Bitcoin: Overview | Money, banking and central banks | Finance & Capital Markets | Khan Academy
An introduction to the mechanics of bitcoins and an overview of how transactions take place. Created by Zulfikar Ramzan.
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Finance and capital markets on Khan Academy: Learn about bitcoins and how they work. Videos by Zulfikar Ramzan. Zulfikar is a world-leading expert in computer security and cryptography and is currently the Chief Scientist at Sourcefire. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from MIT.
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Major Cryptocurrency Hedge Fund: ICON is Our Biggest Bet in 2018 Dan Morehead an early cryptocurrency adapter and CEO of the hedge fund Pantera Capital said in an interview on Bloomberg yesterday that the funds biggest […]
bitcoin entrepreneur Charlie Shrem shared his views on the scaling debate, stating that “it’s not about technology anymore, it’s about power.”
Shrem: ‘It’s About Power’
Charlie Shrem, bitcoin entrepreneur and of Intellysis, was present in today’s episode of the Double Down show, dubbed “” with the usual hosts Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert.
During the show, Shrem expressed his thoughts regarding the current state of the scaling debate or as Herbert called it, “the Great Blocksize War of 2017.”
Shrem stated:
In reality, it’s not a technical argument anymore. Everyone on both sides of the table say that SegWit is the best technology that we have.
According to Shrem, the scaling debate is no longer about the most viable technology or solution that can be used to scale bitcoin. Instead, the scaling debate has become a power struggle between two development teams, and .
“The other side of the debate, which is bitcoin Unlimited, they agree that SegWit is a great technology,” he continued. “But to them it’s not about technology anymore, it’s about power.”
Shrem went on to say:
They want to remove [bitcoin Core’s] ability to work on bitcoin and instead have a closed-membership small group of four to five developers, who they think are the best for the job, run bitcoin going forward.
However, there is a silver lining in this development, which Shrem considers it as an “extremely bullish situation for bitcoin.” The current block size is showcasing bitcoin’s ability to resist a malicious attack on the network.
He noted:
Here you have a group of bad actors who are trying to overtake the bitcoin network and essentially fork all of bitcoin and force all bitcoin users to be able to use their developers and their codebase and their everything and it’s not a group of miners that’s preventing this.
Shrem sees the current as a “glorified poll” when it comes to hard fork given that nodes are the ones that validate blocks and they can discard the ones from the hard-forked chain at will, meaning that miners don’t have nearly as much power as they think they do.
This can be observed the , which would bypass the miners completely and leave it up to the nodes to force SegWit into activation.
However, it may not come down to a UASF, as mining pools like F2Pool are beginning to move to SegWit driven by demand from individual users that contribute hashrate to the pool.
Champagne Problem
Not all is gloomy for bitcoin, however. Amidst all the tension and drama, one must also look at the bright side, which is the reason we’re having this heated debate at all: at an exponential rate.
This is, as Shrem puts it, a “champagne problem,” one that gives us as much to celebrate as it gives us to fight about.
“It’s a good problem to have. bitcoin has grown really quickly. We never expected this to happen so quickly, to be honest. We’re getting towards what they call a ‘champagne problem,’ how do you scale?” he said.
This means that not only is bitcoin working as intended, but there is also an urgent need for such a currency in the world. Now, it’s only a matter of making sure that bitcoin can become that currency and still maintain its decentralized and immutable characteristics.
Shrem concluded:
There has always been research and conversations on scaling over the past three years but, to be honest, we didn’t think we’d see this exponential growth in bitcoin and now it’s time to have that conversation.
Do you agree? Is the scaling debate actually about power and control? Share below!
Images courtesy of Shutterstock, alchetron.com, coin.dance
It looks as though we found the perfect way to close out our tribute to Cannabis month with none other than Lyn Ulbricht the mother of Ross Ulbricht the creator of the website “The Silk Road”. While Ross may have created this site, an Ebay for the Dark Market if you will.He how ever was never proven to have any involvement in this fake murder for hire plot as was maliciously alleged recently in some sensationalized hit piece called American Kingpin by someone who deserves no mention.Lyn and Cody Wilson elaborate on the fallacy of the aforementioned book. The last 30 minutes is very light-hearted and fun as we counsel Chris on his love life.
An introduction to the mechanics of bitcoins and an overview of how transactions take place. Created by Zulfikar Ramzan.
