Mon Jan 18, 2016 8:44 pm

What first attracted you to Bitcoin and made you decide to get involved?



What attracted you to participate on the Bitcoin.com forum instead of somewhere else?



Thanks!

Hi, thanks for doing this AMA. My question would be, how do you feel about the ongoing bitcoin blocksize debate? Have you heard of Bitcoin Classic or any other alternative implementations that fork the protocol to raise the blocksize? If so, how do you feel about them?

I was involved in e-commerce, e-currency space since early 2000s, so I would say Bitcoin was a natural evolution from centralized e-payment solutions such as e-gold or liberty reserve, which were easy to use and etc payment methods, but had a major flows, because of being centralized. On the other hand, Bitcoin attracted me, because it promise to use technology to revolutionize the way people pay in the same way as commerce was revolutionized by having electronic market places like Amazon or eBay, what meant a lower number of intermediaries, hence the lower cost and higher speed. While in fintech industry I can see the increasing number of intermediaries (every payment company is usually just built on top of old infrastructure with a nice user interface as an additional layer/intermediary).I am also participating at other forums, but I like Bitcoin.com forum as it focuses on describing and shaping Bitcoin ecosystem, but not building a forum-marketplace.I am fallowing the debate and trying to make myself familiar with most of proposals such as BitcoinXT, BitcoinNG, Bitcoin Classic etc, but honestly I believe, that energy is spent on the wrong issue as firstly it will be miners who will decide on the block size and they do have a motivation to increase it as if bitcoin becomes unreliable or transactions will be too expensive, people will look at alternative coins/protocols, there is no monopoly of Bitcoin here. But the issue of scalability is very important and the solutions how to reduce transaction size and hence block size (but not its limit) should be investigated, also it is a time to look for solutions to reduce blockchain size in the future as the real threat is that bitcoin might fail to scale, not because of internal/coded limits, but global technological capability, and that is very likely if Bitcoin grows quicker than technology required to support it in general. On the other hand, Bitcoin as we have it today is an experiment which might be a foundation for more efficient protocol, which I believe will be a result of evolution of Bitcoin, as the strength of Bitcoin is that it is just a protocol which can and has to be modified until perfection.