an application a year earlier and by her own statements had "given up" on "Blockchain" strongly supports his statement that this was a cold email. A warm email would have had some preceding trail.
That trail may exist, and it may have been intentionally omitted for "sport" by the author, but frankly such an accusation screams emotional discomfort at the obvious conclusions from the facts available, and you should rather respond with an alternative set of facts that broaden the picture.
Neither of us know the author’s intent for certain unless you’re the author. I don’t think Zhao was material to his pov, so I couldn’t understand why he spent so much time on her, hence my “sport” comment. Meaning, I think their grand theory can be argued without going after Zhao. What facts do I need to support that?
This is a long article (one of four that @hodlonaut promises). It spends a lot of time making the case that females were given special treatment as contributors to Core and that some people in positions of power did not have good Bitcoin values.
In the first case, the leadership of Chaincode labs, particularly Newberry, does not seem to have been particularly salubrious to Bitcoin Core.
In the second case, I do not think the political leanings or morality of a person is relevant to their ability to contribute to Bitcoin development.
I guess the next question is whether someone's values have any bearing on whether they should be in a position of authority in a Bitcoin project.
Again, I would say it doesn't matter. Perhaps as a consequence of Core's market saturation, we seem to have come to a place where we care about the values and signals of a project, not just the code and what it does.
My naive understanding of Bitcoin is that it is a permissionless system. To me, this means you run the code you want, and don't run anything else.
If Elizabeth Warren can write good code and it receives a lot of review and it fixes something in Bitcoin, I would be happy to see Pocahontas join the corps of shadowy supercoders.
If a project doesn't produce code you like, you are free to run some other project's code. If no other project exists, you can do your best to create it.
If Coinbase decides to put lots of money into bitcoin development funding and ends up funding all the people who are maintainers of Bitcoin Core, the only tool I have to resist this my choice of which software to run.
But acting like it is our business what values a project chooses to have does not make sense to me. Whoever funds the project is in charge. That's how money works. If Brink or Chaincode's donors want to see DEI and women developers, you cannot stop them from using their money to pay such developers.
But they can't make you run their software, either. Perhaps we have forgotten that part in our heavy reliance on one project.
There was one sentence in the article that very much resonated with me:
This is what networks do: the people inside them experience them as fair.
This is true. Whether Bitcoin continues to have a reference implementation that most people run, or a number of other node implementations gain real popularity, each of those projects will have this same trouble: they will be run by humans and when people are on the inside of a thing, they have a hard time seeing how their biases are clouding their vision.
This is a stretch. It's like you saying "End the Fed," and I say, "well a real cypherpunk doesn't concern itself with the Fed, therefore you must respect their power." The charitable interpretation is that Zhao saw herself as the empowered, a person capable of being a prison governor or a jail breaker, and was calling for other empowered people to choose the jail breaker path with her.
There are important things to say about this saga, but it's not very helpful imo to continue the brainrot witch hunt from X. If anything is clear, it's that Zhao and Uttarwar didn't seek the responsibilities they were given. It's fair to point out evidence of special treatment, and evidence that they perhaps weren't ready for certain responsibilities. But digging up a college essay arguing for privacy and implying that makes her politically misaligned is fucking lame.
Look guys, if you squint from this angle, she's slightly off target. Get her!
The "article" also keeps stressing a "cold email", when it reports that glozow had applied to the residency the year before. How is following up from a prior application a "cold email"?
Even within their frame, it's cowardly. They spend ample time on Zhao and Uttarwar, then while attempting to rationalize their hand waves, unintentionally acquit them of wrong doing. Then they go relatively soft on people they conclude as responsible. There's no need to attack the conscripts when you can attack the generals. Unless, of course, you're reasoning from emotion and want to hurt people for sport.
This article was in no way malicious or spiteful or emotional. The fact that she made an application a year earlier and by her own statements had "given up" on "Blockchain" strongly supports his statement that this was a cold email. A warm email would have had some preceding trail.
That trail may exist, and it may have been intentionally omitted for "sport" by the author, but frankly such an accusation screams emotional discomfort at the obvious conclusions from the facts available, and you should rather respond with an alternative set of facts that broaden the picture.
Neither of us know the author’s intent for certain unless you’re the author. I don’t think Zhao was material to his pov, so I couldn’t understand why he spent so much time on her, hence my “sport” comment. Meaning, I think their grand theory can be argued without going after Zhao. What facts do I need to support that?
It was a cold email unless you support the contrary with facts, some thread between her failed application and the email tying her to bitcoin.
oh my reply to anon is a nonsequitor.
The frame, as I understood you, is that glozow was recruited by cold email, when people like Atack were already verifiably committed to Bitcoin.
DO NOT READ THE "SUMMARIES" IN THE COMMENTS.
Go read the article itself.
It's clear Core has been captured, but you should make up your own mind.
do not read the "summaries"
make up your own mind
oh btw HERE'S MY SUMMARY
You should learn the definition of a summary.
gloria's only crime is being too much of a softie to have used her power to give these bullies the shellacking they deaerve.
This is a long article (one of four that @hodlonaut promises). It spends a lot of time making the case that females were given special treatment as contributors to Core and that some people in positions of power did not have good Bitcoin values.
In the first case, the leadership of Chaincode labs, particularly Newberry, does not seem to have been particularly salubrious to Bitcoin Core.
In the second case, I do not think the political leanings or morality of a person is relevant to their ability to contribute to Bitcoin development.
I guess the next question is whether someone's values have any bearing on whether they should be in a position of authority in a Bitcoin project.
Again, I would say it doesn't matter. Perhaps as a consequence of Core's market saturation, we seem to have come to a place where we care about the values and signals of a project, not just the code and what it does.
My naive understanding of Bitcoin is that it is a permissionless system. To me, this means you run the code you want, and don't run anything else.
If Elizabeth Warren can write good code and it receives a lot of review and it fixes something in Bitcoin, I would be happy to see Pocahontas join the corps of shadowy supercoders.
If a project doesn't produce code you like, you are free to run some other project's code. If no other project exists, you can do your best to create it.
If Coinbase decides to put lots of money into bitcoin development funding and ends up funding all the people who are maintainers of Bitcoin Core, the only tool I have to resist this my choice of which software to run.
But acting like it is our business what values a project chooses to have does not make sense to me. Whoever funds the project is in charge. That's how money works. If Brink or Chaincode's donors want to see DEI and women developers, you cannot stop them from using their money to pay such developers.
But they can't make you run their software, either. Perhaps we have forgotten that part in our heavy reliance on one project.
There was one sentence in the article that very much resonated with me:
This is true. Whether Bitcoin continues to have a reference implementation that most people run, or a number of other node implementations gain real popularity, each of those projects will have this same trouble: they will be run by humans and when people are on the inside of a thing, they have a hard time seeing how their biases are clouding their vision.