https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7#.obcepgw0g
Lies, FUD, and hyperbole Part 1
With apologies to the length but Hearn does pack a lot of misrepresentations and lies into this article.
a system completely controlled by just a handful of people. Worse still, the network is on the brink of technical collapse.
This is patently untrue as power dynamics within bitcoin are a complex interwoven level of game theory shared by miners, nodes, developers, merchants and payment processors, and users. Even if one were to make the false assumption that Miners control all the power, the reality is mining pools are either made up of thousands of individual miners who can and do redirect their hashing power or private pools with companies controlled by multiple investors and owners.
Worse still, the network is on the brink of technical collapse.
If and when a fee event happens, bitcoin will be just fine. Wallets already can adjust for fees and tx fee pressures will be kept reasonable because they still need to compete with free off the chain solutions. Whether the Block size is raised to 2, 4, or 8 MB it will also be fine(in the short term) as long as corresponding sigop protections are included. The blocksize debate more has to do with bikeshedding and setting a long term direction for bitcoin than preventing a short term technical collapse.
Couldn’t move your existing money
Bitcoin functions as a payment rails system just fine, just ask Coinbase and bitpay.
Had wildly unpredictable fees that were high and rising fast
False, I normal pay 3-5 pennies , and tx instantly get to their destination and confirm between 5 min to 1 hour like normal. CC txs take weeks to months to confirm.
Allowed buyers to take back payments they’d made after walking out of shops, by simply pressing a button (if you aren’t aware of this “feature” that’s because Bitcoin was only just changed to allow it)
RBF is opt in , and therefore payment processors won't accept this if they do 0 conf tx approvals.
Is suffering large backlogs and flaky payments
The block chain is full.
Blocks are 60-70% full on average . We have yet to see a continuous backlog lasting more than a few hours max. This conf backlog doesn't prevent tx from being processed unlike when the Visa/paypal network goes down and you cannot make a payment at all.
… which is controlled by China
People in China
partially Control one small aspect of the bitcoin ecosystem and why shouldn't they? They do represent 19% of the worlds population. This comment is both misleading and xenophobic.
… and in which the companies and people building it were in open civil war?
Most people are passionate but still friendly behind closed doors. The Blocksize debate has spurred decentralization of developer groups and new ideas which are good things. Sure there has been some unproductive infighting , but we will get through this and be stronger for it. "Civil wars" exist within and between all currencies anyways so this is nothing surprising.
Once upon a time, Bitcoin had the killer advantage of low and even zero fees, but it’s now common to be asked to pay more to miners than a credit card would charge.
Credit cards charge 2.8% to 7% in the US and 5-8% in many other countries. Bitcoins once had fees up to 40 cents a tx , and for the past few years normal fees have been consistently between 2-8 pennies per tx on the chain and free off the chain.
Because the block chain is controlled by Chinese miners, just two of whom control more than 50% of the hash power.
. At a recent conference over 95% of hashing power was controlled by a handful of guys sitting on a single stage.
Mining pools are controlled by many miners and interests , not individuals. Miners also share the control with many other competing interests and are limited in their ability to harm the bitcoin ecosystem if they so choose.
. They have chosen instead to ignore the problem and hope it goes away.
Bitcoin core has already come to a consensus on a scaling proposal -
https://bitcoincore.org/en/2015/12/21/capacity-increase/https://bitcoincore.org/en/2015/12/23/capacity-increases-faq/ and various other implementations are developing theirs to propose to the community. Bitcoin Classic is another interesting implementations that appears to have found consensus around BIP102.
This gives them a perverse financial incentive to actually try and stop Bitcoin becoming popular.
The Chinese miners want bitcoin to scale to at least 2MB in the short term, something that both Core and Classic accommodate.
Bitcoin will continue to scale with many other solutions and ultimately payment channels will allow it to scale to Visa like levels of TPS.
The resulting civil war has seen Coinbase — the largest and best known Bitcoin startup in the USA — be erased from the official Bitcoin website for picking the “wrong” side and banned from the community forums.
Coinbase was re-added to bitcoin.org. Mike conveniently left that important datapoint off.
has gone from being a transparent and open community to one that is dominated by rampant censorship
There are more subreddits, more forums , and more information than ever before. The blocksize debate does sometimes create divisions in our ecosystem but the information is all there and easy for anyone to investigate.
But the inability to get news about XT or the censorship itself through to users has some problematic effects.
The failure of XT has nothing to do with the lack of information. If anything there is too much information available , being repeated over and over , in many different venues.
One of them, Gregory Maxwell, had an unusual set of views: he once claimed he had mathematically proven Bitcoin to be impossible. More problematically, he did not believe in Satoshi’s original vision.
Satoshi never intended to be used as an argument from authority and if he does he can always come back and contribute. We should not depend upon an authority figure but evidence, valid reasoning, and testing.
And indeed back-of-the-envelope calculations suggested that, as he said to me, “it never really hits a scale ceiling” even when looking at more factors than just bandwidth.
Hearn's calculations are wrong. More specifically they do not take into account TOR, decentralization in locations with bandwidth limitations, bandwidth softcaps imposed by ISP's, the true scale of historical bandwidth increases, and malicious actors attacking the system with sophisticated attacks.
Once the 5 developers with commit access to the code had been chosen and Gavin had decided he did not want to be the leader, there was no procedure in place to ever remove one.
The 45 developers who contributed to Bitcoin Core in 2015 could be replaced instantly if the community wanted with little effort. Ultimately, the nodes, miners and users control which code they use and no group of developers can force them to upgrade. In fact Bitcoin Core deliberately avoids and auto-update feature with their releases at the cost of usability to specifically insure that users have to actively choose all new features and can opt out simply by not upgrading.
... end of part one...
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