Inside the Fight Over Bitcoin’s Future
errific rumpus broke out in the world of Bitcoin last week, when veteran developers Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn published Bitcoin XT, a competing version of Bitcoin Core, the open-source program that generates new bitcoins, verifies all transactions, and records them on the massive distributed ledger known as the blockchain. Andresen is Bitcoin’s most senior developer, and has been the project’s de-facto leader since 2011; Hearn is a pioneer in the development of Bitcoin wallets. According to an explanation Hearn posted on Medium, they released XT because “the decision-making process in Bitcoin Core has broken.” The real crisis, as this suggests, is less about Bitcoin’s code than about the power structure that governs it.
The dispute centers on a fast-approaching computational bottleneck. The blockchain is composed, as you might guess, of “blocks,” each consisting of a list of recent bitcoin transactions, time-stamped and verified by one of the network’s “miners”—computers that secure a block’s inclusion on the chain by solving a computational puzzle called a proof of work. The first computer to win this computational race “mines” a reward of twenty-five bitcoins, and then competition recommences for the next block.
“Right now,” Andresen added, “just Mike and I have commit access to Bitcoin XT.”
The publication of XT threw the Bitcoin forums into turmoil, with partisans duking it out in what has amounted to an old-fashioned flame war. Some of the public debate was constructive, though. Roger Ver, a Bitcoin investor and evangelist famously nicknamed “Bitcoin Jesus,” tweeted, “If you run a full node, and support bigger blocks so more people around the world can use bitcoin, install XT today.” Nick Szabo, a respected cryptography expert whom some believe to be the real Satoshi Nakamoto (whose identity and location remain mysterious), publicly stated his opposition to XT, tweeting, “A rapid block-size increase is a huge security risk: a reckless act to be performing on a $4 billion system.”
