The Bitcoin Core cooption of Bitcoin - which was the cause of Bitcoin Cash being created - has led to Bitcoin being transformed into a currency that in any kind of future success scenario, only power-users (banks and exchanges) will directly transact with on-chain, with their own private keys. Armstrong's vision is much more pro-decentralization.
Core accepts the technical realities and limitations of Bitcoin’s design and works within them. Bitcoin Cash simply wishes them away and ignores them, and that will eventually cause the whole system to fail.
They’ll learn the hard way what the wiser small block contingent have understood from the early days. Bitcoin Core’s layered architecture is the only realistically viable architecture given Bitcoin’s inherent design constraints.
Nodes can handle far more than 7 transactions per second of throughput, even if you 4X the data size of that to account for propagation to multiple peers. 10 KB/s is nothing. Keeping nodes so light so that you can validate with a Raspberry Pi with a dialup connection, at the cost of preventing 100X more people from using Bitcoin, is a terrible tradeoff. There is no technological bottleneck preventing a 100X raising of the throughput limit: not Initial Blockchain Download, which is already being expedited with trusted third party set checkpoints, not computation, not storage and not bandwidth.
The vast majority of Bitcoin agreed with my sentiment, and that was the sentiment expressed by Satoshi any time he commented on it.
It was just irresponsible, overly timid leadership allowing a loud minority to sabotage Bitcoin's widely supported roadmap.
That wasn’t the tradeoff. The tradeoff was that increasing transaction throughput would also increase the risk to loss of decentralization and thus effectively the systemic catastrophic failure of Bitcoin. Without decentralization it’s just technological trash.
The most vocal big blockers were business guys prone to the same kind of risk-blind short-term thinking that led to the Global Financial Crisis less than a decade before - improve some easily measured metric now at the expense of introducing greater medium to long term total failure risk into the system.
Part of the problem is, systemic risk is difficult to measure and quantify, whereas other metrics like ROI or TPS are easy to measure and quantify. And thus we get more of what we measure, and less of what we don’t (systemic resilience, safety factor, redundancy, etc.). Everyone has a very strong bias for optimizing measurable metrics while being blind to the unmeasurable but important, and that’s what was happening here.
Thankfully the Bitcoin engineering community understood this and resisted making this tradeoff.
>There is no technological bottleneck preventing a 100X raising of the throughput limit: not Initial Blockchain Download, which is already being expedited with trusted third party set checkpoints,
This is a fundamental and irreconcilable philosophical difference. You think third parties can be trusted indefinitely and safely integrated into a core role in a decentralized system. That kind of mindset is why Ethereum is being run almost entirely on Consensys’s centralized Infura database. But that mindset doesn’t fly in the Bitcoin community. Core and most others that prioritize decentralization and censorship resistance will, rightly, never agree.
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/trusted-third-parties/
> The vast majority of Bitcoin agreed with my sentiment, and that was the sentiment expressed by Satoshi any time he commented on it.
No, UASF proved that wasn’t true at all. The majority of people actually running Bitcoin nodes preferred Segwit and no block increase. The “loud minority” was the cartel of highly visible large businesses that wanted to increase the blocksize, not the “vast majority of Bitcoin”.
> It was just irresponsible, overly timid leadership allowing a loud minority to sabotage Bitcoin's widely supported roadmap.
No, it was wise, responsible, foresightful, and technologically savvy leadership that understood the potential butterfly effect here, small changes compounding the systemic catastrophic failure risk over time.
Even if that systemic risk to decentralization couldn’t be easily quantified, Core and small block advocates nevertheless acknowledged it, and integrated it into their analysis of the decision, and came to a very different conclusion from others who did not and who only focused on measurable metrics and short-term considerations.
It was the latter loud minority who proved to be irresponsible and almost forced Bitcoin into making the same category of error that Wall Street made in creating the GFC.
Then decentralization is dead and can never exist.
