Background

Though China has long been puzzled by its brain drain in the form of elite emigration, it is still out of expectation that the rising industry of Bitcoin is also losing its elite.

Circle, a then sought-after start-up that received funding of 60 million USD with China’s Baidu among its investors, has announced it will cut off its business with bitcoin system and shift to blockchain.

Last week a friend asked me why his account balances in his wallet of Bitkan were negative numbers and doubted there might be bugs. It turned out that it was because the transaction fees for transferring bitcoin are too high and the balances of users of small amount transaction can’t offset the transaction fees. Now wallet begin to subsidize these users to ensure a quick transaction confirmation for them.The transaction fee of bitcoin has been risen to 0.5 mbtc from 0.1 mbtc of June, the time when the bitcoin block became full.The even worse experience is that any dynamic fees recommended by any wallet now cannot guarantee a confirmation within 10 minutes while transactions before the block was full can all be confirmed within 10 minutes. This uncertainty is indeed awful.

Satoshi has predicted the need to scale the block and has given the scaling plan.

In 2013 when block was 300kb full, developer Gavin began to promote scaling. The senior developers including Gavin and Jeff expected that block could full after 3 years and began to lead Core team to promote hard-fork scaling. But Core team has squeezed out the visionary developers including Gavin and Jeff. Gavin was compelled to set up another team in an attempt to resume the influence of bitcoin.

In 2015, the Chinese miner-based entrepreneur team began to negotiate with Core and no results have gained in the near 2-year-long process.Core is so shameless that they use censorship to face the opinions from the community.Bitcoin has missed the best timing to scale and has operated at full capacity for half a year. Bitcoin has lost its far-reaching impact for half a year.Core team confine the block size to a small one, making bitcoin expensive, inconvenient and hard to attract new users. Core’s choices are far from supportive of the development of bitcoin companies. In the context, to cut off business with bitcoin system becomes a natural choice. Circle, though a company that has gained huge investment, is hardly an exception.

Core highly promotes anonymity, which is against the mainstream of the human civilization development.

It’s really hard to understand why Core is so obstinate when it comes to scaling, a plan that is in the interest of the whole community. The mystery of Core’s motives has been unveiled in the scaling conference in Milan.

The people with influence behind the Core are anti-governmentalists. Their main goal is to build bitcoin into a type of currency that can resist government’s check and inspection. If bitcoin block is too big, then the ability to resist government’s check will be weakened. Particularly, Core members want to run full nodes through Tor. On Milan conference, Bitcoin Core clearly exposed their thoughts to the public. They controlled the agenda only discussing anonymity instead of scaling. They want make blockchain ledger a complete anonymous one. As for lighting, Core members actually don’t care. Anyone discerning will know lightning can’t be done in a 1MB size block.

Core’s idea to change the transparent ledger of bitcoin into a black and anonymous one will make bitcoin a tool for criminals. This is not only against the will of Satoshi, but also against the of mainstream entrepreneurs and the majority of the community. It is even a deviation from the trend of human civilization.The majority of the people want to see bitcoin a world-class application instead of a tool for money laundry, gambling and drug trafficking.

The public ledger of Bitcoin has already caused misunderstandings. The Silk Road case is still simmering and Coinbase is now negotiating with American government. If Core successfully make bitcoin utter anonymous, Bitcoin will be in a state of full hostility to people and governments. The law-abiding and professional enterprises of bitcoin will find it hard to provide services to the users.

Any business starter with dream and mission will not pin its future on an anonymous ledger. The leave of Circle is a natural reaction.

Core’s high-handedness to the bitcoin community is sterilizing the bitcoin’s soil for start-ups.

I tried to promote bitcoin to a lot of strangers in the first half of this year and found out that more than 99% of the people thought bitcoin is something negative.

Some of them liken bitcoin to heresy, which I think is misunderstanding. But in the past 6 months, the Core’s core members, the most powerful people in the community, have used the means of heresy to manage the communication. One out of their ten sentence is deceitful. They will censor, delete and block posts. They will hire sockpuppets to squabble and even openly coerce miners.

Isn’t this a kind of heresy? Among the “congregation” are users, miners, business owners. They beg Core to scale the block even just to scale to 2M block. But Core member show no interests in negotiation and do whatever they want to.

When Gavin and Mike released Bitcoin XT, Core maligned them as criminals;

When Coinbase was ready to test Bitcoin XT, Core said Coinbase was a company of alt coin;

When miners released new version of Bitcoin Classic, Core said Classic’s developer were making the community fall apart;

When Bitcoin Unlimited released Xthin, Core released the Compact Block, a copy of BU’s Xthin Block, and cursed BU devs for not following BIP development norms

When Viabtc used BU to mine, Core said BU haven’t gone through thorough tests.

…

Core cannot withstand any project that runs counter to their lust. Bitcoin becomes Core’s private garden granting no permission to anyone who wants to sow grass in it. Core will say you are alt coin.

Users and business owners are all outrageous and are criticizing Core. But Core hasn’t made any change. Circle’s leave is inevitable.

*This is the translation of article written by Huang Shiliang, famous opinion leader. The article dose not represent the opinions of 8btc. see: The original text.