It has been interesting to watch the formation and expansion of a rogue element in the upper echelons of the Bitcoin development community. In a professional context, I have seen this type of group often referred to as a ‘Cowboy Outfit’. They are the parties working in a shared project who don’t listen, think they know everything and wield their ‘’expert authority” as a shield.
It is possible to identify and deal with a cowboy outfit early in a project’s formation, however if they get their fingers in during the design phase they can create problems that need costly engineering fixes years down the track. To ensure this doesn’t happen, vigilance and sometimes painful corrective action is required.
How did they get there?
The Bitcoin Cash/Core debate was primarily split around scaling lines however there was a much more insidious play happening — SegWit. It’s rumored there were moves afoot to kill Segwit (and end the scaling debate) using hashpower and the Nakamoto Consensus to overpower Bitcoin Core’s influence however before the plan could be executed the Cowboy Outfit was asked to head off the Segwit threat and lack of scaling agreement through a mechanism known as a chain-split. Bitcoin Cash was announced in May 2017 with the network fission taking place just 15 weeks later. Pretty quick moves for a multi billion dollar project.
The split effectively gave the pro-scaling factions everything they wanted. Big blocks, new innovation. Release from the restrictive, high fee environment caused by Core’s 1MB block restriction. And more importantly for the long term future of Bitcoin, no Segwit. However it gave it to them in such a way that it could be easily derided as a sham. It’s own shitcoin, forked to eventually centralize into one Raspberry Pi on a Chinese miner’s desk, ready to be mercilessly parodied and abused as the retarded cousin of Big Daddy Bitcoin, never to be trusted as money.
But believers went about their business, and started innovating. New wallets, new websites, tokens, buttons and more. Safe in the knowledge that Bitcoin was back. Upgrades came and went and and new scaling milestones were achieved. Scaling x 8 and then again x 4. A limitless future but… no customers.
The blocks stayed empty and transactions sparse even as Bitcoin Core had spiking fees for us to point out. Stress testing showed that more was possible, but so far, natural volume has not yet arrived.
To go where?
Currently it’s not there, but even one large on-line customer (Personally I’m gunning for Porn and News with Money Button) could drive numbers up by thousands of transactions per block.At that point, 32MB starts to look like another hard limit that we will soon hit, except instead of 100,000 speculation trades per day, it would be several million content purchases. Even pushing fees to a few cents per transaction would be disastrous in many instances.
Bitcoin needs to focus on one thing only, and that is scale. Within 10–15 years, the network will need to carry at least a terabyte of transactions per block or the ever shrinking rewards will start dropping to a point they no longer cover the cost of operation. To do this the network’s transaction capacity must be scaled at least 1,000,000 fold by 2030.
This means multiplying the network by at least 10x every 2 years for 12 years. On paper, the network is moving faster than this (16x per year) however the stress test and a few other events have shown that the actual capacity may not be as stated. Some major services were sent offline, and the biggest bitcoin block ever was created, but even that was just a measly 23MB.
The affects of the Cowboy Outfit
As we have come through all this, one thing has become very clear. The software being released by the Cowboy Outfit is not up to scratch. Severe bugs have been discovered, and there has been a digression back towards conservative scaling and the solidification of freedom limiting rulesets.
Their mantra: ‘We need to fix it first, before it can scale’. Now where have I heard that before.
The Cowboy Outfit have also displayed disdain for the community and an unprofessional attitude. In one episode the Cowboy Leader visited a public forum and proceeded to make a series of inflammatory statements including ad-hominem attacks and name calling against a prominent community member. Despite several warnings, the leader persisted and was eventually removed from the forum at which point they went onto social media and used the removal as a means to attack the forum and the personality for engaging in censorship. This episode was followed up by the cessation of engagement between the Cowboy Outfit and at least two leading miners, and a social media campaign that frames certain miners and people as hostile to Bitcoin.
With a sizeable percentage of the network using their software, the Cowboy Outfit have wielded their overconfidence in a benign dictatorship of permissionless incompetence. Their architects trying to scale Bitcoin like some kind of centralized system, where things can be delegated infinitely across a million racks of computers. These mistakes are primarily driven by their misinterpretation of Bitcoin as a Software project.
The Bitcoin Project
The Bitcoin Project is technological. It sits at a an economic nexus of networks, computing, storage and energy and it’s place there will ensure the creation of accelerated research and development in all of them. Investment will scale with Bitcoin as miners seek to pursue every advantage over their competitors.
The Cowboy Outfit’s assertion that we need to halt progress on scaling to implement software fixes for issues that compute, network and storage technology will eliminate is both shortsighted and rash, and despite the advice and requests of leading miners, they have elected to pursue their own agenda. At the same time, a dismissive arrogance has emerged, with the Cowboys now refusing to engage in debate over the details of their long term strategy, despite numerous credible rebuttals to their claims.
The Cowboy Outfit have finished paying lip service and are now ready to do their damage. The changes they are proposing for this hardfork would set Bitcoin on a path to becoming something very different. A sharded network with a block discovery process that is bloated across tens or hundreds of partial nodes, each handling a disparate set of transactions. The Merkle tree that resides at the core of every block changed into something completely different, and incompatible with every piece of software written to operate using the Bitcoin blockchain.
In my professional opinion, this would be nothing short of a total disaster for the confidence of anyone seeking to build on stable, digital cash.
Thankfully, leading miners are on to these guys and are taking appropriate steps to ensure that their ideas don’t gain a foothold. It won’t make them friends in the short term, but they aren’t here to make friends. They are here to make sure that Bitcoin scales faster than any previous technology and is ready for global adoption as soon as possible.
