Benevolent Dictator or Tyrant?

Look to Rock

Bitcoin SegWit … Maybe

Each week brings new allegations that Jihan Wu’s Bitmain is slowing down improvements of the Bitcoin protocol. Perception is reality, and Jihan and his merry band of sycophants are constantly fighting PR fires on various social media platforms.Bitmain’s share of the mining equipment market is nearly 70%. This gives them incredible influence and indirect control of Bitcoin, so it is no wonder that this made headlines this week:At worst, this firmware backdoor allows Bitmain to shut off a large section of the global hashrate (estimated to be at up to 70% of all mining equipment). It can also be used to directly target specific machines or customers. Standard inbound firewall rules will not protect against this because the Antminer makes outbound connections.Even without Bitmain being malicious, the API is unauthenticated and would allow any MITM, DNS or domain hijack to shutdown Antminers globally. Additionally the domain in questions' DNS is hosted by Cloudflare, making it trivially subjected to government orders and state control. [ Antbleed We've looked at the code.The official line from Bitmain is that this part of an optional feature they sought to launch called Minerlink. If true, it would make sense to integrate into firmware early, but it was irresponsibly implemented. So irresponsibly, many in the community are only seeing malice.The malicious implication is: during a contentious hard fork initiated by Jihan’s posse, Jihan could maliciously shut down miners who disagreed with him. As with all things in Bitcoin, the community is bitterly divided on intent. Yet, do not reduce this into just another BU vs. Core debate. Bitmain breached its users' trust by opening and maintaining this vulnerability, and regardless of which side of the scaling debate you stand on, it should worry you that a single software bug could DoS a majority of the network.The question must be asked: is this what we want our decentralised currency to look like? Should any single entity's mistakes have this much influence?Against all odds, Litecoin finally locked-in Segregated Witness (SegWit). This is the same SegWit implementation that Bitcoin is struggling to activate. Bitcoin's SegWit disciples will now use Litecoin as evidence of SegWit’s benefits.The Litecoin SegWit struggle is important because many believed Bitmain and its affiliates actively blocked its activation. In a recent Medium article , Whalepanda posted a conversation between a few Litecoin miners about why a soft-fork SegWit activation cannot be allowed on Litecoin. In this conversation, Jihan was afraid it would erode his arguments as to why a similar activation method could not work on Bitcoin.My base case still remains that SegWit will not be activated by the November deadline. However the constant PR beatings Bitmain endures slowly increases the odds that SegWit will activate.Jihan will have to take to the blogosphere and refute the latest allegations. Many were left unimpressed at his defence of ASICBOOST: "I used it on Testnet not on Mainet, but don’t disable it please." Not the right answer.How Bitcoin scales is completely a political problem. If Jihan keeps taking beatings like this, not even Francis Underwood can save him.