What are the "inherent flaws"? Seems like the bitcoin blockchain has done its job better than any other blockchain for longer. Also, it's open source.. You can submit a proposal yourself if you want to fix it..
Not really. The vast majority of the bitcoin community has been trying to do just that. But a few devs have unilaterally been able to block the changes. The Devs have a lot of "soft power" to do stuff like that.
They want these changes to happen, they just want the Core Development team to say that they are going to stay out of the way, and not attempt to burn the whole thing down if they don't get their way.
Basically, they can scare people into thinking that there is going to be two separate, competing chains. This would cause prices to crash , and crash hard.
Because of this threat to burn the whole thing to the ground, they prevent the community from acting in the first place, even though it has the support to do so.
Doesn't matter the majority of users have moved to the new fork. That becomes the new core.
>They can say that they have 10% of the mining power and threaten to not move over to the hard fork.
Why would this matter? That 10% of miners will move over quickly or lose money by mining on a fork with no value.
>Basically, they can scare people into thinking that there is going to be two separate, competing chains.
There would be but since the majority of users and miners and companies want the one you want theirs would be losing right?
>This would cause prices to crash , and crash hard.
Why? If the vast majority want the change then they will just continue on as normal. It's only the people still using the old fork that will have problems.
None of these problems exist if the majority truely wants the change.
And if they do that, then there is a chance that there will be two competing forks, instead of one, and each competing fork will dump their coins on the other fork, and basically cause the whole thing to crash.
Core can't "win" by doing this, but they can certainly make the rest of us lose. This threat, along with their constant insistence that improvements are Just Around The Corner, has allowed them to delay efforts to coordinate and make the changes that the community wants.
Eventually people will wizen up to the fact that their improvements are never coming, but until then, they are playing the delaying game to buy themselves as much time as possible until they are able to get their competing, lighting network out of the door.
If there is one fork with 5-10% of the hashing power why do you think anyone would care about it?
What do you mean by dump their coins on the other fork? You mean like try to sell them on an exchange? But the majority of users would be on the new fork right so they would have the majority of coins so why does it matter if the core developers dump their coins? Do you believe it to really be so fragile that a dozen users could crash the whole thing just by selling their coins?
Have you considered that the real reason there hasn't been a change is that because the people that want it aren't actually in the majority?
Are you actually for real?
This is the current mining pool distribution: https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/pools
Antpool, which represents 17% is in favor of 2MB, and has threatened to NOT include any Core changes until it happens.
Proof: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4l564f/bitcoin_cor...
f2Pool, which is 23%, supports 2mb.
Proof: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=700411.msg13571787#m...
BTCC, which is 13%, supports 2MB
Proof: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/40az4o/bobby_lee_b...
BW, which is 12%, supports 8MB! Huobi, (HaoBTC), is 7%, and also supports 8MB.
Proof for both: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3a5qj5/draft_signe...
KNCMiner, which is 2%, supports bitcoin classic (2MB hardfork)
Half of slush pool (5% total, so 2.5%) supports classic.
The only major miner that hasn't explicitly supported some sort of block size increase, is I believe Bitfury, which is ~10%.
Now, please add up all of these numbers, and see if it adds up to a majority.
My other points that you skipped over all still stand. If the majority truely wanted change they could do it painlessly. But they don't so the minority that does has to find something to blame besides lack of support so you come up with a ridiculous dream in which a handful of developers are holding everything up.
Thats a common claim made on easily sockpuppeted forums, but when put to cryptographic votes, we find pretty much the opposite response: http://bitcoinocracy.com/arguments/if-non-core-hard-fork-win...
Similarly, I've found in person meetings to also yield similar results.
> But a few devs
Really, almost the _entire_ technical community; with the exception of a few high profile companies and their consultants.
> have unilaterally been able to block the changes
That isn't how Bitcoin works.
Bitcoin development has been hijacked by Blockstream since 2014.
It's a flaw because users did nothing wrong yet their transaction could take hours if not days to confirm if it confirms at all.
The most simple and straightforward fix is to increase the maximum blocksize from 1MB to something larger, which many users in the space have demanded. The max-blocksize was always meant to deter spam and attacks.
New users should use Bitcoin Classic, which fixes the problem and subverts Blockstream's obstruction.