| For those not following the drama, there has been an organized attempt for the last 6+ months to take over Bitcoin. A fake "grass roots" campaign was started on Reddit, where numerous sock puppet accounts were used to bombard the /r/bitcoin subreddit with calls to change Bitcoin's "block size limit" to a much larger number. This would allow more transactions per second, at the cost of hurting Bitcoin's P2P decentralization (the main thing it is good at). These posters claimed there was a dire, urgent need to do this immediately, and used spam transaction attacks on the network to make it look necessary. They also used downvoting/upvoting scripts to push their posts to the top, and to censor the developer's
responses (reddit hides posts with a -5 score; any post by developers instantly would be downvoted to that level). They harassed the developers with constant personal attacks, to the point that it became impossible for them
to engage the community. They also flooded the development mailing list, and many developers unsubscribed. As for the "block size increase", an absurd number was picked (20x increase), and knowing that the developers would not go along with it, the "solution" proposed was a fork of the both the software and the network itself called "Bitcoin XT". All but 2 of the 90+ Bitcoin developers thought this was a terrible idea, especially since they have
come up with much safer and better solutions to achieve the same goal (scaling up the transactions per second). Yet when this fork attempt failed to gain any support, a better funded, even more aggressive second attempt (oddly named "Bitcoin Classic") started being promoted. It is being pushed by the CEO of Coinbase (the author of this blog post) and backed by some of the other bitcoin exchange's CEOs. I think the creator of bittorrent, Bram Cohen, sums up what developers and the larger technical
community are thinking about these takeover attempts- https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/697705876337995776 |
If Bitcoin Core did the sensible thing and started to increase blocks and working towards that goal, no takeover would happen. Quite the opposite, Bitcoin Core is now taken over by developers from Blockstream company, pushing their own (vaporware) product and doing changes to Bitcoin that will help them. And also adding, with little (non-censored) discussion, controversial features like Replace-By-Fee.
How can you talk about decentralization when the few important people, who can decide about the future, can literally sit to one table and decide. How can you talk about decentralization when there is one person controlling all discussions and actively censoring all negativity against him, or against current bitcoin core.
There is no long-term solution for scaling than resizing the blocks right now. SegWit is great, but only a one-time thing.
The only thing that is missing from your comment is that there is conspiracy by Big Banks and Evil Statists to silently destroy bitcoin (by making it more usable).