He makes some pretty bad points regarding the vision of Satoshi.
He names some points about bch and then says "that's closer to Satoshi's vision". Yet the points he quotes are the exact opposite, except technological scaling.
The Bitcoin Cash developers have the following philosophy around Bitcoin Cash:
1) Not everyone in the world should or will run a node and therefore making it economical to do so is not actually practical. Decentralization to the nth degree is a nice idea but they believe Bitcoin is a small world network. The tradeoff is that not everyone in the world will be able to run a node and so the question really is: How important is that level of centralization to trusting that the network as a whole can function? On Bitcoin, there are around 10,000 listening nodes today (so possibly 10x in terms of validating nodes), and probably over 30m people using Bitcoin worldwide, but it’s still unlikely that average users will want to run a node and would be comfortable trusting larger third parties.
2) Bitcoin was arguably designed to scale at layer 1, due to increases in computing capacity every 18 months, as per Moore’s Law. Brian Armstrong from Coinbase wrote about this a year ago. Bitcoin Cash intends to scale by increasing the block size, and not creating a layer 2 solution.
3) Nodes without mining power have no ability to contribute to the consensus mechanism of Bitcoin, so they are disregarded. The original white paper did not differentiate between the two, because it was never envisioned that you would have a node running without mining at the same time. Bitcoin Cash is using Nakamoto Consensus to determine consensus rule changes.
4) As per the original Bitcoin.org website — Satoshi said that a fee market should maybe exist, once the coins had been fully exhausted. There is no need to build a fee market today, as there is 120 years to plan for it. Keep transactions cheap and fast and ensure that there is global adoption first and foremost.
5) Anyone can submit changes to the network from any one of the multiple implementations/clients running Bitcoin Cash. If miners vote to adopt the change, a hard fork will occur and the network will continue to function using this consensus mechanism.
As many Bitcoin and Core developer supporters have indicated, the Bitcoin Cash philosophy is more closely aligned to Satoshi’s original white paper, but the centralization aspects of mining and other concerns around privacy and government resistance have come to the fore and as a result Bitcoin needs to pare back on these aspects because Satoshi could not have predicted these risks (ASIC mining, the rise of China, etc.)
1) What part of
"peer-to-peer" didn't he grasp? You either have a client/server system, or a peer-to-peer, or a semi-centralized system with very few "peers" who are your servers, and thus aren't really "peers"... you are their client. How can a client/server system be closer to Satoshi's vision than a peer to peer system?
2) That's the only point that's correct, however some things in bitcoin code don't scale linearly and need change. Additionally, we don't only need jumps in processing capacity, we also need jumps in networking and fast storage capacity - and on top of that, affordability for these, so they can run on "peers", since it's a peer-to-peer system. You can't have a decentralized system that is based on a centralized topology because it's vulnerable.
Time and technological progression *ensures* the scaling of all blockchains, even those who will host videos instead of 226 byte txs. It's not a question of if, it's only a question of when. However if you rush things in this department, by having a network with expensive technical requirements, you lean more towards a server-based system rather than a peer-to-peer system (p2p is the novelty factor here). Centralized systems existed in the past too, and they all have a common theme when it comes to competing with the government: The government shuts them down.
3) So if a miner had a 51% majority and decided to change the rules of the game to issue all the coins he wanted, that would be ok, or would it be a 51% attack? Some things are pretty simple. The very concept of a 51% attack wouldn't even exist if arbitrary rewriting of the rules by the majority hashpower was ok. It wouldn't be considered an attack, it would be considered "nakamoto consensus fairly changing the rules of the game because the majority hashpower said so"...
4) Without fees, mining profitability will fall of a cliff, not in 100+ years, but in 6 to 14 years from now. No miner will stay around to mine 0.0 to 0.1 btc per block until "coins are exhausted" in over a century ahead so that a fee market develops. That's bullshit. Without fees and a fee market, BCH is not futureproof. If you exist as a coin on the premise that users will always have ample space to transact, and that users can always have txs on with 1-2-5 sat/byte, at that point your store of value property is destroyed because
a) the network will be unsafe (no mining incentive)
or
b) you implement a tail-emission inflationary scheme to cover mining incentives by issuing more coins than the initial 21mn target.
5) Satoshi was pretty adamant about not wanting competing implementations etc etc...
With all these serious problems in the rationale, how did he find "alignment" with the vision of Satoshi?
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