[Melting_Harps]

> but it doesn't seem to line up with the actual events of Gavin visiting the CIA

Just so it's clear I was deeply hurt with the loss of Gavin in our Community, and it shows why Power should never be trusted with Humans, given it's propensity to corrupt--who the hell would call him Chief Scientist of an open-source project, besides the Foundation?! However well meaning a person may be or seem.

With that said, I think his visit to the CIA was a co-opt which is why he teamed up with Hearn (ex-google) to try and make a play for Bitcoin XT/Classic forks. He had become the face of Bitcoin after Satoshi, and was US based, so it makes sense the CIA wanted to meet with him.

What was unexpected was Gavin's actions afterwards, Cypherpunks (espeically the Crypto-Anarchist type that were the norm in Bitcoin back then) aren't traditionally afraid to go to Prison for thier convictions: as we've seen since Zimmerman and PgP. Hal was the person that embodied Bitcoin the most, but given his health it makes sense why he took a backseat to it all and let the children take the spotlight.

CSW was a farce, giving Gavin an immediate exit from the Community by then; subsequently, it cost him his entire reputation and his standing.

@NullC: what do you have to say about any of this if you're reading this?

[jron]

Gavin's endorsement of CSW really is one of the strangest things in Bitcoin's history. Barely Sociable's Satoshi reveal touches on it a bit. I also think it is pretty telling that Greg hasn't publicly commented (that I'm aware of) on the video despite still refuting CSW nonsense on an extremely regular basis. As someone with a ton of respect for Greg, I too would love to hear his thoughts.

[nullc]

Hmh? The video is high production value barely disguised nonsense, through and through. Most of the content is uncritically rehashing the same thoroughly discredited talking points that Roger Ver has been paying astroturfers to repost for years (the weird allegations about Theymos, for example).

For click-bait and harassment purposes they stuck some nonsense about Adam Back at the very end of it-- using arguments that were thoroughly debunked such as the use of two spaces after periods when they were applied to other people.

Lots of people in Bitcoin have destroyed or otherwise declined to share any private communications with Satoshi, myself included. Personally I think lowly of people who've shared such communications.

I posted crapping on this video within minutes of watching it, two days ago.

As far as Gavin goes-- His (substantially unwithdrawn) endorsement of Wright just made clear to the public what a lot of other people had known about him for quite some time. When Gavin's endorsement of Wright came out the shocking part was less that he'd do something like that, the shocking part was that he apparently thought he'd get away with it.

[jron]

Get away with what though? Do you believe Gavin was a willing dupe using the CSW narrative to push bigger blocks? Honestly before watching the video it was something I hadn't even considered. I was certain Gavin was simply naive. Thanks for taking the time to reply.

[nullc]

Wilfully indifferent to the truth because Wright's position matched perfectly with what he'd been pushing for is a possibility between outright complicit and completely naive.

Wright was transparently, painfully, fake to every (other) technical expert. He can't make it 5 minutes talking about Bitcoin without inserting some claim which is obviously false or outright nonsense. Considering his chosen vocation (satoshi impersonator) he's been extremely uninformed about Bitcoin's technical history... worse, he tends to try to employ "bet you didn't know" 'zingers' based on reading some public summary which are just incorrect (because he misunderood the source or the source was wrong-- wright isn't very literate in code).

For a person who is technically proficient in Bitcoin to fall for him it isn't sufficient for them to have just been tricked by him, they also have to be blind to more red flags than a communist military parade. :)

[javert]

I always thought that Gavin had some kind of bizarre ideological or personality change. He had seemed like a wise, smart and good guy for a long time. Was that not so? As an outside observer, I'm genuinely curious.

[nullc]

I guess the thing to understand is that Gavin was (is?) a literal politician-- though only one at the small scale of his town government. He was extremely generous with the glad-handing. It was the norm for him to agree kindly with you in public and to your face while chasing a conflicting agenda in private.

It made for a reliably good initial impression but often lead to a bad relationship in the long term. Over time, you'd learn to recognize the coded language "Ok." meant "I disagree profoundly and I'm going gonna screw over this plan behind your back." and dread dealing with it.

So, for example, he'd disagree with something the development community was working on but instead of confronting it directly, he'd go to companies as a representative of the development community and advocate for his position (without disclosing that he alone held that position) but then come back and tell us that it was something the company was demanding. He even went as far as to recommend obscure altcoin developers to companies looking to employ a bitcoin devloper full-time, presumably to protect those relationships and maintain that leverage.

So essentially sticking himself in the middle of things and presenting himself as speaking for people he didn't speak for. This proxying went swimmingly when there was broad-spread agreement and rapidly turned into a mess when there wasn't.

As time goes on we continue to slowly learn more. For example, recently I learned that people were given highly edited copies of email chains between the active Bitcoin devs that eliminated most of the disagreement's with Gavin's positions, and falsely made it look like other people agreed with him in discussions where, in fact, no one agreed. It'll probably never be possible to tell if distortions like that were intentional or just a result of a profound tunnel vision that came from fundamentally not respecting other people's positions.

What you see as a change in ideology or personality I think was a combination of reaching a point where the web of appeasement couldn't be maintained anymore, where people who previously provided sound advice behind the scenes no longer cared to offer their council because they'd been alienated, and the stress and desperation as the plan he'd invested so much in was falling apart.

There were flashes of that long before, even extremely public ones like the infamous "Luke-jr is a toxic person" post that arose because luke steadfastly wouldn't support Gavin's position on what was mostly technical minutia. (Admittedly, Luke can be pig-headed and annoyingly impervious to political winds but that post was entirely inappropriate).

[jron]

Thanks for the insight. I feel like a lot of us missed a good chunk of history by avoiding /r/btc.

[javert]

Thanks, that is illuminating.