Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong - $5000 bet regarding successful Bitcoin hard fork

[nandibear]

Coinbase CEO & co-founder Brian Armstrong's exact words (he wrote them) were:

I’ll bet you $5,000 that bitcoin’s first hard fork works out just fine

His statement was made two days ago (feb 14 2016) at Medium.com

He created some slides (31 slides) to support his position, including:

(1) Bitcoin is not having a crisis, it is having an election

(2) Bitcoin is having a debate:
(a) Small Blocks - Bitcoin Core - decentralization > scale (b) Large Blocks - Bitcoin Classic - decentralization > scale (3) In an election there might be a lot of name calling, but in the end one person wins and we all remain one country

(4) Tradition election vs Bitcoin election:
(a Vote ballot box = Vote with CPU power (b) New person = New Features (c) Every four years = Can happen any time (d) 51% or more = any threshold can be used (over 50%) (5) Bitcoin is not splitting in two it is upgrading

(6) Bitcoin is entering an era of multiple competing nodes

(7) New teams have emerged to challenge Core:
(a) Bitcoin Classic (b) Bloq (c) [redacted] (?) (d) BTCD (8) Which bitcoin node will be the:
(a) Chrome of bitcoin (Incredible performance benchmarks & sponsor with deep pockets) (b) Netscape of bitcoin (Early pioneer that fades & invented most building blocks) (c) Internet Explorer of bitcoin (Questionable quality & forced upon people via monopoly) (d) Mozilla of bitcoin (quick ideological & die hard open source) (9) Coinbase is going to be supporting Bitcoin Classic

All of the above was written either in my owns words, paraphrases or truncated verbatim citations gathered from the following sources:

Coinbase CEO Armstrong Sets 5000 Wager That Bitcoin Fork Works Out Fine
Cryptocoins News
February 15, 2016
by Elliot Maras

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/coinbas ... -out-fine/

I’ll bet you $5,000 that bitcoin’s first hard fork works out just fine
Medium
February 14, 2015
by Brian Armstrong

https://medium.com/@barmstrong/i-ll-bet ... .i0e9u8qfi

[arnoudk]

I expect 7c to be something that Coinbase is working on themselves.

Brian Armstrong did (if memory serves me well) that they were working on a bitcoind implementation that works efficiently at their scale.

[arnoudk]

Come on, small block supporters! Put your money where your mouth is Brian Armstrong just made a 1:10 leveraged bet: you bet $500 bitcoin won't scale, he'll put $5000 saying it will!

And no one is taking the bet?

Very telling, indeed.

https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/sta ... 0607280128

https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/sta ... 9077000192

https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/sta ... 0580548608

https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/sta ... 3133680640

https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/sta ... 0695284736

Some people on twitter call these kind of tweets "playing politics". It's not. Talking but not acting is politics. Stalling is politics. More meetings is politics. Inaction is politics. Putting up your own money for a statement you believe in, is the opposite of politics.

[arnoudk]

I expect 7c to be something that Coinbase is working on themselves.

Brian Armstrong did (if memory serves me well) that they were working on a bitcoind implementation that works efficiently at their scale.

Found the quote. Here it is: https://medium.com/@barmstrong/scaling- ... .kchjxffd8

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).

(Sorry for hijacking the thread! I'll pause for a minute and let someone get a reply in!)

[nandibear]

I expect 7c to be something that Coinbase is working on themselves.

Brian Armstrong did (if memory serves me well) that they were working on a bitcoind implementation that works efficiently at their scale.

Found the quote. Here it is: https://medium.com/@barmstrong/scaling- ... .kchjxffd8

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).

(Sorry for hijacking the thread! I'll pause for a minute and let someone get a reply in!)

@arnoudk

Excellent find!

I'm reading the cited article now and looking for more information regarding this ...custom node we [Coinbase] wrote which works at our scale...

[nandibear]

In the article cited by arnoudk I also learned the following:

In their current forms the following can process these amounts (according to the cited article) of transactions per second:

Bitcoin - up to 7 transactions

Paypal - about 100 transactions

Visa - about 4,000 transactions

[iFixBTCmemoryIssues]

Brain says, "It's crazy no one has taken me up on my bet",

It isn't so crazy because the majority of opposition have their own interests in mind whereas Brian doesn't.

So many of these guys seek "Satoshi" fame, if you want that type of fame - invent something.