Most of the arguments against the core team revolve around the economics and future of the coin, but the tech team seems to think that somehow their coding experience gives them insight into that.
Bitcoin seems like technically great but it fails on many of the economic aspects (e.g. making a currency with a fixed amount basically ensures it can never be used to write long term counteracts in).
I guess I'll give the blunt answer: many proponents of cryptocurrency have views on economics, politics, society, law, and contracts that are ignorant of the way those things really work. Many really do believe that currencies, transactions, and contracts can be implemented entirely by computer programs and that governments and courts should have no jurisdiction over such things.
If you don't believe me, go to some of the active crypto forums and get involved in political discussions. You'll see an astounding mix of techno-utopianism, extreme libertarianism, and baseless conspiracy theories about fiat money and governments in general.
The blockchain is an interesting technical achievement, and so are smart contracts, but they are not a replacement for laws and governments. Unfortunately, a lot of people think they are. Some people even insist that bitcoin doesn't have governance, but that's clearly not the case because the current controversy about the core developers is exactly about governance.
I bring this up because these kinds of beliefs are the reason people in the bitcoin community think the programmers who implement bitcoin are capable of solving the economic problems -- they reject the idea that there are any economic or social problems facing bitcoin that can't be solved with the underlying technology. They don't accept that these are social problems with social solutions.
If that's the case then it certainly does the job.
There are a lot of people out there who are very aware of how their saved money loses value and actively want an alternative that feels "safe". I don't know that Bitcoin is that alternative, but it's definitely trying to be and even I have to admit has been far more successful than I ever would have expected.
A lot of Venezuelans would disagree with you there. History clearly shows governments fail to act responisbly with currency. In the last 25 years, 21 countries experienced hyperinflation. What do you propose people in those counties do?
Your comment was big on problems but offered no solutions. Cryptocurrencies are a solution for many.
Take off the developed world rose tinted glasses for a moment and see that for a large majority of Earth's population their government and courts do not serve them well.
And this is not just poor countries, a woman in Saudi Arabia cannot open a bank account without a mans permission. That same woman can create a bitcoin wallet in one minute.
[0] - https://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/10/15/inside-hudson-riv...
I say BTC lack economic understanding not from some theoretical view but from some of the almost religious decisions that comes from the project (fixed issue, low tx volume, etc). It is almost like they don't want people to use it for anything important.
But i will search out Alex's posts more often though.
See: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1842146.msg18340002#...
Bitcoin is digital gold. The idea that is should be used as currency only seems plausible to the biggest proponents of a return to gold standards.
But for everyone who believe in inflationary currency, bitcoin is still a viable value store, which definitely can be used for all sorts of contracts.
Imho on average it's easier for computer scientists and engineers trained and practiced at algorithmic/systems/recursive thinking to learn (and invent) the relevant economics than it is for economists to learn computer science. The emerging field of cryptoeconomics is an amalgamation of high-assurance systems engineering and mechanism design (applied game theory), and computer scientists and engineers are on average better equipped to understand both parts of it than most economists are.
There's also an invaluable degree of street smarts and intuition in people who build and work on complex systems of varying non-/determinism and value-at-risk on a daily basis than in folks who just study/model them.
>Bitcoin seems like technically great but it fails on many of the economic aspects (e.g. making a currency with a fixed amount basically ensures it can never be used to write long term counteracts in).
Fwiw Bitcoin's issuance model is what it is b/c Satoshi wanted a strong incentive for people to bootstrap Bitcoin in the early days via mining, and a scarce deflationary currency was a simple and effective means of achieving that. He succeeded obviously. Any problems down the road resulting from that can theoretically be fixed with some kinds of derivatives, or worst case-scenario with a non-contentious hard fork to change the issuance model. But that would require a clear crisis affecting the value of the currency that everyone could agree would need solving, which likely won't be the case for as long as there are non-trivial mining rewards.
Does it? It seems horrendously, even criminally, inefficient to me.
1. The value (not necessarily price) of the currency will fluctuate wildly since they money supply cannot grow and shrink along with demand for it. The fixed supply will make these swings even wilder.
2. In a currency which is constantly deflating at say 3% a year, you would never want to take a loan unless you can cover that 3% plus any other return on capital you require. You're going to be paying back BTC that is going to be more expensive every year passing. Imagine a 5 year contract for 10 BTC a year. The next year is it 10.3 BTC (deflation adjusted). And at year five you are paying back BTC worth 11.6 BTC.
3. If you are on the other side, any counter party (default) risk is also huge since you are losing an asset that you could have held on to for zero risk and still gained 3% a year.
To enter a contract you need a stable currency. It is like building a house with a yardstick that keeps getting longer and longer. And it is very difficult to figure out what the value and exchange rate of BTC will be in a year from now, much less longer.
The argument is that they've moved too slow on important things like scalability, blocked a simple blocksize increase hard fork that would have added capacity, and that as a result Ethereum is catching up and on the verge of overtaking Bitcoin (http://duckduckgo.com?q=flippening).
The counterargument is that there's no other technically credible team in Bitcoin, despite all the prior attempts to "fire" and replace Core - Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Unlimited, etc. - and that "firing" Core is akin to killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
You forgot the most important counterargument. That they _did_ move extremely fast on scalability. They released a masterpiece of engineering, SegWit, which doubles the blocksize, improves efficiency, enables future efficiency gains, and a laundry list of other improvements ... all while being a softfork. And, IIRC, that was all developed, tested, and released in _very_ short order.
Ironically, scaling ethereum seems a lot dicier than scaling BTC.
For technical background, I recommend these two posts by Mike Hearn, who has since left the Bitcoin community [1] [2]
Now, what the original article is talking about is the "Core" development team--the people who have commit access on the Bitcoin Github repo. The whole debate has essentially become Core vs. some other factions, mainly miners. You'll see the arguments in [1] and [2].
(Keep in mind, Mike Hearn is strongly on the anti-Core side of the argument. But those articles should give you an idea of what to search for, if you want to hear arguments on the other side.)
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-10/bitcoin-r...
[1] https://medium.com/@octskyward/on-consensus-and-forks-c6a050...
[2] https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...
> In a soft fork, a protocol change is carefully constructed to essentially trick old nodes into believing that something is valid when it actually might not be.
The soft-fork protocols used for upgrades are specifically designed to ensure nodes are not tricked into believing something is valid when it might actually not be, as there is a well-defined mechanism - the block header nVersion field - that both co-ordinates soft forks and ensures that nodes that are unaware of the specifics of a given soft-fork know that there are new rules in effect. This is why at present, Bitcoin Core nodes/wallets loudly warn you that unknown rules may be in effect that your node does not understand, because the BIP91 soft-fork just activated that Bitcoin Core does not recognize. (BIP91 is a temporary hack to activate segwit at 80% rather than 95% threshold; in a few weeks it'll no longer be relevant to consensus)
Hearn is misleadingly confusing the adversarial case where a majority of miners may try to change the rules without consent of the community in an undetectable fashion, but that's simply a 51% attack. At present, preventing such attacks is an open research question; conflating the 51% attacks and soft-fork upgrades is very misleading.
In Hearns "resolution of the bitcoin experiment" Hearn states that:
> Bitcoin Core has a brilliant solution to this problem — allow people to mark their payments as changeable after they’ve been sent, up until they appear in the block chain.
and
> How many people would think bitcoins are worth hundreds of dollars each when you soon won’t be able to use them in actual shops?
Here he's referring to zero-confirmation payments and BIP125, Opt-In Replace-By-Fee. First of all, opt-in replace-by-fee is actually derived from Hearns own proposal to re-enable transaction replacement by nSequence. Specifically, Hearn proposed to re-enable an old feature in Bitcoin Core - originally written by Satoshi - that allowed transactions to be replaced if they signalled a higher sequence number. This creates a DoS attack, which I proposed we fix by ensuring that replacements paid a higher fee than the replaced transaction.
Opt-in replace-by-fee is a combination of Hearn's proposal and my own: transactions can signal that they are replacable, and if they signal replacability, can be replaced by transactions paying a higher fee. The combination implements Hearn's desired transaction replacability behavior, while fixing the DoS attack.
The bigger issue is that zero-confirmation transactions are simply not secure: even without the opt-in replace-by-fee that Hearn criticises Bitcoin Core for implementing, it is very easy to double-spend unconfirmed transactions. Soon after Hearn published that post, I did a study which found that every half the wallets tested could be double-spent trivially with nearly 100% success rates, and the other half with about 25% success rates: https://petertodd.org/2016/are-wallets-ready-for-rbf
Unfortunately, Hearn is simply being dishonest on both counts here, something that got him wide condemnation in the technical community.
For the rest of the context, check out most of the Bitcoin posts that have made it to HN over the past month. They're almost all about the current issues in the system and community.
Edit: typo
This really gets at the heart of my dislike for cryptocurrency -- most proponents believe it's supposed to be decentralized and free from the control of government, but it's actually centralized under the control of a small group of unelected programmers (who seem to misunderstand how human societies, currencies, and contracts actually work), and there is no recourse when they make bad decisions except to fork the blockchain and the code. It's really a step backwards in terms of governance compared to, say, fiat currency with democratic governance. This applies to most cryptocurrencies I've seen, not just bitcoin.
Problem is they have -not- been killing it 24/7.
This block size debate has been going on for years with Blockstream(Core) refusing to do anything about it aside from indirect fixes. Well before Bitcoin's 1MB blocks were full people were getting dismissed/deflected/denigrated due to bringing the subject up to the developers.
As the issue climaxed earlier this year Blockstream only proposed SegWit as a fix[1]. Segwit isn't even related to the block size issue directly. It is more applicable to Blockstream's business plans for rolling out for-profit Lightning Network nodes that use Bitcoin as a settlement layer.
So for years now Blockstream has done what? Threatened to edit[2] Satoshi's whitepaper while ignoring public consensus unless the public accepts their kludge of a 'fix?'
Fire Core. They are overtly driving Bitcoin away from the purpose it was created for, a "peer to peer electronic currency." They halted Bitcoin development after investment by AXA and others, turning their focus into creating for-profit products that use Bitcoin.
Fire Core.
[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/10028 [2] https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/issues/1325
It's not the words of somebody who wants to help anybody, just somebody wanting the power.
If the US dollar forked, or an EU country left the Euro, it would widely be considered a disaster and a failure of politics and governance. Why should bitcoin be held to a different standard?
This is part of the reason why bitcoin remains highly speculative. People point this out like it's a bad thing - the only people who have it are just investors, speculating. But this is part of the process that bootstraps bitcoin's value, so that when it does become more practical to use, actual value is being transferred.
