Bitcoin: no need to keep talking Posted by bravetheworld on Wednesday, March 1, 2017 · Leave a Comment

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I will make this brief and to the point, respecting the spirit of my post's title.

Roger Ver and those associated with BU have a dislike for the core dev team, and segwit. Roger has been very vocal regarding his idea of how Bitcoin should move forward and so has his opposition. This week we happened to all be at a conference together and efforts were made to have a productive dialogue.

Tone Vays started the discussion with Roger, after which Trace Mayer and I thought a more technical follow up was needed, so we asked JD of blockstream to flesh out some points. The intention was for the two sides to expand their common ground, to stop animosity, and to agree on a path forward for Bitcoin considering the solutions available today. After several private and public discussions, no one's attitude or understanding of Bitcoin has changed.

There were points where he was asked "if core increases blocksize to 10 MB tomorrow, will you get behind core & segwit, and disassemble BU?" and "how about signaling segwit on BU?"

Roger tended to defer the questions or respond with "we asked core to do something years ago and they didn't listen."

I later asked Jake the first mentioned hypothetical and he simply said "no."

I'm not sure if much else can be said.

I understand Roger's frustration, but writing sound code is hard, and doing things right is a priority over making companies happy. Core cannot compromise code quality because someone's business model is suffering.

If Roger wants a Zero-Confirmation StarbucksCoin that is controlled by miners, he has a right to fund its creation. I will miss him as a positive voice for the original protocol, but I'm happy that it's now more clear as to what everyone's intentions are.

Predictions:

1. BU will continue to develop, while making technical blunders (such as their recent loss of 13k due to the mining on an invalid block) and remaining perpetually behind (~4000 commits as of today).

2. Core (around 120 active devs) will silently keep working on awesome stuff like mimble wimble, tumblebit, Schnorr, MAST, etc.

3. Bitcoin will keep its status quo until Jihan (bitmain CEO) makes a move

Until then, shhhhh…let the work talk.



A huge thank you to the cryptoshow for hosting and moderating, and to Tone Vays for his contributions and stream!