Brian Armstrong, CEO of bitcoin exchange service Coinbase, said Friday that he believes the Bitcoin Core team, the development team that oversees work on bitcoin’s software, may be the biggest systemic risk for the bitcoin network.
The comments were issued as part of a new blog post published after Armstrong attended the Satoshi Roundtable , an invite-only bitcoin industry retreat held between 26th to 28th February.
Armstrong opened with his take on the bitcoin network scaling debate , which he framed as an unresolved dispute between Core developers and "most bitcoin companies who want growth".
Miners, the entities that process transactions on the network, he said, are caught in the middle of a debate that he painted as philosophical in nature.
He went on to write: "The conversations initially focused on various compromises that could be made to kick the can down the road on scalability. But as the conversations went on, I became less and less concerned about what short-term solution we pick because I realized we all had a much bigger problem: the systemic risk to bitcoin if Bitcoin Core was the only team working on bitcoin." From there, Armstrong details his concerns with the Core team. Some of them, he writes, "show very poor communication skills" or "lack maturity”, which he argued has kept other developers away from bitcoin.
He also drew contention with what he characterized as a preference for "perfect" solutions over "good enough" ones.
"If no perfect solution exists they seem OK with inaction, even if that puts bitcoin at risk," he wrote.
Lastly, Armstrong criticized the Core team’s overall position on scaling the bitcoin network, writing: “They seem to have a strong belief that bitcoin will not be able to scale long term, and any block size increase is a slippery slope to a future that they are unwilling […]
