Quote from: mikeywith on June 11, 2025, 11:38:51 PM

Quote from: Satofan44 on June 11, 2025, 10:44:43 PM

I am surprised that you don't know this. Just look at how much money altcoin projects are raising for absolute vaporware garbage that nobody needs. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Core developers could probably earn a lot of money by just giving permission to be listed as advisors in a variety of project. Just imagine the money if they participated in some more deeply, as co-founders. Integrity is what keeps them away.

Oh, When he said "alternatives," I didn’t think of scam projects or other reputation-wrecking paths like joining the porn industry or launching a worthless shitcoin.

I assumed he meant more reasonable and respectable alternatives -- like working at a well-paying tech firm. For example, landing a job at a U.S.-based company earning $150k–$300k a year. Cheesy

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply outright scams. However, most of the layer 1, and layer 2 projects that were launched in the last 5 years are essentially just that. You could call them legitimate, vaporware scams. Simply, a way to enrich the founders at the cost of retail. Sadly there was a time when being an advisor would provide a lot of legitimacy and those that choose to put their names with any major project could earn a lot of money depending on their reputation. I don't know how relevant such positions are still today, but I am sure that at least some of the Core developers have received their fair share of all kinds of offers.

Quote from: mikeywith on June 11, 2025, 11:38:51 PM

Gavin Andresen might be controversial, but how exactly is Jeff Garzik a "bad" example? He laid the foundation for much of what the mining ecosystem relies on today -- nearly every piece of mining hardware out there still builds on the base of his code.

I don't closely follow Core devs news, so maybe I've missed something recent, but that doesn't change the fact that he played a major role in Bitcoin's early infrastructure, and the same applies to Gavin.

Controversial is being too lenient, didn't he confirm that C.W. was satoshi? When he left, he should have stayed gone. Instead he tarnished his reputation. As far as Garzik is concerned, it is a similar scenario. Nobody doubts that the contributions were made early, but they all ruined themselves afterwards. Did you forget that they tried to pull of a contentious hard fork on us? Why do people obsess over historical contributions? Had it not been the three of them, it would have been 3 other people? Might as well been a chance selection by the universe's entropy. People come and go, and many will come and go for malicious reasons.

Even today, he is using his early contributions to damage Bitcoin: https://www.coindesk.com/opinion/2025/06/09/the-end-of-bitcoin-maximalism. This is not someone who has Bitcoin's best interest at heart, and it is questionable if he ever had. Even if he did, people are easily corruptible and that is what happened to some of them. Others left for more normal reasons.

We are going a bit off topic, but look at your precise wording from earlier.

Quote from: gmaxwell on June 11, 2025, 02:10:36 AM

Quote from: mikeywith on June 10, 2025, 10:23:19 PM

I can just as easily cherry-pick devs who left Bitcoin and ended up working on competing projects.

Can you? I'm drawing a blank on any significant contributor that has (e.g. more than a couple bug fixes or doc changes), it's possible that I'm missing someone but generally no because it's almost always been the case that working on alternatives would pay a lot more and so people who have worked extensively on Bitcoin have done so out of principle.

You explicitly mention competing projects, and as far as I am aware most people that left didn't work on such a thing. Maybe that is where the misunderstanding comes from? None of the 3 examples you gave went to work on competing projects really. Two became altcoiners, Jeff and Gavin, and Hearn became a banker. Cheesy

Quote from: mikeywith on June 12, 2025, 12:30:03 AM

Quote from: Satofan44 on June 11, 2025, 11:49:05 PM

Your statement proves my points even further -- it was a response to the examples gmaxwell gave about bad miners and exchanges. I was trying to say that; there exist bad core devs.

Oh, in that case I am in agreement with you. I would even say there are different kinds of bad.

Replying here to avoid continuing this subtopic.