Topic: [2017-06-14] Bitcoin Scaling: How to Give Everyone More Control (Read 2456 times)

Politics has gripped bitcoin – it's about the only thing people have been wanting to talk about for the past few years.

I've written before about how the bitcoin ecosystem is like the three branches of government, with developers being the legislative branch, miners serving as the executive branch and users being the judicial branch. I've also written about how bitcoin changes through consensus, and how consensus is not supposed to be easy.

In this article, I examine an alternative path to the current political stalemate and how that can help empower developers, miners and users.

Current state of miners

Among mining manufacturers, it's pretty obvious that Bitmain is the biggest and most successful. They produce somewhere around 50–75% of the bitcoin network hash power through their chips and other manufacturers have a tough time competing with them on price.

Their first product, the S1, came out in 2014 when there were many more competitors (CoinTerra, KnCMiner and Spondoolies-Tech to name a few). They distinguished themselves by having the product on hand at various bitcoin conferences and, unlike many of their competitors, having great supply chain management helped them win fans around the world.

As bitcoin experienced a three-year bear market, many mining manufacturers simply went out of business as the economics turned from wildly profitable to barely survivable. It didn't help that many had products that often had defects and delivery issues. Bitmain not only survived this time, but thrived, and managed to capture significant market share.

Whatever your opinion of the company may be, Bitmain is the most dominant miner and they are the 800-pound gorilla in the mining space.

Current state of developers

It's well known that Satoshi Nakamoto made the first bitcoin client and released it to the world in 2009. Many people have contributed to what's called the 'reference client' and Bitcoin Core, as it’s now called, has hundreds of developers that contribute to the open-source repository.

What's less known is that there have been many different attempts to create alternative bitcoin clients. Obelisk, btc-d, Toshi and bcoin are just some of the many attempts at creating new clients from scratch.

Bitcoin Unlimited, Bitcoin XT and the newest Segwit2x are some forks of Bitcoin Core. While each has had a varying degree of success, it appears most of the network continues to run Bitcoin Core (most estimates are well over 90%).

Why is Bitcoin Core the most popular? There's certainly history to consider. People managing money tend to be conservative and changing any part of the tool chain for managing money tends to be a dicey proposition as any errors may cause monetary loss. Further, Core has the largest developer community and the most rigorous development processes in place.

Whatever your opinion of Bitcoin Core may be, the team continues to produce the dominant client on the network, and they are the 800-pound gorilla in the development space.


full: http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-scaling-give-everyone-control/