Salil Deshpande serves as the managing director of Bain Capital Ventures. He focuses on infrastructure software and open source.
How to join the network
A recent rift amongst the developers of Bitcoin, which originally started with a question over increasing the so-called block size (so that throughput of transactions can be increased), exposed deep divides about distributed governance; and has now ironically led to entrenched positions, flared tempers, public insults, accusations and disparaging remarks.
The Rift
The opposing views of those advocating for preserving the current implementation of Bitcoin (Bitcoin Core), and those who believe that the block size needs to be increased immediately to overcome scalability challenges, has balkanized the Bitcoin developer community into mainly two camps.
A dramatic public characterization of this rift came from Mike Hearn’s January blog post on Medium, provocatively claiming that the “ Bitcoin experiment has failed ” as a consequence of the community’s unwillingness to increase the blocksize: “Why has Bitcoin failed? It has failed because the community has failed. What was meant to be a new, decentralised form of money that lacked “systemically important institutions” and “too big to fail” has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people. Worse still, the network is on the brink of technical collapse. The mechanisms that should have prevented this outcome have broken down, and as a result there’s no longer much reason to think Bitcoin can actually be better than the existing financial system.” The price of Bitcoin plummeted to $358 following Mike’s post, but has since recovered to $418 at the time of writing. Alternatives have emerged , such as Bitcoin Unlimited, which has no hard coded block size limit; Bitcoin Classic, which would increase the blocksize to 2 megabytes; and BitPay Core, which would have an […]
