It’s the legitimate upgrade. Yes. – By saying – 2.0 – I mean it was always the intended upgrade from the moment Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin’s source code into the wild.

Let’s take a look back at memory lane.

Going back to the original Bitcoin source code as provided by Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi placed a crucial, and vital piece of ‘commented’ information.

The comment on line 2249 of the main.cpp file contains the comment “Transaction fee requirements, mainly only needed for flood control”. This was an early spam mitigation strategy, a useful limiter during the bootstrapping phase of the project.

“Cryddit” also once stated that he “went over the blockchain stuff in Satoshi’s first cut of the bitcoin code. Satoshi didn’t have a 1MB limit in it.” He continued “The limit was originally Hal Finney’s idea. Both Satoshi and I objected that it wouldn’t scale at 1MB. Hal was concerned about a potential DoS attack though, and after discussion, Satoshi agreed. The 1MB limit was there by the time Bitcoin launched. But all 3 of us agreed that 1MB had to be temporary because it would never scale.”

The last two words in his paragraph couldn’t have been closer to the truth.

Segwit after three months has failed to scale BTC. The very idea, that the Bitcoin network can only handle a tiny number of transactions globally is embarrassing. More than half the population of the world cannot use it. They have been excluded by elitist mindsets.

“But Blockstream launched a satellite to make Bitcoin accessible to people in Africa” I hear you say. Well what’s the point!? – Many won’t be able to use it at $5+ a transaction. Let me state that Fees are on the rise. And they will continue to rise in the face of ever growing popularity.

The transaction rate gets compounded for wanting to cash-out. If someone needs to send you $10 USD, and they pay a $5 fee, only to have a $5 to revert back to fiat in the case of wanting to cash-out, then you have the total amount of transaction lost in fees on both ends.

Right now, many people will turn a blind eye to these warnings… The price is going up after-all and everyone is happy. Uh, that’s the problem.

Everything is well and good while everyone is making money, and its much easier to ignore warning signs when the status quo looks so good!

“There’s a storm coming”. When will it hit land, I can’t say – but it’s on the horizon, and some people see it.

As fees grow, there will be a trade-off at some point. The current state is absolutely non-viable in the long-term and something has to give.

The upgrade to Bitcoin to fix this problem has already happened. It’s called Bitcoin Cash (BCH). The upgrade isn’t some defection as some might like to have you believe. It is in fact, 100% consistent with the intended development that Satoshi, and early developers had. Segwit (BTC) changed things, not Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

Even Core developers and supporters in the early days were completely onboard with adjusting the blocksize to enable more transactions.

Censorship champion and Core moderator ‘Theymos’ is quoted as saying “Satoshi definitely intended to increase the hard max block size” in January of 2013- link

Theymos again: “I strongly disagree with the idea that changing the max block size is a violation of the “Bitcoin currency guarantees”. Satoshi said that the max block size could be increased, and the max block size is never mentioned in any of the standard descriptions of the Bitcoin system… …I’d like the limit to be set in a more decentralized, free-market way than a fixed constant in the code, though.” – link

Blockstream CEO Adam Back also once tweeted “Strongly agree. My suggestion 2MB now, then 4MB in 2 years and 8MB in 4years then re-asses.”.

So according to Adam’s own tweet, today we should have had “4MB” effective capacity, but instead he is fighting to against an effective Segwit with 2MB movement…

So… I mean… what happened?

Bitcoin Cash has done everything true to original scaling plans for Bitcoin. No deviation whatsoever. Satoshi’s post on the matter, suggested a hard fork to raise the blocksize limit.

Unfortunately, Satoshi did not stick around to see his suggested upgrade take place. With his departure, there was a power vacuum, and the scaling roadmap was hijacked.

Those that hijacked the project’s direction, have moved to aggressively to attack the legitimate upgrade, and attempted to delegitimize it as an altcoin by pushing the “BCash” agenda. This is an intentional move to sabotage the upgrade.

Today Bitcoin (BCH) enables far more capacity, and will continue to scale to increase capacity, as needed, so that we are “way ahead” (as Satoshi put it), of the congestion point.

This upcoming weekend will feature some very interesting news at the Scaling Bitcoin conference concerning the results of the gigablock testnet. I look forward to sharing the details with you.

Eli Afram

@justicemate

New to Bitcoin? Check out CoinGeek’s Bitcoin for Beginners section, the ultimate resource guide to learn more about Bitcoin—as originally envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto—and blockchain.