The chief expert at the Bitcoin Foundation has shared his thoughts about the outcome of the recent Satoshi Roundtable, accusing some developers of reluctance to adopt any on-chain scaling solution.
The letter of Gavin Andresen, published on his web page, lists the key discussion topics at the Satoshi Roundtable and Andresen's own impressions of what he had witnessed at the event. The block size limit was the most hotly debated issue at the conference, which took place a week ago in Florida. According to Andresen, primarily all participants were mostly interested to discover each other members’ choice. Andresen recalls the question posed at the general meeting: the participants, supporting different solutions, raised their hands to be counted. According to Andresen, around forty or fifty people (which would make the majority of the audience) voted against the Segregated Witness roadmap, created at the Hong Kong meeting several weeks ago.
“There was a lot of talk about moving the July of 2017 date closer,” the Andresen's letter reads. But the roundtable resulted in no consensus, albeit some interesting ideas were voiced out. Among the promising proposals, he mentions a three month grace period after 95% of hashpower voted yes, and 75% coin-age voting. Still, he emphasises that the second scheme needs months to be discussed in details, its code still to be written and reviewed.
The main problem faced by the bitcoin community is developers' reluctance to adopt “any on-chain scaling solution any time soon,” believes Andresen. He claims that some of them prefer off-chain solutions like the Lightning Network, mistakenly assuming that it would play out better in the long-term perspective. That is the reason, according to Andresen, why some developers resist any blocksize limit increase at all: they believe this way they will push the whole bitcoin community to adopt this long-term solution faster.
“They are wrong,” comments Andresen laconically.
With no blocksize limit increase, off-chain solutions would become increasingly popular. Andresen warns of the appearance of “highly centralized ‘clearing’ agreements between exchanges and miners and merchants or merging of miners and transactions creators.” He remembers that the first steps towards this danger have been already done: BTCC, an exchange and mining pool at the same time, enhanced its portfolio with a new service called BlockPriority offering their customers a higher priority and faster realisation for their transactions.
This trend looks like “a symptom of an unhealthy network.” The author insists that the bitcoin system is becoming “increasingly unreliable and vulnerable to attacks.”
Andresen does not mention any names or company titles, as the roundtable discussions comply with the “Chatham House Rule” that prohibit the revelations of speaker's identity or affiliation.
Earlier yet another Satoshi Roundtable participant, Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO, published his own vision and criticism of what had happened at the event.
Elena Platonova
