I have my own clear vision of what it would be the future of value exchange. At the moment I am running a Bitcoin Classic, full node. This is because I want to keep a copy of the blockchain to verify my payments and make the Bitcoin network stronger. I have also a p2pool mining node and 2 miners, to be able to express myself with the bitcoin “consensus” (without thinking of profit).

Sadly, somebody had the bad idea to start an attack against some Bitcoin Classic nodes, in the war against Bitcoin Core. Somebody is missing the bitcoin vision: For few hours, my internet connection was not stable or down, and I have to believe that this event is connected to this stupid DDoS attack.

My miners went down several times as I was attacked.

I don’t care who did it. I care more why they did it: What is the point of blocking me and making a DoS attack to me and my Classic Node?

Bitcoin Classic is a modified version fo the Bitcoin Core client, that wants to increase the block limit to 2MB: this will speed up the transactions verification, allowing more people to use the technology and reducing waiting time and fees. This update will be applied if the 75% of the 1000 last blocks, will be mined using Bitcoin Classic. Then the nodes have 28 days of grace period to update to Bitcoin Classic and accept 2MB blocks.

Running a node means that you want this change.

Mining on that node means that you are helping to reach the 75%.

By running a DDoS attack to these nodes, if those people want to discourage to run Bitcoin Classic, they have the opposite reaction: They indirectly told me to spend more money to mine classic blocks to help to reach the consensus over 2MB as block limit.

But to the eyes of somebody that does not know what Bitcoin is, this is only bad advertisement, since we should have a community that is supporting the use of BTC as a value of exchange, solving cultural and technical problems and removing that “bad smell” that some people think it has. We should not fight against each other, corrupting people and making every aspect of it like it was coming out from a cracker/hacker movie in the late 90s. I am not wearing leather jackets and controlling the traffic lights!

I am scared that if nothing is changing, this will lead us to the same situation in the GNU/Linux world: it will be use only by nerds and developers, because people were too much focused and busy on solving technical problems and fight against forks of distribution, licenses, that people forgot to make the software usable and spread the real open source message around the world. Mark Shuttleworth helped to stop it, but the direction was clear: the capital was used to develop GNU/Linux for servers and not for desktop. A server oriented B2B model was creating more services and more money, with less efforts than a desktop solution.

This DDoS attack is really stupid: we should stop using Bitcoin as a “nerd-only” value of exchange, and start investing the capitals in ads, companies and diversified development to spread Bitcoin to everybody and make it better. How do you think people will see another DDoS attack to some nodes? It’s time to start thinking in a global vision. Somebody is missing the Bitcoin vision, and I believe it will change: Bitcoin Classic will make this vision real again.