Bitcoin as we know it is at a crossroads. The community is sitting on an opportunity to grow Bitcoin as a currency and the Bitcoin blockchain as a network exponentially, but only if we can work together and stop working against each other.
Dr. Craig Wright, one of the early minds behind Bitcoin and Chief Scientist at nChain, proclaimed “there will be no king in Bitcoin” and the Bitcoin community must come together and start acting like one.
This proclamation comes at a time when the community is hotly debating over how to deal with Bitcoin’s underlying scaling issue and wasting energy over unnecessary “internal” politics.
“There is no one individual who can ever exceed the market. We saw this in socialism. We saw this in Russia and China. There is no person who can do the calculations. There is no machine, never will be anything that can do all the calculations”, shared Dr. Wright.
“Information is distributed, every single individual knows more or less about their own life than someone else. They know parts of what makes them tick…I’m not a big fan of behavioral economics. I believe people are rational. What I don’t believe is that other people can decide what is rational”, he added.
Coming together as a community to work on a solution that will create true scale for the Bitcoin network- as opposed to an illusion of scale- is what Dr. Wright would like to see happen.
“So we’ve got to weigh things up rationally and we all can. Not because someone else has decided what’s good, but because we can. That’s where we get into what the community needs”, he said.
“There’s no one group who can start setting what is good for Bitcoin. We have a market, a world. It is not a group of developers who know more than anyone else. Markets work through competition. If you have an idea, you can’t restrict other people, you have to allow competition, that’s how the market works”, Dr. Wright added.
The crucial contribution of miners to the Bitcoin ecosystem is something that must not be forgotten. Dr. Wright is clear on his view of the miners’ role in the future of the Bitcoin network.
“The miners are the groups, the companies, the everything else, that secure the network. So when you actually send a transaction, it is settled into a block by being mined. A lot of people have this idea that nodes can include individuals running at home, but as an individual, you care about your own transactions. As a miner, you secure the network. The network works because of miners. Not individuals, miners”, Dr. Wright explained.
“Now when you go to a store and buy something, part of the problem is people have this idea that they need to secure their transaction. But the store needs to secure the transaction. You walk out with goods, they get your Bitcoin. You really don’t care. No one cares if their money isn’t processed properly. Miners care because they get paid from transaction fees and they get paid to secure the network”, he added.
Despite popular belief, Dr. Wright pointed out how altruism is actually not a part of Bitcoin, especially when it comes to the role of miners.
“People get paid and its competitive. Miners come and go and the better miners, the ones who do it faster and more efficiently, they survive and they make the Bitcoin network more secure over time”, he said.
