A significant piece of my soul died last month when I started to catch up and found that out after years of intelligent discussion on what Bitcoin is (both here and on many other forums) the fork to save Bitcoin from the bearded wizard and the rest of core put someone
who thinks rolling 10-block confirmation checkpoints is a good idea in control of the protocol. Words fail me.
I am not too surprised though, I tried contributing to ABC a year ago and found Amaury and the ABC process to be just as insular as core. First the process for new developers to join and submit changes was broken and it took them two months to work it out. I then submitted a simple change that added the ability to backup and restore a wallet's HD Master Seed to the ABC client, which enables the ability to fully recover a wallet from just a saved seed. It was a simple change that only effected the encrypt wallet part of the code when first setting up a wallet and then isn't touched, but Amaury basically just said no and that was it. I signed off after that.
https://github.com/Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-abc/compare/master...satoshisbitcoin:hdrestore
BU should have hard forked in 2015 or 2016, we would have people such as theZerg and PeterR influencing the roadmap, not this ABC monstrosity. As far as I am concerned the BCH branch is dead and not going anywhere.
CSW is just as bad. He actually argued last week that control of a private key does not give someone possession of a bitcoin. His style, self aggrandizing and patent trolling are wrong, put people off, and frankly is an issue for the BSV branch.
Regarding the debate on if CSW is Satoshi, he does not feel to me to be Satoshi, maybe a Satoshi (if Satoshi was a team) but not the Satoshi. CSW's communication style and other aspects are too different in my opinion. CSW tries to inflate his worth, Satoshi did not and seemed more humble. Most importantly CSW does not invent or create as far as I can tell. He mostly takes other people's work and discusses that. His knowledge seems wide but shallow. Satoshi on the other hand invented in a manner that I have not seen from CSW.
I was pretty despondent on the Bitcoin project a month ago when first catching up for these reasons. All 3 branches are in control by fools and shysters, and the original Bitcoin community that promoted the project in 2012-15 in bitcoin talk, reddit and this thread frankly had lost.
However, over the past couple of weeks I have come around to BSV both as the true Bitcoin and as having a real chance to be the project we always wanted.
The pace and scope of community development on BSV is really amazing, I started to follow bsvdevs and _unwritter and there is a constant stream of activity. Sure most of it is silly experimentation, but it is easy to see where it is going and the scope of possibilities. This is the activity that should have taken place in 2012/13 if core did not get in the way.
1) The ability to store and run applications off of the chain is unbelievable. Napster and Silkroad were able to be shutdown because they had to exist as separate tools. Napster 2.0 and Silkroad 2.0 will be run off of the blockchain on a completely censorship resistant platform. That is where stuff like this is heading.
https://bico.media/ffe8f32c9003a50a82a7d1a68a4ca40cbc0429718e483c8dc79fbd6ddc8a4089.html
2) There are paths for BSV to be able to store essentially infinite data, people are knocking BSV for just being an unscalable file store, but that is not seeing the big picture. The thing to remember is OP_RETURN data does not need to be stored by a full client. Full clients can prune historical OP_RETURN data and still validate a chain of transactions with the header, merkle tree, and transaction data, while ignoring and not serving up OP_RETURN data. Applications instead can store data of interest to them and prove its validity similar to how SPV works today. For example a network of computers for application A would store and serve up application A OP_RETURN data, application B servers for application B OP_RETURN data, and so on. In this manner BSV could "store" exabytes of data on the blockchain, but full clients could prune it down to easily manageable terabytes and offload application storage to other P2P networks.
3) It does not matter that CSW is or is not a fraud, the same way it did not matter if Satoshi was a serial killer. Bitcoin is the code, not the person. CSW also is an asset. I do agree with his vision plus he is independently wealthy which means he can't be influenced or controlled and also has the
resources to invest in BSV's vision, and I agree with his vision regardless who he is as a person.
You put this together and BSV has tremendous potential.
Chains such as ETH require all storage and computation to happen on full nodes. BSV however allows storage and computation to happen independently of full nodes and creates a better balance. This will allow it to scale further, and not just in block size. Economic incentives will determine that balance, but it will form in a manner not possible on chains such as ETH.
It is early days and BSV is considered a joke by most people (because of CSW), but look at this chart of usage. BSV is the only one trending up. All other chains are stagnant. Part of me wants to go all in on BSV. Today we can trade 1 dead end BTC for almost 60 BSV, if you consider BSV to be Bitcoin you can buy 1,000 bitcoins for only $60K. When was the last time we could do that?
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/size-btc-bch-bsv.html#log&6m
From catching up on the last dozen or so pages it sounds sentiment was against CSW's hard fork but now is trending in favor of BSV, which was similar to my path as well.
@cypherdoc last year we were discussing if payments was enough or if more functionality is required to be successful and generate usage, you were in favor of payments only and I in functionality. I'm curious if you are favoring BSV today because of the development activity on it, or if it's just due to how badly Amaury is screwing up BCH.
Hope everyone is doing well. Glad to see the thread is still going. Sorry to see that BU seems to have stalled.
