The Way Forward - Discussions about Bitcoin's Scalability and governance

[Meni Rosenfeld]

https://youtu.be/LF23hHqdgGg

This is the video from an event that took place on February 4th 2016. The event's goal was to spread awareness of a variety of issues concerning Bitcoin's scalability and governance, and to come up with new insights for tackling the challenges Bitcoin faces.

The event had 3 main parts:

40 minutes of short lectures
45 minutes of moderated round table discussions with the event's participants
Summary and conclusions of the discussions

The lectures are spoken in Hebrew with English subtitles. The summaries are spoken in English. Glimpses of the round table discussions are also featured in the video.

Lectures were given by:

Meni Rosenfeld, Israeli Bitcoin Association - intro, embracing the possibility of splitting to two currencies
Aviv Zohar, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel - the tradeoff between volume and security
Ron Gross, former Mastercoin executive director - technological progress and democracy
Nadav Ivgi, Bitrated founder - the importance of consensus
Adlai Chandrasekhar - Giving users a choice
Guy Corem, Spondoolies-Tech CEO - how Bitcoin Core can survive a contentious hard fork

Discussion moderators included Ron, Adlai, Guy, Nadav and also:

Ayal Yona Segev, Bitcoin emBassy in Tel Aviv founder
Jonathan Klinger, Advocate

If you'd rather read a written transcript, it's available here. (Does not include English-spoken summaries at the end)

If you found this interesting, you might also be interested in a panel discussion we've had half a year ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3su8xj/the_looming_fork_english_subtitles_panel/

[sgbett]

Thanks for posting this, a serf like me can't really get to these kind of meets so its great to read what is going on at them.

"Learn to love the fork" is an interesting idea.

For some time now it seemed to me that the accepted wisdom was that "Hard fork" is bad. The inference I think was that it forking is *more* bad than the status quo. I use "bad" as a simple catch-all here. The exact sentiment varies.

I think its not clear that either is more or less bad than the other. Emotive arguments exist on either side, the fact is that its such a complex system its almost impossible to know with any certainty what is best.

I think that "Nakamoto consensus" was the mechanism designed to try and avoid having to give anyone the responsibility of choosing a path. The idea being to leave it up to the free market to vote on the paths that have been made available. "Consensus" being an emergent property of all the participants within the system.

As messy as the "debate" sometimes is right now, I think the mechanism is alive and well.

[Jet Cash]

Will you be posting English transcripts, or an English video. I'm not too good on reading sub-titles.

[Meni Rosenfeld]

Will you be posting English transcripts, or an English video. I'm not too good on reading sub-titles.

The transcript was linked from the original post: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cAkcCkVRYl7M-XSn3fdrVEDqs2FxAWZe2A5ozk7ezk4/edit
This does not include the last part of the video, which was spoken in English and you'll have to watch separately: https://youtu.be/LF23hHqdgGg?t=41m27s

We will not be doing an English-dubbed video, of course.