…who would rather burn the network to the ground.

Falkvinge founded Iceland’s Pirate Party. In the end of 2016, they had a shot of winning the elections and I am not sure if anybody else noticed it: while they were waiting for the results he was hanging around on Bitcoin Reddit subs. If anything, this a strong indication of Falkvinge’s Bitcoin obsession. But I also very often encounted his comments and posts in the past and I can guarantee you: he is not a liar, nor a hypocrite.

Edit: Aaron van Wirdum pointed out: he is the founder of the Swedish pirate party.

Then he replied with this, but I am just a pragmatic programmer. I think arguing with hypothetical and vague concepts is not only counterproductive, but offensive.

Is Bitcoin real money? Or is it a commodity? Depends on which state or country you ask, the answer is not a fact.

Does Bitcoin has intrinsic value or not? Good luck answering this question. The definition of intrinsic value is pretty dodgy in the first place. The answer is not an absolute fact, either.

Circlejerking on these questions if not counterproductive or offensive, at the very least is a giant waste of time.

Did Core delivered what the market asked for? Similarly, the answer depends on what one thinks what the market asked for. The answer is not an absolute fact, at least that’s what I thought first.

Out of respect I gave more thoughts to Falkvinge’s answer. What could he possibly mean by Core didn’t deliver? The only thing Core didn’t deliver and the market desperately needs is anonimity, but I suspect that’s not what he means, since almost all prominent Bitcoin figure would deny to their death that Bitcoin is barely used for anything outside of the dark web. At least for now…

Then I considered the context. I looked at what BU delivered that Core did not. Because he obviously implies that:

BU delivered block size increase that enables more and cheaper transactions.

Core delivered a one time block size increase, called SegWit, that instantly enables more and cheaper transactions, but also payment channels, like Lightning Network or Advanced TumbleBit, those not only enable thousands of times more transactions, than BU ever could, but also instant transactions with the interesting side effect of price skyrocketing. Every TumbleBit or Lightning Hub must hodl as much bitcoins as much liquidity it wants to provide.

What if LN turnes out to be a complete failure? We can always come back and continue the endless arguments on BU again. But what if BU turnes out to be a complete failure? Unlike LN, BU is not a second, but a first layer solution. If the second layer collapses, we still have the first one, if the first one collapses game over.

Ok, I owe you an apology, because I concentrated and discussed the a real issue, the transaction throughput, and not the blocksize, which Falkvinge obviously meant when he said “what the market asked for”. However that’s silly. There are plenty of ways to scale and I want to see most of them implemented, but having a die hard laser focus changing a variable in the codebase for the sheer sake of changing that variable, because some people hurt your or your friends’ feelings over that is going to cause problems.

As a developer I am terrified by the fact that all BU did last year is copypasting Core’s code.

But it’s not all, they are 4000 commits behind, because they cannot even keep up with the copypasting. Core works faster, than BU can follow it.

Falkvinge, if you really want the best for Bitcoin, it’s time to swallow the insults, ignore the opinions of your friends and take some time to dig into the topic and form your own opinion.