I think you got it backwards. The volatility was the result of main stream media attention to the threat of stalling growth of Bitcoin due to the shortage of block space.
Growth of micropayments was not on the table, per Satoshi himself. They don't scale with the existing tech. He was hoping for technology to solve this issue - and so far this hasn't been the case. It may be solved in 10-20 years, right now it isn't.
Now that it slowly but surely becomes clear that Core is getting ditched for Classic by the community, the volatility is getting less. Once more details emerge about the implementation path of Classic, you can expect a rally.
There is a serious risk that the post of Satoshi against XT fork is real. In that case, if the "classic" fork succeeds, what Hearn says about bitcoin dying will be ...nothing compared to a
Satoshi declaration of BTC failure.I have been following the recent block size debates through the mailing list. I had hoped the debate would resolve and that a fork proposal would achieve widespread consensus. However with the formal release of Bitcoin XT 0.11A, this looks unlikely to happen, and so I am forced to share my concerns about this very dangerous fork.
The developers of this pretender-Bitcoin claim to be following my original vision, but nothing could be further from the truth. When I designed Bitcoin, I designed it in such a way as to make future modifications to the consensus rules difficult without near unanimous agreement. Bitcoin was designed to be protected from the influence of charismatic leaders, even if their name is Gavin Andresen, Barack Obama, or Satoshi Nakamoto. Nearly everyone has to agree on a change, and they have to do it without being forced or pressured into it. By doing a fork in this way, these developers are violating the "original vision" they claim to honour.
They use my old writings to make claims about what Bitcoin was supposed to be. However I acknowledge that a lot has changed since that time, and new knowledge has been gained that contradicts some of my early opinions. For example I didn't anticipate pooled mining and its effects on the security of the network. Making Bitcoin a competitive monetary system while also preserving its security properties is not a trivial problem, and we should take more time to come up with a robust solution. I suspect we need a better incentive for users to run nodes instead of relying solely on altruism.
If two developers can fork Bitcoin and succeed in redefining what "Bitcoin" is, in the face of widespread technical criticism and through the use of populist tactics, then I will have no choice but to declare Bitcoin a failed project. Bitcoin was meant to be both technically and socially robust. This present situation has been very disappointing to watch unfold.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Do you feel lucky?
I don't.
There has been a social engineering attack and it has been successful.
If btc turns to gavincoin / nsacoin under the pretext of "larger blocks urgency" => it's dead (per Satoshi). And we may have a public obituary for it by fuckin' Satoshi.
if core folds and goes to 2mb or segwit right now => it's theoretically better than turning btc into gavincoin but it's still a social engineering attack success, in terms of pushing things and breaking consensus under the threat of a hard fork.
The parameter that "btc fails because there is no space" is for technically ignorant people. At most some dust will transact with a lower priority due to zero or low fees.
