The purpose of this list is Bitcoin protocol discussion of all kinds, including consensus rules that require hard and soft forks and there have been many discussions about both. There is also a clear technical process for proposing, discussing and peer reviewing consensus rule changes via the BIPs process which this list has traditionally played a large role. BIP specifications allow community wide coordination across multiple implementations.
Since the recent thread announcing a new version of Bitcoin Classic, many people have complained on and off-list that is should not be allowed on the bitcoin-dev mailing list because it is not consensus compatible nor is it a change which has been arrived at through wide community consensus. There isn't even a formal specification that other implementations could follow if they wanted to. The general feeling seems to be that announcements for consensus compatible implementations is ok on this list. If there is ever community wide consensus for a hard fork, then that too would be ok since there would be consensus. This list does strive to be somewhat high signal to noise ratio where possible and we need to be clear about the list remit. So let's be clear, announcing/advertising software that is consensus incompatible is off-topic, however, discussion of hard forks, peer review etc has always been, and remains, on topic. I've copied the current list remit below for completeness. General discussions should be directed at bitcoin-discuss, where as actual protocol development discussion belongs on bitcoin-dev. Bitcoin development and protocol discussion. This list is lightly moderated. - No offensive posts, no personal attacks. - Posts must concern development of bitcoin protocol. - Posts should be technical or academic in nature. - Generally encouraged: patches, notification of pull requests, BIP proposals, academic paper announcements. And discussions that follow. - Generally discouraged: shower thoughts, wild speculation, jokes, +1s, non-technical bitcoin issues, rehashing settled topics without new data, moderation concerns. - Detailed patch discussion generally better on a GitHub PR. - Meta-discussion is better on bitcoin-discuss (https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-discuss) Thanks _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev