Roger Ver vs Tone Vays Scaling Debate Reality Check nopara73 Follow Feb 27, 2017 · Unlisted

I listened to a scaling debate today between Roger Ver and Tone Vays. In this podcast the participants got away with many dubious statements and they built up their whole arguments based on them. In this article I will do a reality check, and hopefully in the future less scaling argument will be built upon false premises. You can watch the whole debate here:

Roger Ver

The whole subject of this debate is that the goal of Bitcoin and the roadmap for Bitcoin is being altered by a bunch of people who came to Bitcoin much more recently than myself.

The whole subject of this debate is how to scale Bitcoin.

Chris Neandrathal

[To Tone Vays] I understand that you want the people with the right knowledge to make the decisions… but I would say that both sides of this issue have plenty of that.

The below graph shows the contributions to the Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Unlimited GitHub repository.

The brownish color denotes the common code.

The red color denotes the code that is unique to BU.

The blue color denotes the code that is unique to Core.

This graph shows all BU commit activity during the last year was merged from Core, but it might be somewhat misleading. This graph is not perfect. We know there were unique BU activity during the last year, but it was very few compared to Core, so zooming of this graph was not able to catch it.

Regardless, it disproves Chris’ assumption that the number of competent developers on both sides are well-balanced.

Roger Ver

He [Satoshi Nakamoto] turned over the entire project to Gavin Andresen.

What actually happened is:

[Source] [Gavin] tells Satoshi that he is visiting the CIA. Satoshi leaves for good coincidentally.

Furthermore Satoshi never had a GitHub account, therefore Satoshi did not give Gavin access to the bitcoin repository.

Roger Ver

We knew that scaling issues are gonna be an issue, he [Gavin Andresen] tried to solve that, and a bunch of people who came to Bitcoin much more recently treated him absolutely horribly

His idea was to roll out a new block size limit at 20MB. Other than Mike Hearn there was not a single developer who got behind his proposal. And instead of trying to find a scaling solution he decided to bypass the consensus of the develoepers and started a campaign instead to convince everyone else.

…and basically kicked him out of the project.

While the above story played a role, there were other reasons why his commit access has been revoked.

He had already not been contributing to Bitcoin for over a year, and many Core developers asking him to voluntarily drop his access already. Why would someone have one if the person is not contributing. The tip of the iceberg was when he wrote a blog post on the identity of Satoshi. He believed (possibly still believes) Craig Wright is the person who invented Bitcoin. He allegedly proved it to him in person. While his presented public proofs turned all out to be fake quickly, other developers were concerned if Gavin got hacked, therefore as a precaution revoked his commit access. They did not automatically gave it back to him after he clarified he was not hacked.

Roger Ver

If Bitcoin is supposed to be a world-wide censorship resistent peer-to-peer cash system why on Earth would we trust a bunch of people who resorted to censorship to maintain Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer censorship resistent cash system.

No Bitcoin Core developer is currently /r/Bitcoin moderator. Many of them don’t even have a Reddit account. Blaming thousands of developers for such a weak connection is unfair, especially when the one who’s blaming is actively exercising censorship himself.

Chris Neandrathal

CN: Why is a hard fork that’s contentious necessarily bad? TV: Ethereum just showed us what happens in a contentious hard fork. CN Ethereum is not a fair comparison. TV: Why not? RV: It’s not a fair comparison, and I think it’s worth pointing out that a hard fork is just an upgrade. [notice not attempting to answer here] So if you call it a protocol upgrade it doesn’t sound nearly as scary as when you keep calling it a hard fork.

And so the argument is won by those who were shouting louder. Of course Ethereum’s hard fork matter. You cannot ignore something just because it is inconvenient for you.

Roger Ver

More than a hundred thousand Bitcoin, worth more than a hundred thousand dollars voted that they don’t support Core’s roadmap and would support whatever developer team forks away from Core.

He is talking about Bitcoinocracy. In 2013 Roger Ver was holding an estimated 300,000 btc. If he lost third of his wealth since then he would still have enough to be the only voter himself.

But also saying the richest Bitcoiners should decide on the future of Bitcoin is arguably a terrible idea, too.

Tone Vays

TV: [With SegWit] the block size becomes an effective 2.3MB.

RV: It’s worth pointing out that it only in case if the 100% of the wallets adopt that transaction format for their transactions.

TV: I think wallets are in support of SegWit, outside of maybe Blockchain.info

RV: It’s worth pointing out that Blockchain.info is responsible for more Bitcoin transactions on the netwrok that every single one Bitcoin transaction combined.

From here on Roger built many of his arguments on Blockchain.info being against SegWit, while making this case he also got into the trap that if Blockchain.info would happen to be for SegWit, that would not only demolish his arguments, but they would effectively be for SegWit arguments.

And here is the plot twist, Tone Vays was wrong: Blockchain.info IS already SegWit ready.

Also taking a look at SegWit wallet adoption: almost all wallet is already SegWit ready and those who are not, they are planning to add it.

Conclusion

Listening to politicians carefully is tiring.

I was only able to analyze the video up until the 20 something minutes, despite I only attempted to fact check and not to express my own opinions.