<story><title>My view on the current situation of Bitcoin and the Blockchain</title><url>http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2016/02/22/my-view-on-the-.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pash</author><text>Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, wrote a blog post [0] today that gives a very different take on things. He criticized Bitcoin Core&amp;#x27;s development team for their poor communication with the community, for their inhospitality to new contributors, and for their repeated rejection of practical and simple solutions to Bitcoin&amp;#x27;s immediate scaling problem. He advocated adopting Bitcoin Classic&amp;#x27;s short-term fix for full transaction blocks and wrote that it is vital in the long term to foster an environment in which multiple development teams can compete to introduce new features and improvements to the protocol.&lt;p&gt;There are many people in the Bitcoin ecosystem who, like Brian, feel strongly that if Bitcoin is to survive and thrive, then not only must the blocksize-limit be increased, but the exclusive power to decide the future of Bitcoin must be taken out of the hands of the Bitcoin Core team.&lt;p&gt;0. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;medium.com&amp;#x2F;@barmstrong&amp;#x2F;what-happened-at-the-satoshi-roundtable-6c11a10d8cdf#.xw7emyjhh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;medium.com&amp;#x2F;@barmstrong&amp;#x2F;what-happened-at-the-satoshi-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>My view on the current situation of Bitcoin and the Blockchain</title><url>http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2016/02/22/my-view-on-the-.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>adrianmacneil</author><text>I feel like that&amp;#x27;s giving the Bitcoin Core developers a bit too much credit.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; When asked &amp;quot;can you scale this?&amp;quot; They said, &amp;quot;we&amp;#x27;ll do the best we can.&amp;quot; That wasn&amp;#x27;t good enough for many, especially those who don&amp;#x27;t understand the architecture or the nature of what is going on inside of Bitcoin.&lt;p&gt;The larger issue is that some of the core developers don&amp;#x27;t want to scale Bitcoin at all. They would rather have a more decentralized, less widely used Bitcoin. There is no right answer here of course, but many companies and VCs bet their future on a widely used, less decentralized version of Bitcoin (i.e. one where it&amp;#x27;s hard to run a Bitcoin server on a home internet connection, much like SMTP today).&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Many people call them &amp;quot;Bitcoin Core&amp;quot; as if they are some sort of company you can fire or a random set of developers with skills that you can just train others to acquire.&lt;p&gt;They called themselves Bitcoin Core, and even went so far as to create a separate website and have started branding the reference client as Bitcoin Core.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; It feels like while the Bitcoin Core development community is robust, the ecosystem of stakeholders and the understanding of how decisions are made and information is shared is still fragile and vulnerable.&lt;p&gt;The real issue is that Bitcoin has no &amp;quot;official&amp;quot; governance, so it&amp;#x27;s resulting in design-by-committee and stalemate on key decisions. The project needs a BDFL, but since it has none it will fail to keep pace with innovation in the space. Unlike most internet protocols, the consensus layer prevents anyone from effectively forking the project, without creating a whole separate blockchain (unless they can convince 100% of the community to follow them).&lt;p&gt;Luckily, we are starting to see more innovation and competition in the blockchain space, with Ethereum being by far the most interesting newcomer IMO (and run by a competent team with a clear governance structure).</text></comment>