TD₿: Bitcoin’s Existential Crisis by Nic Carter
TL;DR The way that Bitcoin has survived absent any single leader, is it has a robust and mutually understood set of ideals that constitute the essence of the system.
Hey Bitcoiners,
Right now, there’s a bit of controversy in the Bitcoin developer world with the BIP-119 proposed softfork upgrade (Check out Marty’s concise review here).
The arguments really revolve around three things:
1.) Does Bitcoin really need this upgrade?
2.) Has enough technical work and review been done on this?
3.) How should upgrades get activated on Bitcoin?
The last argument is what I’d like to focus on here because it has been a question surrounding Bitcoin since its early days. How does a protocol, that has no leader, define rules, forge consensus on technical issues, and organize to execute on these changes?
After all — one of the main strengths of Bitcoin is it has no formal, centralized governance structure. But this strength also creates inefficiency in the decision-making process. Despite this challenge, Bitcoin has still been able to upgrade and morph into a completely different beast compared to its earlier versions. But how?
Nic Carter makes the case in this blog post that the way Bitcoin overcomes this lack of leadership is by having an unwritten set of ideals or rules that constitute the soul of the system (10/31/2018).
It is up to Bitcoiners today to protect the essence of the system as we consider upgrades by remembering the ideals that make Bitcoin special: freedom, credibility, censorship resistance, decentralization, etc.
Making decisions absent a leader is inherently difficult. But changing the rules of the hardest money shouldn’t be easy.
If it was easy, then we might as well just use fiat.
Tick tock next block,
Cory Klippsten
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“Bitcoin is an upgrade for humanity.” - Alex Thorn, Head of Firmwide Research at Galaxy Digital
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