Topic: An Open Letter to The Bitcoin Community (Read 197 times)

thank you.
But personally, I think there is a very small chance that this open letter will be adopted by almost all developers now focus on wealth.
If the core team continues to sink, BTC bifurcations will be more and more.

Increasing blocksize is the wrong thing to do in my opinion.

Alternative coins are beneficial for Bitcoin, hopefully, they will remove all the dust services like faucets, micro-gambling, and scammy/spammy sig campaigns. This will allow Bitcoin to get on with its real purpose, which is a store of wealth.

Dear Bitcoin Community,
Wow. Who would have imagined Bitcoin would be where it’s at today 5+ years ago (when I first entered the community)? As a community of users, philosophers, speculators, businesses, miners, and developers… we should all be very proud of ourselves. The amount of work it took to get here was quite an astounding amount, but it is nice to see the tremendous success of which we have all collectively worked for. Now the mainstream media, your family, and friends are all talking about Bitcoin more and more. It is truly on the cusp of being a mainstream phenomenon.

However, with such success breeds complications. Bitcoin is effectively software, and scaling software to millions of users online has historically been a challenging subject in computer science. Both hardware and software considerations need to be considered. It is obviously a challenging problem to face, and Bitcoin should be proud that it is making headway with Segwit implementation complete.

Lightning Networks will start popping up in the very near future because they are all effectively competing against each other to be first to market. However, it will take a long time for all services and wallets to implement it. There is still a lot of testing that needs to be done. Knowing Bitcoin’s security conscious developers, there will be many tests before anything goes live at all. Point is that it could take a year or more for all wallets and services to implement LNs.

Because of the network effect, Bitcoin has to scale… and it has to scale fast. Every day Bitcoin takes to do so is another day that at least SOME capital goes into an alternative cryptocurrencies' markets instead of Bitcoin's. It is hurting all of the Bitcoin community participants in the ecosystem because some capital is leaving Bitcoin for other alternative cryptocurrencies both from old Bitcoin stakeholders and new community members. Bitcoin fees are already reaching all-time highs, and with the way adoption is going parabolic, expect transaction fees to go parabolic in the short-to-mid-term too.

Although Bitcoin has had a lot of success, it still has many adversaries to conquer, including nation states that may or may not choose to onerously regulate Bitcoin, bankers that will compete for market share on their own centralized solutions, and alternative cryptocurrencies that are competing for market share. There also exists the possibility that all three of those entities (nation states, bankers, or other alternative cryptocurrencies) will try to kill it via many attacks (51%, spam, ddos, political, social, etc) … if they aren’t already…

Bitcoin is already under attack. We can’t control nation states or banker attacks… they will happen regardless of how we proceed. However, I posit that we can do something about the Alternative cryptocurrencies are trying to kill it economically, socially, and politically. Bitcoin Cash has been the main benefactor of the congestion on the network, but other alternative cryptocurrencies are getting an inflow of capital too from what would have otherwise been capital in Bitcoin. It benefits everyone in the Bitcoin community including users, developers, miners, and companies if that capital stays in the Bitcoin ecosystem rather than shifting over to the alternative cryptocurrency’s ecosystem. Bitcoin’s network effect is under attack, and do not underestimate the power of its adversaries. Things will only get worse from here as all adversaries start to ramp up their attacks.

I think there is one solution that you can implement that will kill the value proposition of Bitcoin’s main competitor... the one alternative cryptocurrency the that the “big blockers” have rallied behind: Bitcoin Cash. The supporters of this resistance have been relentlessly attacking Bitcoin in an attempted coup by claiming they are better, and the “real” Bitcoin- among other things. However, the only advantage it has is that it has a higher 8 Mb block size, and is a lot less popular, which brings its transaction fees down substantially. I know Bitcoin’s plan is to scale via Lightning Networks and I support it, and I also realize that scaling purely by raising the block size infinitely eventually leads to a centralized network. However, at the same time, I would like to ask that the Bitcoin community please consider doing one small increase to Bitcoin’s block size to 8Mb, because Bitcoin’s capacity will be greater than that of Bitcoin Cash’s transaction capacity with the block size increase (plus the efficiencies Segwit affords us).

This will provide temporary financial relief from transaction fees for users and businesses until the Lightning Networks are fully working and implemented into most of the websites, services, and wallets. This will also kill the value proposition of big block solutions because at that point their marketing slogan would be an obvious lie if Bitcoin had the same or cheaper transaction fees. The capital would stop bleeding out of Bitcoin, and stay within the Bitcoin ecosystem. Due to the Network Effect, it is paramount that we retain all of the new users the most current “hype wave” (which people usually call a bubble) is bringing us because the quantity of new users and capital is orders of magnitude more users than the last hype wave.

Again, for emphasis, please consider raising the block size for temporary relief. Even if Lightning Networks are fully implemented, we might still have to increase the block size in order to increase the settling capacity of the network. As Bitcoin garners more and more utility through software innovations, the payment channel settling capacity might need to be scaled similarly to how the transaction capacity has had to with transactions. Also, 8Mb blocks are not really that much bigger than 2Mb blocks. It will hardly affect the decentralization of the network. No one is running full nodes on their phones, modern low-cost desktops and servers can efficiently process 8Mb blocks, and network bandwidth and network latency both are not an issue for most modern ISPs either with only 8Mb blocks.

I understand and totally get that you wouldn’t accept a group of companies’ attempts at doing so (Segwit2x), but surely, we can come together socially in order to come to an agreement. An agreement of which that is made out in the public in between almost all of the community members- not an agreement made behind closed doors by a limited portion of the community (like the Segwit2x agreement was formed). I think that is possibly the main contention the No2x crowd had against Segwit2x… is that it was an agreement formed behind closed doors by a few parties, and not necessarily the concept of a small rise in block size. Let’s test that theory?

Please swallow your stubbornness and pride, admit that there is a problem with high transaction fees, and then take the bull by its horns to fix the problem. Let’s raise Bitcoin’s block size to 8Mb.

A concerned community member,

William Connatser aka. CoinHoarder