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I’m not sure if you’re willfully misinterpreting what happened or just unware, but the debate over how to scale bitcoin (basically, on-chain vs off-chain) is know being played out with Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash. And it’s looking like big blocks is actually a solution for scalability (lower fees, faster transactions), at least in the short term.

(For those not aware, Bitcoin Cash is a fork of Bitcoin that removes segwit, the initial groundwork for off-chain scaling solutions, and instead simply increased the blocksize; so far this has proven to greatly reduce network congestion.)

Maybe it was the right call for Coinbase to not support many of the forks, but they will be adding support for Bitcoin Cash in 2018 (at least withdrawals). So it’s inaccurate to characterize Brian Armstrong on the “losing” side of these debates.

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Bitcoin Cash is the brute force solution to scaling. Increasing block size results in longer validation times as well as slower block propagation. Both of these things lead to centralization. The entire purpose of bitcoin is to be as decentralized as possible.

Anyways, here's a video released today of a lightning transaction happening on mainnet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a73Gz3Tvx3k

Here's a video of Greg Maxwell explaining how slight propagation delays can lead to drastic increases in centralization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHIuuKCm53o

And here's rootstock, an ethereum compatible solution for smart contracts: https://www.rsk.co/

Bitcoin Cash is like trying to solve traffic congestion by adding more lanes.

Why would anyone ever use rsk? They created a centralized clone of Ethereum and charge 20% fees, or something like that.

Here's a truly revolutionary scaling solution by the inventor of Bitcoin's Lightning network and Vitalik Buterin: https://plasma.io/

Also here is an Ethereum's equivalent of the Lightning network, which was deployed on main net recently: https://raiden.network/

I don't mind eth. I hope they can solve their problems. But they have problems, and they are running out of time to work them out. Their blockchain is out of control size. Nodes are dropping and they aren't coming back up. I've heard about sharding and pos, but i haven't seen anything approaching a solution yet. It's an issue.

Edit: > Why would anyone ever use rsk?

ICO. Share offer.

> Increasing block size results in longer validation times as well as slower block propagation

Processing more transactions requires more resources. That's not a bad thing. One might note that currently Bitcoin Cash is usable as a medium of exchange, whereas Bitcoin is not.

They can reduce the bandwidth requirements by implementing e.g. compact blocks.

Feel free to implement your code changes on the alt of your choice. Bitcoin node users remain unaffected.

It's over right? The whole attempt to sideline the bitcoin development team failed, and now that uncertainty has been removed, the price of bitcoin is skyrocketing. That's because bitcoin is valuable for what it is, not for unproven use-cases that decrease bitcoin security. We will get to those use-cases through layering bitcoin, and will not have to sacrifice security to do it.

Accept it. Move on.

And guess what, businesses are moving on. Steam just dropped Bitcoin as a method of payment. And before that OpenBazaar. And Yours.

FWIW OpenBazaar has not dropped Bitcoin as a method of payment, just chosen to diversify payment options.

Using the blockchain for one-off payments between participants is never a viable solution. The establishment of lightning allows commits to be aligned with the long term relationship between two participants. Even after that relationship ends, a completely unrelated payment may be routed through your channel, earning you a micropayment. There was never a solution to that type of functionality with a 10 minute block creation schedule.

That went live on main chain two days ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a73Gz3Tvx3k

Blockchains are successfully used for one-off payments, even Bitcoin used to be. Not anymore. And Lightning doesn't solve that problem. Thus other cryptocurrencies will thrive as methods of payment, whereas Bitcoin will remain a settlement layer for recurring payments at best.

Ah lightning network, the vaporware that is always just around the corner...

The Bitcoin community I once knew is truly dead, if making purchases is an "unproven use-case" and the desire to do so on other chains is met with such hostility.

Fortunately among the other cryptocurrencies are communities that have not yet been compromised by greed.

You should invest in litecoin. They have had the blockspace you're looking for for years.

> so far this has proven to greatly reduce network congestion.

their main stroke of genius was not having any transactions on their chain

Bitcoin Cash has a much lower blocksize, not larger. It is the maximum limit that is larger. They regularly have < 100 kB blocks. Of course there is no congestion. Nobody uses it.

Coinbase is only supporting Bitcoin Cash because there was a large and very legitimate class action lawsuit headed their way if they didn't.

Just out of curiosity, why only BCash and not the other "big" forks of BTC (like Gold)?

Nothing wrong with my memory

http://bitcoinist.com/coinbase-ceo-brian-armstrong-announces...

Not to mention being a signatory to the nya, being the attempted hostile takeover of bitcoin via 2x that crashed one block before the fork. And let's not forget :

http://www.coinfox.info/news/persons/5012-brian-armstrong-ca...

Losing side. Every time.

And no one is interested in a centralized alt like bch, which is why it has virtually no traffic. If people were interested in that use case, they'd be using litecoin, having double the capacity of bch, as well as having segwit, and atomic swaps with bitcoin.

I dislike it when people like you try to paint segwit2x as a "hostile" attempt to take over Bitcoin. It was not. A few confrontational segwit2x supporters made it look this way, but in reality the people at the center of the movement genuinely cared about simply making Bitcoin scale.

See also a longer explanation I wrote at: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7508mh/comment/do7umhy

Segwit2x attempted to replace the existing Bitcoin software and network with something the entire current development team thought was a terrible idea. It relied on the premise that the reason almost every person who had experience deploying changes to Bitcoin opposed it was because they were part of a secret conspiracy to cripple Bitcoin. The software was developed by a single guy, was to be deployed on a ludicrously tight schedule with no real code review, and had bugs that would've caused chaos if t wasn't cancelled at the last minute due to opposition. Hostile takeover seems accurate.

Oh, and BitPay (the payment provider Steam used) tried to trick users into switching to it via a blog post telling them they needed to upgrade to it because of Segwit and their money was at risk if they didn't. Every user who followed their advice will now have a client that doesn't work.

"Everybody should sign this paper and promise to use btc1 instead of bitcoind. We have a guy on payroll who is both project maintainer and lead developer of said software."

Yes, I can see how some people might see that as a bit hostile. It's as if IBM went around all the Fortune 500 soliciting signatures to swap out all Libreoffice for Openoffice.

Except perhaps Openoffice is a healthy project in comparison.

Is Armstrong involved in it? It's an attack. I have nothing against the business of coinbase. They provide a service and are compensated for it. He needs to just butt his head out of technology governance.

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