Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong just published two must read articles

[BitcoinXio]

Check these out. Just published, well written, well thought out in my opinion and explained in an easy to understand way. With some nice shout outs to the Bitcoin.com forum too, so make sure to give 'em some love.

Bitcoin’s Elegant Upgrade Mechanism: Miner Voting
https://medium.com/@barmstrong/bitcoin- ... .dgojf7ad5

Scaling Bitcoin: The Great Block Size Debate
https://medium.com/@barmstrong/scaling- ... .l7s0kxi9q

[rogerver]

Both his articles are great!

We should also remember what counts regarding Bitcoin decentralization as well:
https://twitter.com/rogerkver/status/683677986630033408

[BitcoinXio]

Both his articles are great!

We should also remember what counts regarding Bitcoin decentralization as well:
https://twitter.com/rogerkver/status/683677986630033408

I'm still constantly amazed at the foresight Satoshi had when he built Bitcoin.

People should remember he first coded Bitcoin back in 2007, then wrote the whitepaper, then published it in late 2008!

[BitcoinNewsMagazine]

I wonder what Brian Armstrong thinks about Bitcoin Unlimited? If Coinbase switched from XT to BU they would directly be able to increase block size with out mining.

From BU Forum:

Bitcoin Unlimited is proposing that full nodes and mining nodes decide the blocksize settings for themselves from among BIPs or their own custom configuration, with Bitcoin Unlimited being a vehicle for doing that more conveniently (users don't have to mod the code themselves).

The idea is that users would converge on a consensus Schelling point through various communication channels because of the overwhelming economic incentive to do so. The situation that results would be no different than now except that there would be no reliance on Core (or XT) to set what the options are. Bitcoin Unlimited, as software, constitutes a meta-proposal that rejects the idea that it is the job of Core (or XT) developers to govern policy or available policy options on blocksize. Bitcoin Unlimited would relegate developer-led BIPs to the status of mere recommendations

[rogerver]

I wonder what Brian Armstrong thinks about Bitcoin Unlimited?

He mentioned in several places that he finds the idea interesting.

[Windowly]

Cornell University professor Emin Gün Sirer made some good points calling into question some of Armstrong's understanding about the bitcoin space power dynamics here -- Time for Bitcoin Users to Reclaim Their Voice

He brings up the fact that exchanges, payment processors and merchants maybe have the greatest power in the equation.

[LiteCoinGuy]

I wonder what Brian Armstrong thinks about Bitcoin Unlimited? If Coinbase switched from XT to BU they would directly be able to increase block size with out mining.

From BU Forum:

Bitcoin Unlimited is proposing that full nodes and mining nodes decide the blocksize settings for themselves from among BIPs or their own custom configuration, with Bitcoin Unlimited being a vehicle for doing that more conveniently (users don't have to mod the code themselves).

The idea is that users would converge on a consensus Schelling point through various communication channels because of the overwhelming economic incentive to do so. The situation that results would be no different than now except that there would be no reliance on Core (or XT) to set what the options are. Bitcoin Unlimited, as software, constitutes a meta-proposal that rejects the idea that it is the job of Core (or XT) developers to govern policy or available policy options on blocksize. Bitcoin Unlimited would relegate developer-led BIPs to the status of mere recommendations

"I think BitcoinXT is one of several good proposals that we’d be happy with, but people shouldn’t read much into it beyond that (we are running a variety of node types in production including bitcoin core, XT, a custom node we wrote which works at our scale, and we will probably add others in the future like BitcoinUnlimited)".

https://medium.com/@barmstrong/scaling- ... .rudx3w8a3

[nakedbitcoins]

Cornell University professor Emin Gün Sirer made some good points calling into question some of Armstrong's understanding about the bitcoin space power dynamics here -- Time for Bitcoin Users to Reclaim Their Voice

He brings up the fact that exchanges, payment processors and merchants maybe have the greatest power in the equation.

I agree that exchanges, payment processors, and merchants need to have the greatest power in the equation. It makes the most sense to me.