TL;DR: Jeffrey Tucker, Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) appeared on the network Russia Today’s (RT) program Boom Bust. The panel included noted Bitcoin skeptic Peter Schiff who took delight in BTC’s recent failure to be a store of value (SoV) during the legacy market’s collapse. Tucker pointed blame squarely at Bitcoin Core developers and their wasting time on preventing scaling and ultimately retarding adoption.

Jeffrey Tucker Blames BTC Core Devs for Failing to Scale, Lack of Adoption

“Bitcoin was innovated to become a safe haven,” Tucker explained, “during times just like this. So why aren’t we seeing Bitcoin become the safe haven that it was developed to be, and was for a number of years? I think it’s because the Core developers spent the last four years wasting time on this ridiculous scaling problem.” Jeffrey Tucker is well-known in the ecosystem as a crypto evangelist and is credited with hosting one of the first conferences on the subject. He’s also founder of the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy, and author of numerous books on popular economics.

It’s a debate familiar to Bitcoiners. BTC was until relatively recently in its history thought to be peer-to-peer electronic cash, presented as a medium of exchange (MoE). Bitcoin pioneers largely agreed adoption and usage were key to growing sustainable enthusiasm for BTC, and slogans of “be your own bank” and the like were commonplace. Indeed, tucked within the Genesis Block itself is a reference to dramatic government bailouts of the legacy industry back in 2008, which many believed to be a fundamental reason for BTC’s birth. BTC was supposed to be that safe haven, eventually.

Depending on who is cited, the narrative shifted as BTC rose exponentially, at times parabolically, in speculative price throughout the years. What was once P2P electronic cash became digital gold, something to horde, keep, not use. Debate, especially around 2017, became so heated Core developers outright refused to even consider raising block sizes, capacity for more transactions, and even cheered as blocks filled, mempools clogged, transaction fees skyrocketed, confirmation times dragged, and the user experience soured (to say the least).

It Wasn’t Allowed to Perform

“Adoption hasn’t gone far enough,” Tucker continued, “and it hasn’t come into consumer use like it should and would have if it had been able to scale. Now we’re seeing what happens when Bitcoin was not properly scaled.” He went on to call it “conjecture” about what might have happened if BTC were allowed to scale, if adoption wasn’t purposefully stifled in favor of speculation, … noting surely it would’ve been a “different world” in light of an economic downturn this month.

Ironically, BTC Core devs kept the safe-haven narrative even though merchant adoption and usage gains slowed in recent years. The coronavirus pandemic, which many analysts attribute in part to the global slide in equity prices, was to be BTC’s chance, according to Core devs, to show its wonderous SoV properties … until it wasn’t. Almost immediately, the BTC narrative began to shift again, or certain BTC influencers went quiet altogether.

Tucker concluded, “The reason why Bitcoin [has] pulled back so hard is because it wasn’t allowed to perform the way it should’ve done,” and insisted investors didn’t even look to the traditional gold hedge, choosing fiat cash instead.

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