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    Adam Back on Bitcoin XT ☶ cryptocurrencies spectrum.ieee.org
    itistoday avatar via itistoday 3 years ago | cached | 2 comments

The original title, I feel, is a poor one even though it’s accurate. I’d prefer to call it “The most accurate and comprehensive explanation of what’s going on with Bitcoin and Bitcoin XT”, but that would violate the submission guidelines (no editorializing). :P

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    steveno avatar steveno edited 3 years ago | link

    I was skeptically siding with the XT guys because I had yet to see the other side of the argument.

    Frankly, I feel like this guy’s argument is much better. I’ve switched camps.

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      brinker avatar brinker 3 years ago | link

      Indeed. It’s a well done article that both clearly explains the situations to newcomers, and provides a strong and compelling argument for why the XT fork is a bad idea both for the Bitcoin project and for those who have participated in Bitcoin or will want to in the future.

      It seems perhaps that there should be some official “goals of Bitcoin.” Some set of core principles against which all project decisions must be judged. Something like the list Adam gives in the interview:

      If you say it’s the fact that it’s permissionless, so that anybody can use it without permission from anybody, and it’s policy neutral, so you can pay anybody and nobody’s going to judge payments, or block your payments, or revoke your payments and that kind of thing—the fact that those properties are possible is because Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer system. Policy neutrality is implemented by decentralization.

      So:

      1. Bitcoin is permissionless
      2. Bitcoin is policy neutral
      3. Bitcoin is decentralized

      This list may of course be incomplete. But it would seem that, given that the XT change clearly violates number 3 in the long run, it would have to be ruled out based on violation of the core principles.