A cup is not being useful when it sits in the cupboard, only when you drink from it. A bicycle is not useful when it sits in the garage, but when you ride it. …
This article is inspired by Derek Magill’s excellent post, ‘Animal Farm’ and Bitcoin Core, and will take a closer look at the similarities between George Orwell’s allegorical tale of an animal uprising and the hijacking of the Bitcoin (BTC) project at the hands of Bitcoin Core. In brief:
The leaders…
This article can also be read on Yours.org
The latest thought meme being echoed from Wall Street to Silicon Valley is that Bitcoin is merely a “store of value,” an alternate asset class to be held as part of a well-balanced portfolio.
This sentiment was recently expressed in a Tweet…
The word “decentralization” gets bandied about so often in Bitcoin scaling debates that its actual meaning seems to have been forgotten. Although decentralization is an important property of Bitcoin, many people have come to fetishize the word, imbuing it with all sorts of mythical properties and treating “more decentralization” as…
In a previous essay, I examined the unlikelihood of a Bitcoin chain split. At the time, hashrate signaling for larger blocks was increasing daily and the prospect of a miner supermajority hard fork appeared likely.
The situation has since changed. The two warring factions have reached an impasse, one side…
Note: This post is meant as a follow-up to my original article, A (brief and incomplete) history of censorship on /r/Bitcoin. As the /r/bitcoin moderators will frequently alter the content of threads, the entire thread being referenced in this article has been archived here. …
“At the core of Bitcoin’s value proposition is censorship resistance. Bitcoin has value because it can be used to complete transactions that are likely to be censored on other payment networks.”
One of the more recent talking points being used by small-block…
I have noticed an interesting phenomenon on the side of the small-blockers throughout the course of the scaling debate. I call it “narrative drift.” It is similar to the logical fallacy of “equivocating” or “moving the goalposts,” in which evidence presented in response to a specific claim is dismissed by…
I don’t anticipate that fees will be needed anytime soon, but if it becomes too burdensome to run a node, it is possible to run a node that only processes transactions that include a transaction fee. The owner of the node would decide the minimum fee they’ll accept. Right now…
