The Buddhists describe enlightenment as “a final blessed state marked by the absence of desire or suffering”. Yesterday was a day of Bitcoin Enlightenment for myself. After coming to the realization that the segwit2x efforts were likely dying quickly, I laid out my thoughts in a post last week without any outside noise offering up feedback. It got an amazing response from those who wanted segwit2x to die. All my “credibility” came back. Not from the hard work and products I’ve helped deliver over the last few years, but because I capitulated and gave the loud crowd what they wanted.

And you know what? I don’t really care. Because I’m way more interested in working on powerful software that fulfills it’s original goals than bickering with a group of people who clearly don’t want the same thing. If all of the Bitcoin eggs are in the layer 2 basket for scaling then so be it. I’ve been enlightened.

Going forward I will be working very hard with OpenBazaar and OB1 to find better, additional ways for users to transact that also prioritize reasonable speed and costs. We have spent a lot of time focusing primarily on Bitcoin to try and figure out how to best optimize these factors along with security, privacy and freedom, but it’s not having the dramatic impact we expected it to have. Our team was one of the first groups to implement segwit in production and while it did help some it’s not nearly enough. Our users still consistently complain about the costs and beg us to consider alternatives. I realize it’s still early as segwit adoption seems to be going in the wrong direction until other larger groups get on board so I am willing to back off this if we see a change. Keep reading.

One interaction I had with a merchant on OpenBazaar recently about fees.

OpenBazaar developers are constantly having to figure out clever and informative ways to explain to users why they can’t withdraw money from their wallets or why it takes forever to receive it (yes, we have fee priorities). We have to explain how escrow services meant to protect them actually double the cost of doing business in Bitcoin due to larger transaction size and two transactions being required. It’s a burden on our meager resources to have to answer support tickets (for an open source project) to justify why we don’t consider other payment mechanisms.