Martin Hagelstrom is a bitcoin enthusiast and project executive and consultant working on IT projects at IBM.
In this opinion piece, Hagelstrom argues that the bitcoin community’s emphasis on block size in the scaling debate is concealing a larger, more important argument. Let’s start by agreeing on something: Bitcoin is a genius innovation that regulates both an economy and the technology that governs it. This technology is also decentralized, and that makes the risk of a human screw up affecting the network much less likely.
But bitcoin is far from bulletproof. Right now, bitcoin developers are engaged in a battle over a change in the code that, if implemented and accepted into the network, would increase the data capacity of transaction blocks on the blockchain. Maybe it’s not a trivial modification, but it’s still a coding discussion.
But should we assume it’s non-trivial? What if the block size debate is really just a proxy war to avoid a much more important debate that should be taking place?
Let’s do some recap before I get to that point. Classic vs Core
On one hand, we have the Bitcoin Core developers who have been maintaining the bitcoin code since the network’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, handed over the reins and exited the project. They are the ones who, at the end of the day, decide what functionalities and fixes go into bitcoin and which ones don’t.
They also have a procedure on how the community can propose code changes to the project. Some of these proposals may be difficult to implement or maybe the Core developers don’t agree they’re best for the network.
But don’t forget this is an open-source project, so another team can come and fork (copy the code) and start working on their new version of the code.This is what happened with […]
