For an organization that claims to believe in consensus, Bitcoin Core—or at least, some of its members—just couldn’t resist spewing vitriol aimed at intimidating the rest of the community.
Bitcoin Core, if you’re just joining us, is insisting that blockchain technology’s 1MB size limit is doing fine in its current form, even though an increase in block size will pave the way for a more robust bitcoin environment. Core believes that among other things, increasing the blockchain size to anything beyond the current 1MB cap will threaten cryptocurrency’s decentralized state, and some of its advocates, such as Blockstream co-founder Greg Maxwell, has demonstrated a willingness to stridently attack anyone who dares suggest otherwise.
And it’s not just Maxwell who will go to great lengths—yes, even trolling—to defend their “faith” stance on the block size issue. Eli Afram, a developer, business analyst and cryptanalyst, has listed “some of the most outrageous and outlandish comments from the Core dev team” in a CoinGeek post.
First on Maxwell’s list is Blockstream co-founder Mark Friedenbach’s statement that “slow confirmation, high fees will be the norm in any safe outcome.” To which, Afram commented: “‘Slow’ anything in software is a detriment to user experience. You learn that in your first year of software dev 101.”
“It has been proven that the network can handle a 4MB blocksize today without any threat to decentralization, in a recent study. So what’s not safe? To advocate “slow confirmations” as if that’s a good thing, demonstrates just how disenfranchised this individual is from the real user,” Afram wrote.
Then there’s Maxwell, whose extensive list of outlandish commentaries to undermine confidence in other proposals includes statements like, “I don’t think that transaction fees mattering is a failing, it’s a success.”
“When it happens due to technical limits, it’s one thing. But when these fees start to matter due to a very artificial, ‘magical’ 1MB number in the code, there is a problem,” Afram stated.
Impossible not to be on the list is Luke-Jr, the Core developer who insists the 1MB limit is already far too large for today’s blockchain use. His other eyebrow-raising quote? “It is no longer possible to keep fees low.”
Of course there’s a way, according to Afram, and the only step needed is to tweak “the magic number.”
Finally, there’s Core developer Wladimir J. van der Laan, who’s afraid that “increasing the blocksize will kick this can down the road and let people… relax.”
What’s wrong with people relaxing? Nothing, except that Core wants users on edge and begging for SegWit, Afram stated.
Current bitcoin price
The price of bitcoin dropped to $1,700 level during mid-morning trading on Tuesday.
