A LUTA CONTINUA! THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES....

[cryptency_v]

The morning after the Bitcoin Gold fiasco, Bitcoin’s development team still has no idea as to precisely who was behind last morning’s “denial of service” (DDoS) attack on Bitcoin Gold’s website, while members of the crypto-community continue to grapple with practical and ideological differences over mining.

With cryptocurrency being such a contentious topic – this episode is likely to spur more heated debate about the future and implications of blockchain technology. Crypto-skeptics will likely point the affair as proof of the new technology’s inherent instability, and its status as a historical bubble. Crypto-enthusiasts on the other hand are likely to see the same events as the emergence of a new financial technology, that is in the process of slowly perfecting itself.

What both sides of the debate however can not deny, is the perhaps ironic point that the reality of human nature has for the time being, trounced the lofty pipe-dreams of egalitarianism. As more people realized the profit making potential of cryptocurrency, the process originally premised on the notion of decentralization – became increasingly concentrated in the hands of organizations whose size and wealth make them the only players able to compete.

At one time, cryptocurrency mining was possible to perform on a slightly above-average home computer equipped with a graphics card. But as mining became increasingly more difficult, (a design feature originally built into the system to maintain the deflationary nature of Bitcoin) miners had to pool together resources, sharing the workload and the electric bill. Eventually, this mutated into a parody of itself, to the point that mining operations now look more like factories, with thousands of CPUs occupying racks and shelves of warehouses full of specialist equipment.

This is the interesting thing about this third and latest Bitcoin fork, is that the impetus for its development seems to essentially be an ideological one. For those wishing to maintain ideological purity, this fork is supposed democratize and re-decentralize mining and pry the profitable activity from the grip of a relatively small group of wealthy players. The forked Bitcoin Gold system will use a different “proof-of-work” block-verification algorithm that’s friendlier to the kinds of graphics processing units (GPUs) that regular people can buy.

While it has not been yet established from whence yesterday’s DDoS originated, it does seem that its perpetrators had a vested interest in blocking Bitcoin Gold’s attempt at “democratization.” The main driving force behind the development of Bitcoin Gold is a Hong Kong based company LightningASIC whose outspoken CEO – Mr. Jack Liao – has been an unequivocal critic of mining in its current form, and the companies that profit from it. Members of the cryptocurrency community have already begun to speculate that the nature of the attack has at least partially something to do with the Mr. Liao’s unreticent opinions. It remains to be seen who will have the upper hand in this unfolding power struggle – the idealistic crypto revolutionaries or human nature.