Thu Jun 23, 2016 7:27 am

I've noticed lots of people mentioning how important it is to carefully review code for bugs, errors, or attack vectors before implementing it into Bitcoin.

Even the slightest change could have disastrous effects. That's often cited as the reason improvements to core Bitcoin code take months or even years to actually be implemented. These people are absolutely right, and we should all be extremely careful about whatever changes we make to the core Bitcoin code.



What I think these people often don't realize, is that the exact same arguments apply to the economic incentives that were created with the invention Bitcoin. Up until now, these economic incentives have been incredibly effective at driving growth and adoption of Bitcoin. We all need to be extremely careful about changing any of the economic incentives in the Bitcoin network, or we could potentially destroy the entire system we are all so passionate about.



Until recently, transactions have always been extremely low cost and there has always been plenty of extra room in each block for those transactions. A few months ago that situation changed. Blocks are consistently full and the fee per transaction is increasing quickly. This is a fundamental change to the economics that have been driving the growth of bitcoin up until this point. I think we all need to take a step back and consider just how incredibly disruptive any changes to the economics driving Bitcoin growth could potentially be be to the network as a whole.



I wholeheartedly thank everyone who's contributed coding to the Bitcoin ecosystem, but we all need to stop and realize that the changing the economic incentives of Bitcoin can be just as dangerous as changing the underlying code of Bitcoin.