The average bitcoin user might not have heard much about the bitcoin scaling debate. Most regular users that I’ve spoken with in the last few months have an opinion somewhere between “I’ve noticed transactions are taking a bit longer” and “I have never heard of this and don’t care”.
If you are new to the debate it boils down to the following. Due to the incredible growth of bitcoin, changes will soon need to be made to the network or related technology to allow more transactions to be processed or transaction fees will go up due to high demand. There are a number of different options currently being worked on to help the network scale. The majority of bitcoin developers and users are comfortable to wait for these improvements and let transaction fees go up a little in the mean time.
However another minority group believes that the capacity needs to be increased immediately even at the cost of centralizing some of the infrastructure behind the bitcoin network. These users are willing to attempt to split(or fork) the network into a second blockchain which they will continue to call “bitcoin”. If you’d like more info about this debate, there have been hundreds of articles written about it in the last few months.
All over the world, people are using the incredible utility of the trustless payment network provided by bitcoin to solve problems they were unable to solve with legacy fiat systems. For these people, the politics within the bitcoin ecosystem could not be less important. This silent majority of users just want to continue to use bitcoin without having changes imposed upon them that hurt their ability to transact globally without fear of outside interference.
What is ultimately important to everyone using the bitcoin blockchain is that bitcoin continues to function as a censorship resistant tool for economic freedom, outside the influence of central control.
For this reason Bitcoin Brains has decided to sign the Statement on Hard Forks by Canadian Economic Nodes
The short version of this statement, which was eloquently and painstakingly prepared by Francis Pouliot, is that many of Canada’s most important bitcoin companies will not support Bitcoin Unlimited or any other alternative bitcoin implementation that breaks the current consensus rules.
Its very important that bitcoin users don’t need to begin worrying about which bitcoin they are using and how much its worth compared to the other “bitcoin”. The great thing about bitcoin is that it’s setup perfectly to resist this kind of attack. The only way that a split like this has any chance to succeed in creating a second version of bitcoin is if a significant number of bitcoin companies support the new bitcoin. We are going to do everything we can to avoid this.
If you are a regular bitcoin user who just wants to keep using bitcoin as always, don’t worry, its pretty likely that everything will be fine and you won’t have to do anything.
