It has been almost a year since the Great Bitcoin Debate, which unleashed Bitcoin’s civil war, was brought to public attention. Now, a year later, an unofficial truce seems to have been reached with bitcoin’s potential crypto competitors, such as Ethereum, and potential competition from numerous bank sponsored consortiums focusing attention once again on making bitcoin great and appealing to all.
The Great Bitcoin Debate began with a series of posts by Gavin Andresen in Spring 2015 which argued for an increase in transaction capacity due to estimates that the limit of approximately 200,000 daily transactions would be reached by early 2016. Gavin’s arguments however faced fierce resistance and, as time went on, what started as an amicable debate over scaling bitcoin turned ugly. The Blocksize Wars
Theymos, the top moderator of r/bitcoin, a place that used to be called a “home” for the bitcoin community, initiated a policy of censorship of scalability discussions and enforced it by banning a number of prominent and long-time contributors to the subreddit leading to the creation of r/btc and bitco.in/forum as censorship free alternatives. Coinwallet.eu started spamming the bitcoin blockchain to show what would happen once capacity was reached. In turn, alternative clients like XT and Bitcoin Classic as well as mining pools which used them were DDoSed.
The most vicious attacks however, were attempts to character assassinate and smear individuals and companies. Mike Hearn, after being fully vilified by one “camp”, was the first figurative casualty of the “war” and left to work for R3 banking consortium. Gregory Maxwell, in turn, attracted so much hate by the other “camp”, which nicknamed him Saruman, the magician who sold out to Sauron in the Lord of the Rings, to the point where he too left for a short period and gave up his commit […]
