How China Took Center Stage in Bitcoin’s Civil War
As someone who has been closely following Bitcoin since 2011, I do not think that article captures the current situation very well. Yes, there is a concentration of mining power in China, owed to their low costs of electricity. But it does not seem like the Chinese have found a way to use that power yet. In practice, it is a number of Western developers around Gregory Maxwell and Blockstream that calls the shots, aided by &#x2F;r&#x2F;bitcoin admin Theymos who recklessly removes posts that do not fit their agenda (I&#x27;ve received two temporary bans myself for mentioning ethereum in a comment).<p>I really hope that the Chinese miners start to make use of their power and move Bitcoin back towards its original vision. The block size limit of 1 MB was a temporary hack and the core devs who oppose an increase are in an obvious conflict of interest: if Bitcoin can scale the way its inventor envisioned (namely by simply increasing the block size limit every now and then), the business case of the company they work for falls apart. (Blockstream, who develops the Lightning Network, which aims at scaling Bitcoin by building another layer on top.)<p>What makes me hope is this sentence from the article: &quot;He said in an email this week that if the core programmers did not increase the number of transactions going through the network by July, he would begin looking for alternatives to expand the network.&quot; Recently, I spoke to an executive of another large Chinese mining company, and he shares that opinion. If the &quot;core team&quot; continues to refuse to increase the block size limit, they will stop applying core&#x27;s updates. For that case, some members already threatened to go nuclear and change the proof-of-work protocol, making all existing mining hardware obsolete - which is quite worrying and shows that Bitcoin development currently is not in the best possible hands.