Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, at Medium:
I realized we all had a much bigger problem: the systemic risk to bitcoin if Bitcoin Core was the only team working on bitcoin.
The core team contains some very high IQ people, but there are some things which I find very concerning about them as a team after spending some time with them last weekend.
- Some of them show very poor communication skills or a lack of maturity — this has hurt bitcoin’s ability to bring new protocol developers into the space.
- They prefer ‘perfect’ solutions to ‘good enough’. And if no perfect solution exists they seem ok with inaction, even if that puts bitcoin at risk.
- They seem to have a strong belief that bitcoin will not be able to scale long term, and any block size increase is a slippery slope to a future that they are unwilling to allow. (..)
They view themselves as the central planners of the network, and protectors of the people. They seem ok with watching bitcoin fail, as long as they don’t compromise on their principles.
Being high IQ is not enough for a team to succeed. You need to make reasonable trade offs, collaborate, be welcoming, communicate, and be easy to work with. Any team that doesn’t have this will be unable to attract top talent and will struggle long term. In my opinion, perhaps the biggest risk in bitcoin right now is, ironically, one of the things that has helped it the most in the past: the bitcoin core developers.
This sounds unsurprising. (A lot of developers are like this, unfortunately.)
Fascinating organizational hurdles for this decentralized system. (Which, in fact, is struggling because it gravitated towards a centralized decision making structure.)
