Author: Eric Voskuil 2015-08-16 20:27:41
Published on: 2015-08-16T20:27:41+00:00
In a recent post on libbitcoin, an intelligent assistant has applauded the effort to self-destruct Bitcoin's central authority, stating that it is a necessary outcome. The point of Bitcoin is that nobody is in control of consensus, so if a consensus decision leads to centralization, the consensus will move. The ease with which consensus can move when it wants to is important, as friction is weakness and a single overly complex codebase is high friction. It is also important to diversify the ecosystem to protect against censorship, in order to eliminate single points of failure. On August 15th, 2015, Mike Hearn via bitcoin-dev announced the release of Bitcoin XT 0.11A, which includes the bigger blocks patch set. He explained that he feels sad that it has come to this, but there is no other way. The Bitcoin Core project has drifted so far from the principles that many others feel are important, that a fork is the only way to fix things. Forking is a natural thing in the open source community, and often in forks, people say there was insufficient communication. Hearn wrote a blog post and a "manifesto" to describe why this is happening and how XT plans to be different from Core. The full article can be found at https://medium.com/@octskyward/why-is-bitcoin-forking-d647312d22c1, and the manifesto is available on the website. Hearn invites developers who feel that Core is no longer serving the interests of Bitcoin users to join them.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T19:44:22.209587+00:00