Bitcoin Community deadlock - Good or Bad?

The bitcoin community is split into two factions with each favouring a solution incompatible with the other. The whole bitcoin split and the raging infighting would have seemed unthinkable a few years ago, but here we are.

Some are of the opinion that bitcoin is the victim of its own success.

Bitcoin transactions were effectively free before 2014. It started slowly with small amounts to get a speedy resolution. Nowadays, it is far more expensive and even started looking like the cost of a credit card payments. Is this really as negative as it is made out?

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The first faction is led by Roger Ver. One of his main allies is the Chinese server manufacturer Jihan Wu.

Ver and Wu have taken up the Bitcoin Unlimited banner. Their solution is to directly increase the code’s limit on how much data a block can hold.

Bitcoin Unlimited will solve the immediate problem of the backlog and the growth in future transactions.

The solution can enable bitcoin to compete with credit card solutions in the future. Unfortunately, there is also a downside to Bitcoin Unlimited.

Larger blocks would require more computing power, storage, and network bandwidth to process causes the solution to be more expensive. The increase in cost will concentrate the mining operations in fewer hands causing a more centralised network which is less secure and less democratic.

The second faction is led by the Bitcoin Core developers group.

They developed an alternative solution which they called Segregated Witness, or SegWit.

SegWit free up a smaller amount of space in the block for transactions, while making it easier for secondary systems to handle smaller transactions outside of the main blockchain.

These two solutions imply two fundamentally different visions for Bitcoin which can be regarded as the root cause of the conflict in the community.

The vision which supports the Bitcoin Unlimited group (Ver and Wu) want to see bitcoin as a day-to-day, “open” payments network which can compete with credit card usage - to buy anything from a cup of coffee to a car. Those who support SegWit are more likely to see bitcoin as “digital gold” - a long-term store of value which requires lesser transactions.

Some are saying that the internal community fight signals a failure and that a more authority structure is needed to make the big decisions.

In my personal opinion this conflict is positive for two reasons:

1. The two visions for Bitcoin were always there, but they could live together. But the development of Bitcoin reaches the stage where a final vision needs to be decided for it to face the future. Maybe a split in the chain is needed to accommodate the two visions.
2. Management by a community is a new concept. It is something that appeared with freeware technology and already applied with success to a certain degree. The Linux community is an example of that. The Bitcoin community function well until to point where those involved got too much to lose. However, this disagreement is going to be solved will set the example how future communities will be (or not be) managed.

I am a strong believer in decentralisation as the way to go. I, therefore, has a strong believe that the bitcoin community will find a solution to this agreement. Let wait and see what it will be!

Source:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2017/06/internal_conflict_could_split_bitcoin_in_half.html