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Long time Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn is claiming that the Bitcoin experiment has failed:
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.
Among the problems he lists are:
- A conceptually wrong new feature.
Allowed buyers to take back payments they'd made after walking out of shops, by simply pressing a button (if you aren't aware of this "feature" that's because Bitcoin was only just changed to allow it)
- Technical problems of the network.
The block chain is full. You may wonder how it is possible for what is essentially a series of files to be "full". The answer is that an entirely artificial capacity cap of one megabyte per block, put in place as a temporary kludge a long time ago, has not been removed and as a result the network's capacity is now almost completely exhausted.
- Extreme concentration of hash power.
Why has the capacity limit not been raised? Because the block chain is controlled by Chinese miners, just two of whom control more than 50% of the hash power. At a recent conference over 95% of hashing power was controlled by a handful of guys sitting on a single stage. The miners are not allowing the block chain to grow.
[More after the Break]
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Censorship on bitcoin.org.
So he decided to do whatever it took to kill XT completely, starting with censorship of Bitcoin's primary communication channels: any post that mentioned the words "Bitcoin XT" was erased from the discussion forums he controlled, XT could not be mentioned or linked to from anywhere on the official bitcoin.org website and, of course, anyone attempting to point users to other uncensored forums was also banned. Massive numbers of users were expelled from the forums and prevented from expressing their views.
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And finally, he traces back the root of the problem to the Bitcoin Core developers.
One of them, Gregory Maxwell, had an unusual set of views: he once claimed he had mathematically proven Bitcoin to be impossible. More problematically, he did not believe in Satoshi's original vision.
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In a company, someone who did not share the goals of the organisation would be dealt with in a simple way: by firing him.But Bitcoin Core is an open source project, not a company. Once the 5 developers with commit access to the code had been chosen and Gavin had decided he did not want to be the leader, there was no procedure in place to ever remove one. And there was no interview or screening process to ensure they actually agreed with the project's goals.
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But the first mistake was already made by Satoshi himself:
When Satoshi left, he handed over the reins of the program we now call Bitcoin Core to Gavin Andresen, an early contributor. Gavin is a solid and experienced leader who can see the big picture. His reliable technical judgement is one of the reasons I had the confidence to quit Google (where I had spent nearly 8 years) and work on Bitcoin full time. Only one tiny problem: Satoshi never actually asked Gavin if he wanted the job, and in fact he didn't.
Is Bitcoin rotten to the Core?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday January 17 2016, @01:07PM
Looks like pretty solid mid size growth pains, and those are only avoidable by dying off before reaching them... some projects survive them, some don't. Some will try to strengthen the project, others will try entryism to push their own aims, etc.
It would probably be useful WRT sophistry to separate BTC from the "common project patterns" discussion. Search and replace and put KDE in the place of BTC or whatever.
Sort of like watching how every generation of idiot teenagers think they're the first ones to ever discover sex, drugs, reputations, politics, etc. Mostly a good laugh.
On a very long term perspective (like many decades, since the 70s) its interesting to watch "computers" as no matter how decentralized the technological tools are initially designed, humans insist on making massive brittle centralized systems out of them, its an insane self destructive desire. Doesn't matter if we're talking usenet to reddit or the corporate takeover of linux or corporate takeover of BTC in this discussion.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Francis on Sunday January 17 2016, @02:40PM
I take it you haven't been following the BTC circus for very long then. These are just things that are too big for the fans to ignore. There've been problems with the implementation and design from the beginnning leading to people getting rich for doing nothing and other people getting defrauded out of large sums of money. Mt. Gox springs instantly to mind, but the generally deflationary design of the currency ensures that the cash flow will mostly be moving from newcomers to old timers the way that a typical Ponzi scheme would.
The idea of a crypto-currency isn't necessarily a bad thing, but this implementation was planned by people who have no knowledge of how currencies work or economics or anything other than the technical side of things and even there they failed to apply any thought into the consequences of committing to a specific amount of deflation at the beginning that can't be changed. The Federal Reserve has revised it's sense of what a healthy inflation rate looks like over the years and BTC doesn't have that option.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2016, @07:53PM
Not the bottom yet. Wait for it...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by julian on Monday January 18 2016, @07:20AM
Not to mention that the people who came in right after the creators/innovators were the libertarians/ancaps who made decisions about Bitcoin based on ideology, not technology. They think BTC is a tool to destabilize the USD, disintermediate and eventually bring down the US Government, usher in a glorious new golden age of libertarian economic freedom--and of course they'll be rich since the currency of this new Paradise will be Bitcoin.
These people are absolutely insufferable to talk to. Any criticism you make of Bitcoin and they label you a "statist".
I think Bitcoin (and the blockchain) is an excellent idea, extremely clever, has some technological problems that are probably fixable, and that something like it will exist to supplement traditional fiat currency. However, the fiat currency isn't going anywhere. It's also not a force of pure evil in the world like ancaps and libertarians seem to think. It's an inevitable invention of the state, and the state is an irresistible expression of human spontaneous self-organization in a 4-dimensional universe.