For Bitcoin Devs Inaction Might Be A Worse Option Than A Risky Decision

If you have been following bitcoin development, you should know that for the last 6 months or so we have been at a standstill with new BIPS(bitcoin improvement proposal) unable to be brought in via a soft fork and core unwilling to do a hardfork. Because a softfork requires miners to have 95% agreement, a single actor could essentially block a BIP if they don’t agree with it. There has been drama on top of this, but im just going to try and keep it as simple as possible.

Take in mind I am trying to be as unbiased as possible because I know the debate strikes a nerve with many different people. The major BIP that is really being debated at this point is segwit which stands for segregated witness and essentially by removing some data from a regular transaction, is able to fit more transactions per block. Some who have been waiting for a hard blocksize increase, which can only be done by a hardfork are against segwit because it isn’t what they wanted. While core argues that a hard fork is too risky and risks a splitting of the chain.

The two major groups here are bitcoin core and bitcoin unlimited, each with their own opinions on how to scale bitcoin to the future. I genuinely think that both sides believe in making bitcoin better, they just have different opinions of what bitcoin should be and how we should get there. The major problem however is because bitcoin is opensource with no dictator to say “we choose this” or “we choose that”, a stalemate has broken out in which neither group can really impose changes on the main code.

There are options like a user activated softfork, which basically uses node control to push a BIP in, or if bitcoin unlimited chooses to hard fork, but both these options in my opinion would branch bitcoin into two chains rather than the one. Both core and unlimited seem to agree with me on this one, so what we see now and will see in the foreseeable future is more bickering and infighting. With fees rising to levels that many are upset with and looking at coins elsewhere, I think something eventually will have to give.

In fact, in my opinion doing nothing and keeping with inactivity is more dangerous than hardforking the code to a 2mb block size. As I wrote earlier, bitcoin dominance is at all time lows and many are fed up with how much it costs to even send a simple transaction. For many who got into bitcoin like me in 2012, the idea of micropayments and inexpensive payments was part of the appeal. I understand that untraceable censorship resistant payments should come with some sort of cost, but we have the ability for that cost to be extremely low and give a better option to many people around the world, if they would just compromise on a solution.

Both sides in this debate are extremely immature and slinging shit back and forth at eachother because they disagree with their code. There is a point in time that if we don’t actually do something and implement some sort of fix to the main bitcoin chain, adoption at the levels we see now will slow. Bitcoin is relying too heavily on its network effect and there is a real possibility that can be overthrown. I think there is still hope, but it is dwindling for me and for many others by the day.