Bitcoin ‘Forked’ in Contentious Bid to Address Scaling Concerns

“If two developers can fork bitcoin and succeed in redefining what ‘bitcoin’ is, in the face of widespread technical criticism and through the use of populist tactics, then I will have no choice but to declare bitcoin a failed project. Bitcoin was meant to be both technically and socially robust.”

And we’re back ladies and gentleman. Recently I shared an article on the importance of increasing the blockchain size and basically proposal bip-0101. Sadly I think someone woke up a few hours ago to realize what I am realising just now; this is a whole new beast. Driven by frustration they have decided to embark in creating (for lack of a better term) an alt-coin: Bitcoin XT. I completely get the importance to change the consensus model as not much consensus is happening, but now opening the doors for 1,000s of BitCoins flavors ruled by only the developers is just recepie for chaos. I am all in favor for increasing the block size, but this is just not the method.

“Bitcoin XT will use the “traditional” open source model, Hearn said, in which the code ultimately reflects the decisions of its maintainer. Unlike Bitcoin Core, it won’t run on consensus, but can be forked and modified by others.”

It will be interesting to see what happens at the end of the day. For now, this decision highlights the weaknesses in the governance model of BitCoin and risks the entire ecosystem to wars that could potentially bring about a Napster moment for BitCoin. Today we saw the market reaction to Bitcoin XT: a drop from the 250s to the 220s; and I don’t blame people for selling out. I love risk and I am willing to take some, so I will be sticking with what I have for the time being. But make no mistake, I don’t believe this hard fork is a good thing and I encourage people who have a way of voting to point their votes to NO. I say YES to increasing the block size, NO to BitCoin XT.

Source: Bitcoin ‘Forked’ in Contentious Bid to Address Scaling Concerns