A little over a month ago, Bitcoin's official website announced that it was preparing to change its design. It's now done, and their site has a new look a little less than a week ago. Incidentally, Bitcoin.org teams took the opportunity to remove from their site all the mentions made to certain industry players, including Coinbase and Bitpay.
The argument for removing these two giants from the crypto industry is their attitude against the principles of decentralization. The main reason given would be mainly their support for the "famous" SegWit2x, a hard fork programmed following the New York Agreement (NYA).
For those who were not there at the time, the NYA was a deal co-signed in May 2017 by a group of big players in the Bitcoin industry, except that none of the original developers of Bitcoin Core had not been invited to the meeting. This agreement resulted in SegWit2x, which was supposed to bring more scalability to the network, but in favor of increasing centralization. Many industry players vocally opposed this fork, including the Journal du Coin.
Be that as it may, SegWit2x will never have seen the light of day, but the developers of Bitcoin Core have certainly not forgotten the affront to them. At the time, they posted on their site a note naming one by one the companies that had voted in favor of SegWit2x, enjoining the community to avoid dealing with them. Among the companies mentioned, we found BitPay and Coinbase. The weather will have passed, nothing has been forgotten, and the companies that had openly supported the fork are now missing Bitcoin's official website.
From now on, to be listed on the site, companies will have to meet certain criteria:
- "Under no circumstances should the company list SegWit2x as" BTC "or" Bitcoin ". Note that Bitcoin is not run by minors, and that their initiatives can not be used as a justification for reshaping Bitcoin.
- The company should not do anything that could rob the users of their bitcoins (for example: using the S2X software without worrying about replay attacks, automatically selling users' BTCs, crediting BTC repositories only as as S2X deposits, etc.). Providing access to S2X tokens is however acceptable.
- The company must continue to provide a normal service to Bitcoin users. "
Thus, according to Bitcoin.org, all the companies that were withdrawn did not respect these conditions.
In a recent interview, Josh Ellithorpe, an engineer at Coinbase and Bitcoin Cash supporter, spoke about this measure from Bitcoin Core.
"It happened over a year ago! That does not make any sense. They removed Coinbase, they removed BitPay, two of the biggest players who did more for the adoption of Bitcoin than any other company. It's not a healthy work environment. Josh Ellithorpe
For a while, Bitcoin.org, the site created by Satoshi Nakamoto himself / herself, is attracting the wrath of detractors, mainly among bitcoin cash aficionados. Indeed, if Bitcoin.org is historically the first site "Bitcoin", Roger Ver and his teams are constantly screaming on all roofs: "Bitcoin Cash is the real bitcoin." Between some cases of censorship on the part of Bitcoin Core devs, and doubtful marketing on the part of Bitcoin Cash, hard to navigate.
We will not get into this debate (oh so thorny), especially as this recent development is a new step towards general dissension. But after all, the human being is a being of conflict, which evolves only thanks to the latter, so hope that these various visions that confront each other do so in the end lead to a better future.
Sources : CCN ; AMBCrypto || Image from Shutterstock