All right.
Everyone please take a seat because we don't have nearly enough time to cover all the topics
in the Bitcoin scaling debate.
So I do welcome everyone for coming.
Thanks for joining us.
I'm Jameson Lopp.
I'll be the moderator for this panel.
And today we are joined by a number of distinguished panelists.
And they bring with them a diverse variety of perspectives on scaling Bitcoin.
To my left, to your right, we have Eric Lombroso, CEO of Cyphrex and a Bitcoin Core contributor.
We have Andrew Lee, the CEO of Purse, which also supports the development of the Bitcoin
implementation.
We have Bobby Lee, who is the CEO of BTCC Exchange and Bitcoin Mining Operation.
We have Peter Reisen, who is the chief scientist of Bitcoin Unlimited.
And finally we have Stephen Payer, who is the CEO of Bitpay, which does a lot of merchant
integrations and payment processing.
So let's set a few ground rules here.
I would like for this to be a very informal conversation with me doing as minimal moderation
as possible.
But in order to keep things moving, I would like for you to limit your responses to 60
seconds or less.
In fact, if you could limit your responses to 140 characters or less, that would be preferable.
Twitter still hasn't figured out how to scale the size of tweets.
And I'm still gunning to overtake Bobby's follower count.
So more tweets would be great.
And also I don't want you to feel like you need to speak in a certain order or that you
have to contribute to a specific topic that we're covering.
Let's try to be additive rather than repetitive.
And our time is short.
We're going to compress as much as we can into it.
But this, of course, is for the audience.
We want to give the audience as much information in the time that we have.
So before we start the discussion, I would like to set the stage just by getting a sentiment
from the audience.
The next time that I say the word signal, please make some noise by clapping, yelling,
hooting, and hollering, whatever you want, if you're frustrated by the Bitcoin scaling
debate.
And the more frustrated you are, be more vigorous in your signaling.
Okay.
So it sounds like we have a significant amount of frustration.
And that, I believe, is exactly why we're here.
Now we're all in the same boat.
We all want to make Bitcoin better.
It's just we have conflicting visions for what path to take and what course to steer
the ship on.
So I think that we can all agree on one thing.
We want to break the deadlock.
We want to get moving forward and working on more interesting things rather than repeating
the same old debate year after year.
So for the rest of the audience, while we are having the discussion, I want you to feel
free to send your questions.
We'll do it via Twitter, of course.
My Twitter handle is L-O-P-P. That's Lima Oscar Papa Papa.
If your question is directed at a specific panelist, please let me know.
And if you don't have a Twitter account, feel free to join us in the year 2017.
So let's get this thing started.
Rather than starting off talking about specific proposals because most of them have already
been beaten to death, let's get a little bit more meta.
Do the panelists think that it's possible for us to safely and reliably deploy and activate
consensus changes in a less contentious and less hostile manner than we've been experiencing
for the past several years?
Well, before I get started, I just wanted to say I've been involved in Bitcoin since
almost six years ago.
It's been an amazing adventure.
I've gotten the pleasure and the privilege of working with some of the best people in
the space and in the world, and I really feel honored to be able to work with these people
on some of the most amazing stuff that's been done.
And I would like to do a shout out to all the people that have supported us in all these
efforts.
The last couple of years have been really tough, but I'm glad to see that people appreciate
the work that these guys do, and I'm really thankful for that and appreciative of that.
And I would also like to thank CoinDesk for giving us a chance to be up here talking to
you guys.
I did a Twitter poll, and I asked people specifically what they wanted me to talk about and whether
or not they wanted me to wear a particular user-activated hat.
And they said yes, so I have to do this because this here is the first user-activated hat.
All right.
That sounds like a yes.
Anyone else?
How do you feel about the current environment?
Can we do better?
Yeah.
I definitely think we can.
I mean, it's definitely possible to upgrade Bitcoin.
We have to be able to upgrade Bitcoin as we progress.
There's an issue with the scaling topic in that it's been politicized, right?
And anytime you make an issue political, it's very hard for people to take a stand and reconsider
when options change, new proposals are on the table, and things like that.
In politics, they refer to it as flip-flopping, right?
And we have kind of the same thing here.
People are taking screenshots of what people said from two, three years ago and retweeting
it and things like that.
So I think it's important for everybody to just kind of keep an open mind and consider
new options and proposals as more information becomes available.
I think it's certainly possible to have non-contentious changes to consensus.
We've done it plenty of times in the past.
I think it's a question of what the change is and the nature of that change as to how
divisive it becomes and how contentious it becomes.
Yeah.
And in my opinion, I think people are always asking, how should decisions in Bitcoin be
made?
But I think an interesting question is, how are decisions made?
And in my opinion, decisions are made by Nakamoto consensus.
And that involves two different actors.
There's miners that have direct control of what blocks they mine upon and what they put
in their blocks.
And there's the market as a whole, which has this indirect control that influences the
miners to make decisions on what to include.
So I think the more we recognize that process that already exists, the more we can help
facilitate that process work efficiently by improved communication, improved signaling,
and just events like this.
Yeah.
I would say we don't all have to stay on the same chain.
Bitcoin, anybody in this room can go off and create their own fork of Bitcoin at any time.
That's the freedom that everybody has and the right that everybody has, including the
user-activated platform.
I would never tell you, you can't do that, right?
It's completely your prerogative to do that and to build and work with the chain you want
to work with.
Very astute.
From a technical standpoint, we don't have to all get along.
But obviously, there are enough incentives in place that have kept us together for this
far, even though we have disagreed on a number of things.
So I want to comment.
One thing I like, people don't often think about, is we've been facing the scaling issue
for up to the last two years.
And of course, many people are frustrated, myself included.
But at the same time, it actually proves to us why Bitcoin is truly independent and decentralized.
I'm glad that the scaling issue wasn't decided over a weekend and it was just rolled out
in 2015 or 2016.
But I do strongly believe that after two long years of hard thinking about this, I think
2017 just might be the year that we'll get through this logjam.
I like the optimism.
So along those lines, do you think that it's within the philosophical principles for a
consensus change in Bitcoin to be made on the network, even if a small fraction opposes
it?
Along those lines, we do have a question from Mr. Ricardo Spagney asking if the panelists
believe the creation of a second chain as a result of a contentious hard fork is acceptable.
Well, I mean, I think one of the philosophies that I've really tried to adhere to is to
try to avoid disenfranchising users.
So that means every single contribution I've tried to make to the Bitcoin protocol has
been very mindful of trying to make sure that everything that already exists out there continues
to work, that we don't force people off the network or require people to make upgrades
they don't want to or contentious changes that they feel coerced into doing.
Obviously, when you start to talk about...
I mean, a lot of the changes that we've done in the protocol really don't affect the economics.
For instance, check, lock, time, verify is a great example.
It's a new opcode that was added that allows people that want to use it to be able to lock
up funds for a particular amount of time.
And if you don't want to use it, you're not disenfranchised in any way.
You don't have to use it as 100% optional.
It does not really eat into the economics of the system at all.
Other things, like for instance, the infamous block size issue, does eat into the economics
of the system.
I think right now we're seeing the all-time highs of Bitcoin, which is great for people
that are holding Bitcoin.
They definitely want to see the worth of their assets grow.
But it also hurts people that are, especially like in the payment processing or other areas
of the industry, where they have to be dealing with these fees all the time.
And I feel the concern, because I think it's a very valid concern, the higher the price
of Bitcoin, since fees are denominated in Bitcoins, the higher the fees.
And so this can price out certain use cases that certain companies have.
So it's hard to balance these things out, but in the end, I think one of my goals is
to try to find solutions that disenfranchise as few people as possible and retain as much
compatibility as possible, given those constraints.
I don't want to split.
Nobody I've spoken with wants the blockchain to split.
And there's an enormous benefit as a network for us to stay together on one chain.
A minority chain has huge challenges even surviving to the first difficulty adjustment.
So I don't think there will be a split.
However, at the end of the day, there's nothing we can really do to prevent a split if a small
minority does want to split off.
And if that should be the case, then I think they should have the right to split if they
choose.
Yeah, I don't really see this as a question of forcing a minority to do something they
don't want to do.
It's more allowing people the option of going off on a fork.
So at Bitpay, the Bitcoin blockchain has stopped working for us.
So we have a couple of options ahead of us.
And by the way, we do predominantly settlement-type transactions.
We don't sell cups of coffee, or at least not that many of them.
Our bread and butter is kind of in the $5,000 to $20,000 price range for a typical transaction.
And it's not working for us.
And we have a couple of options.
One is we start using a fork of Bitcoin.
Second option is we start using a fork of Bitcoin.
And the third option is we start using a fork of Bitcoin.
We are really at a point where we have no choice.
And that's what we have to do.
And we look at it as a platform choice, similar to when we make a decision to choose Ubuntu,
Red Hat, or Debian.
We look at the Bitcoin blockchain in the same way, and which fork of the Bitcoin blockchain
we're going to run on.
So we have to do that.
And we would be happy to do that with a few other companies.
If it's just us, then it will be just us.
I think one of the things that I think a lot of people maybe...
It's a point that sometimes gets missed is that the scaling issue really applies to blockchains
as they grow in popularity and get big.
When they're really small and they're not worth anything and nobody's using it, there
is no scalability issue just because there's nobody using it.
There's no traffic.
The blocks obviously are not going to be full.
If any particular blockchain is very successful, it is going to get more congested.
And this is just basic economics.
The demand is much higher and the supply is limited, prices are going to go up.
This is great for some people in the economy and not so great for other people.
So it's more a matter of perspective.
It depends on...
Obviously, some people are making money.
Maybe it's not your business.
And I feel for businesses that maybe are suffering because the particular conditions are not
favorable to their situation.
But I would say that even if you do go to other blockchains...
And I think it's fine to experiment on other blockchains and use other blockchains if they're
more...
If they suit your needs right now more.
But if they do grow in popularity and come to even come close to where Bitcoin's market
cap is and you have all these big stakeholders and the network is this big, it's also going
to get politicized.
You're also going to get issues with the fees, high fees, congestion and all this stuff.
So it's not really a long-term solution.
Even though it could give you a short-term way of working with particular things.
For instance, right now, I'm really excited about working on Litecoin, which is a much
smaller coin than Bitcoin, but it's still big enough that it's not trivial.
So it's worth something.
We're able to explore stuff, but it's definitely far less political.
There's far less drama in it and we can focus more on the engineering part of it, which
is great.
But if it ever grows to be the size of Bitcoin, we're going to find the same problems that
Bitcoin has.
So along those lines, do you believe or do we even have agreement upon mechanisms for
determining how to make these changes in a smooth fashion?
Are we wasting our time even trying to find metrics or mechanisms for doing this?
Or should we just say Bitcoin is what it is and let people do what they're going to do
and it'll just sort itself out eventually?
So that's one of the biggest problems is coordinating these kinds of changes, right?
There's really...
I mean, Bitcoin is designed to be symbol resistant, which means that it's really hard for someone
to just spawn up millions of nodes and pretend to be the majority, right?
And so proof of work is really a solution to this problem.
It makes it hard for people, it makes it expensive for people to be able to try to do this.
So unfortunately, I don't think the proof of work is a good way of representing the
will of the user base in a large sense.
So it does serve the purpose of giving us a way of signaling things in a way that is
objective.
So as long as there's cooperation, as long as miners and users and developers and everyone's
cooperating, the most effective way to make a smooth transition is to apply miner signaling
so we know that the network is ready, assuming that miners are actually enforcing the rules.
Unfortunately, once things get politicized and there's conflicts of interest, and I'm
not blaming anyone here, I think everyone is looking out for their own interests and
that's fine.
The system has exploits and someone finds one, good for them, right?
But that might run counter to someone else's interest in the system, right?
And so now how do we balance those interests out and how do we coordinate changes without
having to deal with this civil issue?
And I think that that's, you know, it's a really big problem right now.
I don't know that we have a really good solution for that right now.
Right, so we have so many different interests, it's hard to even measure them, it's hard
to predict which ones that us targeting might make Bitcoin more valuable in the long run.
I'm interested in hearing from some of the other panelists in the long run.
If Bitcoin continues to dominate, if it doesn't get overtaken, if it continues to become globalized
and have more and more people using it for a number of different use cases, do you think
that it may in fact be inevitable that due to irreconcilable philosophical differences,
we do see forks in the future like we have seen with Ethereum?
I think it's possible and like to challenge what Eric said earlier about Bitcoin scaling
challenges.
I would disagree.
I think Bitcoin can scale massively on chain today and the goal I have in mind is one billion
Bitcoin wallets by the year 2025 and I think we're on track to achieve that.
The biggest problem is right now there's an artificial limit restricting Bitcoin throughput
to about three transactions per second through the one megabyte block size limit.
Now that's about a thousand times less transactions per second than a significant payment system
like Visa.
So at first glance, it seems like we have a long way to go to get to Visa level, but
if you actually look at the math and the physics behind it, it's actually not too challenging.
For my computer to download three transactions, it requires about 12,000 bits of information
to do that every second.
That's 12 kilobits per second.
We're talking early 1990s level dial up internet connections.
My internet connection at home can download 80 million bits of information per second.
That's 20,000 transactions per second.
I know there's some other things like verifying the transactions and I think we have a similar
headroom there too.
So no, I think Bitcoin can scale massively today with the existing technology that we
have.
What are your changes?
One thing I need to point out though is that just even a couple of years ago, given the
current block sizes and the fact that they're filling up, the Bitcoin network, the software
itself, Bitcoin Core would not have been able to keep up with the blockchain.
It would not be able to validate the blockchain as quickly as transactions get generated.
There's had to be a tremendous amount of performance optimizations in the cryptographic libraries,
in the network handling code, in the memory management, in a lot of aspects of the system
to just be able to keep up with the current transaction volume right now.
Be referring to Bitcoin Core, like Bitcoin Unlimited, we're running what we call the
no limit test net where we're constantly propagating 50 megabyte blocks and the system in test
net mode is handling that fine.
We're processing it very quickly.
But it's based off of the Bitcoin Core software and has the optimizations that Bitcoin Core
made.
He's saying that it's only the recent improvements that have allowed for that.
You're relying on improvements that were made in Bitcoin Core.
What I'm saying is that we are processing 50 megabyte blocks successfully on test net.
We could get down into the weeds here talking about whether we can do this or that and this
amount of transaction volume.
It's very frustrating for me working in this environment because I spent about a decade
working and building software for very large telcos and CSPs, ISPs, where they process
massive amounts of data.
You just can't simulate that environment.
What we would have to do is make small changes, deploy them, observe those changes in the
field and do some field testing and then iterate on that.
We need to do that in Bitcoin as well.
The problem is you've got to get through these consensus changes to the protocol, whether
it's SegWit or whether it's a hard fork, whatever the consensus change is, it's a tough process.
We need to do some of that deployment and field testing and iterate on that.
Well, there's been a lot of improvements that have happened.
I think there's a lot of reason for us to be optimistic and that the pessimism need
not necessarily be due to technical reasons.
I think that along those lines, Dr. Munib Ali actually has a very good question here.
Saying that the block size debate has been toxic and mentally exhausting.
I know I for one am exhausted.
He asks how can Bitcoin be more welcoming to academia and new devs and he is basically
making a good point here that consensus 2017 seems to be more about Ethereum than Bitcoin.
We started our company three years ago, April of 2014 and compared to today, Bitcoin price
is up about 7x, transaction volumes are up per minute or per block by a factor of five
or six as well.
There's one metric that's harder to measure that we've been lacking on and it's new developers
contributing to consensus critical code.
That metric is flat or maybe even down from where we were three years ago and to me that's
the biggest problem that we face in Bitcoin.
If you compare it to Ethereum that has multiple implementations and a very welcoming community,
different cultures across each implementation, they've been able to attract more and more
developers to their ecosystem and that's something that we've lacked.
Bitcoin Core has essentially a monopoly on protocol development and that's something
that we're actively trying to change with Bitcoin.
So Bitcoin is a full node implementation that we launched December of last year and compared
to many other implementations, it's not a fork of Bitcoin Core as written from scratch
in Node.js.
It was I think that only non-Satoshi implementation to have mined a block, be used in production
and propose consensus level changes as well as a reference implementation and to me that's
the most optimistic feature for Bitcoin, multiple implementation, multiple development teams,
multiple cultures and essentially more developers.
I have to say that I fully support there being more development teams.
I really like the work that Bitcoin and BTCD and others have done in trying to implement
an entire protocol stack and node software.
I think that maintaining consensus compatibility is really a difficult challenge.
Just because of the nature of it, if there's any kind of divergence and two different implementations
disagree, the ledgers can diverge and now you're talking about many billions of dollars
of other people's money that hinges on whether you accept this node or this node's interpretation
of the rules, right?
And so getting that right is extremely difficult.
It's a very, very challenging problem.
I fully agree that I think Ethereum has done a much better job at community outreach and
getting more developers involved.
Bitcoin could do a much better job of that.
I think that working on consensus rules is the most advanced and most difficult level
of Bitcoin development.
There's all these different levels and that's the seventh degree black belt level of Bitcoin
development.
There really are very few people that are capable of doing that.
I think that Bitcoin Core, even though it has a great track record of security and uptime
and everything, obviously there's certain issues to it.
I think, for instance, architecturally, there's a lot of stuff that could be improved.
I think Bitcoin and BTCD have been more modularized and there's more reusability of stuff in there.
I really like those kinds of things.
I would like to see more projects that are doing that kind of stuff.
But I still think that the consensus part, the consensus critical stuff is very, very
difficult and it'd be better if we can have more engineers that are trained in that without
getting so much politicization because once you get that, it really puts off a lot of
people that just want to work on code.
A lot of people just don't want to get involved as soon as it gets like that.
Eric, with the consensus stuff, how do we get other ideas in there?
What's the governance topic?
There's the scaling issues.
How about the governance of core developers and the leadership and how do we actually
go about upgrading the consensus over the next few years?
Yeah.
I'd like to separate two things.
There's the Bitcoin Core project itself, which is an open source project.
It's a free open source project.
Anyone can create a fork of it and manage their own branches and some people do.
But obviously, Bitcoin Core is the most widely used distribution of this particular code
base.
Managing the project does have some degree of internal governance, its own internal politics
and whatever, but then there's a separate aspect, which is the consensus rule stuff,
which I think is completely different.
For instance, if you're talking about governance of whether a particular patch is going to
get merged that does something, I'll say something stupid like it changes the color of the wallet
or it changes some format of the way some number is displayed in the UI or something,
that's very superficial.
Those kinds of things, every project should be able to manage however it wants.
Let's tackle a hard problem.
How about the consensus idea of the 21 million limit coins?
So do the users get to debate and choose sides about whether we limit 21 million coins or
is there a dictator that says yes or no on that?
Just given the Bitcoin culture, I don't think that most Bitcoin users would be very open
to a dictator that can just change the monetary policy of Bitcoin on the fly.
I think that runs very much counter to the basic philosophy of Bitcoin.
I do think that users in the end are the ones that decide which rules they want to follow.
So if some users, let's say a small percent of users want to have 22 million coins, should
they be allowed to do that?
I think people should be able to run whatever software they want.
If it's compatible with everyone else's software, wonderful, we're all in the same network.
If not, it's going to create a fork, if exchanges want to list it, whatever.
I know that there's a lot of speculators that love that kind of stuff.
I'm not going to say no, don't do that.
So I used to be of the opinion that there should never be two forks of Bitcoin.
But after some more just logical thinking about that, we just can't prevent some small
users to do something different, whether it's 22 million coins or whether it's the no change
on the block size.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, we have no legal framework.
And so basically, what that means is that it's all enforced by the rules that people
enforce themselves.
And we're using cryptography and network protocols to do this.
That means people are free to run whatever software they want.
And if people run software that works fine with everyone else, wonderful, if not, then
they're going to maybe create their own forks.
And we've seen that happen.
Sometimes we don't call it like a hard fork when, for instance, someone just creates an
altcoin.
We call it an altcoin, right?
It has a different genesis block.
The only real difference between a hard fork and an altcoin, let's say, is that they share
the same ledger at some point in history.
And then they branch off.
So there are a number of different proposals on the table.
I suspect a lot of the audience is well aware of these different proposals.
So we're not going to get into the weeds on them, though I will say I've been getting
a lot of tweets asking about the topic du jour, the great Barry Silbert brokered compromise.
I know we don't know all of the details of this.
But are there any quick comments on for, against, or if you're just going to wait and see about
that?
I would love to see something happen.
I mean, Bitcoin needs to move forward in some way.
And I completely support an increase in the block size limit to two megabytes, as Barry
suggests, on the 21st of September.
And the cool thing is the Bitcoin unlimited nodes, because they will already accept blocks
up to that size, they don't even need to upgrade.
It also includes SegWit.
So SegWit is part of that.
Yeah.
However, the SegWit...
I'm very happy to see that the so-called latest proposal will allow us, the industry, to activate
SegWit.
I have to say that the way that the SegWit thing was done, they changed it to bit four,
and they also changed it to 80% activation, which breaks all the deployment that exists
right now.
So basically, we're talking a logistics nightmare of having to redeploy all the current...
Right now, basically, we have a whole bunch of nodes out there that are ready to activate
it.
They've been tested, they've been peer-reviewed like crazy, people have spent months, the
best people that we have that understand this code, looking at it.
And it would basically require redoing a lot of this stuff and doing a redeployment.
So I'm kind of wondering, first of all, why choose a different bit?
Eric, the current code base will activate at, I think, is it 90% or 95%?
What if we don't get there?
Well, you might very well not get there.
So it's fair to say, okay, why don't we reduce that to 80%, right?
So that would require a redeployment.
That would require a redeployment, yes.
Yes, that would require a redeployment.
Do people want that?
Raise your hands if you're willing to redeploy.
So it looks like a small amount.
And the rest of you will stay put?
So I mean, there is...
Just redeploy means running a new version of the software that has a threshold lower
to 80% activation.
Litecoin just recently activated at 75% threshold.
So some people are saying Bitcoin can activate at 80% rather than the much higher limits.
Some people are even going down...
Who's supportive of that?
Some people are even willing to go down to 51%.
I mean, there's a lot of discussion that's been going on.
It's like, well, how low should we go?
The higher the hash rate that's required for the transition, the less likely we're gonna
have high orphan rates and there's certain issues with, for instance, wallets that are
not fully validating, getting false confirmations and stuff like that.
So the higher the hash rate, the safer it is in general for the entire network.
I disagree with that because when Litecoin activated or locked in at 75%, after two weeks,
it wasn't just like only 75% was running and 25% forked off.
It's not like that.
Yeah.
Once the signaling happened, when it locked in at 75%, everybody got in line and within
two weeks, it was 100% activation.
Well a couple of things.
95%...
Same with the 80%.
95% might be a little too high.
I think that the Bitcoin Core developers might've been a little too conservative on that.
I think for non-controversial stuff, like for a check, lock, time, verify, it made sense
because it was pretty clear that we were gonna be able to get 95% of hash power to support
it and it just seemed safer.
Obviously SegWit is a little bit more contentious, shall we say.
It's been politicized a little more, so it's a very different situation.
I think that Litecoin definitely was able to activate safely at 75%, but there's a couple
issues here.
Also, it's a much smaller network and it's much easier, the logistics are easier for
the deployment.
In the case of Bitcoin, you have a lot of people that might have been running a node
years ago that maybe they haven't run it in a while, and if they just suddenly start
running it, they're not gonna be aware of all this stuff or whatever.
I think if we're able to coordinate this and get the message out and people know what's
going on and the user base is actually very supportive of it, then 95% is just way, way,
way too conservative.
But Eric, the nodes that were running years ago is not gonna be affected because it's
a soft fork.
They're gonna stay on the same chain, but they're more vulnerable to, for instance,
reorgs and orphan blocks and stuff like that if they don't upgrade.
It's recommended once a soft fork actually activates, it's very much recommended that
if you're running a full node that you do enforce the new rules as well.
In the case of Litecoin, I think it was pretty easy to get everyone on board because it's
just a much smaller community, the communication network is not that huge.
We can scale those communications to that level.
Bitcoin has gotten to the level where scaling communications is much, much harder.
Not saying it's not possible, but there are logistical challenges in that.
I do think 95% is too high, too conservative.
I think that maybe we can even go below 80.
I think maybe 51 is too low.
I don't know.
But the point is the higher it is, at least if it's a majority, at least with a soft fork
we do not risk a chain split, a permanent chain split.
There could be a temporary split where it's just a typical reorg that happens, but we're
not going to get a permanent split.
Sure, sure.
Eric, you're wearing a hat that says UASF.
You don't think that could result in a chain split?
It could result in a chain split, but I think it's very unlikely to result in a permanent
chain split as long as the markets are strongly supportive of it.
That's the thing.
Obviously, how do you measure that?
There's the idea of having futures contracts or prediction markets or stuff.
People have brought up some interesting ideas there, but if the markets are strongly in
favor of a segwit chain, then we saw with Ethereum that hash power basically chases
the price.
I think the end story is that we really don't know.
We don't know for sure.
There are risks.
The message there is that market-based mechanisms, I prefer market-based mechanisms to determine
the answers to these questions.
Great.
Since we're starting to run out of time here, I do want to give you each a little bit of
time.
My main question is, where do you see us a year from now?
Will we continue talking about the same debates?
Will we move forward?
What's your optimistic outlook on what's going to happen in the near to medium future?
Let's just start and go down the line.
I'd say scaling really is not a measure of just how many transactions we can process
per second.
It's really a measure of how the system will behave as we add more load to it.
If we want to make the system really scalable and to satisfy the needs of a lot of users,
a lot of users really like to be able to validate their own transactions, and that's the most
interesting feature for them.
The trick here is to make it so that validation costs are substantially lower than the cost
of actually executing transactions and including them in blocks and stuff like that.
If we're able to create an incentive structure where people could, for instance, get paid
to generate proofs, short proofs, that their transactions are valid with some better cryptography,
maybe with some payment channel technology so you can do micro payments and stuff like
that, then I think most users would be willing to have gigabyte blocks or whatever as long
as they're able to verify their own transactions.
Right now I think that the main point of contention is that a lot of users feel that there's some
trade-offs and they're going to have to sacrifice something that might be dear to them in order
to satisfy something else.
I'm optimistic that we're going to be able to surmount these things, but it's not going
to happen right away, and I understand that some businesses have bills to pay and they're
struggling in some ways, and I really want to help everyone try to find ways forward
that can work with this, but I will say that it's probably going to take at least another
few years until we find a good solution to these things.
Interesting points.
Andrew?
Yeah, I'm optimistic that we'll scale this year, mainly because we have to.
Prices are way too high at this point, and if anything that Barry's proposal alludes
to is that there's almost unanimous consensus within at least the industry that we need
to move past this impasse, whether or not we repeat this kind of debate a couple years
down the line, that's up to what actually happens, but within the next year we will
scale Bitcoin from where it is today.
Yeah, so I'm also optimistic.
I think the reason I say this is the year, I think this is the year where all of us are
frustrated with the logjam, and whether it's Barry Sober's proposal or whatever happens
in the next few months, I'm optimistic that we'll find a way to activate SegWit and also
find a way to scale on chain to a larger block size.
Well I'm very optimistic as well.
I think we will achieve scaling in the next year, like Andrew says, and I think we will
scale massively over the next decade and achieve my goal that I said earlier of a billion wallets.
And I think the question about users being able to verify their own transactions is a
good one and an important one, and in my opinion users already can verify their own transactions
using SPV technology.
I'm verifying all the transactions that I care about sent to my phone with my SPV wallet,
and that will be highly scalable regardless of how big the Bitcoin network grows so that
users will always be able to be their own bank and verify their transactions even though
they might not be verifying all of the other transactions in the world.
So I guess I'll make it unanimous and I'm also optimistic.
So a year from now I would like to see, so first of all, I don't know what you think
about our business, but we're more profitable than we've ever been.
Our business is great and it's growing exponentially every month.
We're setting new records in transaction volumes and we're dealing with Fortune 100 companies
now that need to move large amounts of dollars globally.
So our business is fantastic.
We've got a platform issue though that we have to address.
And a year from now I would like to be on probably two chains, one, whatever the miners
decide to do with this chain, and if that's not something that we agree with, then be
on a fork, also supporting a fork, and two chains that we run periodically simultaneously.
Long term we need to be on one chain.
We need one chain that's secure and liquid, that has a liquid token and a secure backbone.
But for a while we might run two, two forks of Bitcoin until we see which one wins out.
But a year from now I'd like to have that fork deployed and operational on our platform
and be operating both of those to see where we go from there.
Yeah, that's great to hear.
I mean, I think it's clear that we do have a pretty good consensus that Bitcoin is strong,
Bitcoin is booming, that one way or another Bitcoin is not going to die.
It may change.
It will be an incredibly frustrating process for a lot of people who are using it.
But that we are sufficiently invested that we are not just going to give up whatever
happens.
And this has been a debate that, in my opinion, will probably never end because this system
is running on finite resources.
And anything that is a shared finite resource, there's going to be contention over how those
resources are used.
So I think this has been a great panel, and I'd like to thank Consensus for giving the
opportunity to myself and our distinguished panelists to continue this important discussion
and hopefully assuage some of the fears that the community has with all of the vitriol
and frustration that we do, in fact, share some common vision and some common optimism
for the future of this system.
So could I please get a round of applause for our panelists?
And I look forward to seeing you all next year when Bitcoin is at the moon.
Thanks, everyone.