It is time to call off NYA/segwit2x and work together to scale Bitcoin to compete against Fiat. Please.

The NYA/segwit2x proposal has a number of technical issues and pretty big due care problems, but I consider the biggest issue the circumstances and thinking - to me it's surprising that a few company folks don't see that meeting in a hotel room to impose a change on Bitcoin would be controversial to users and the ecosystem - bitcoin is a user currency, and the properties that brought all of us as users and entrepreneurs to Bitcoin and that give it value inherently rely on user and ecosystem agreement and decentralised process in Bitcoin.

Imagine Bitcoin had been started by a startup with a CEO and some VC funding. It would have been killed with prejudice in 2010 or whenever the first geo-politically interesting test came.

On the eve of the various China bitcoin news problems our Chinese bitcoiner friends are working through - I would think the reason why pivoting change discussion away from an open ecosystem discussion to a few companies is a problem would become very apparent even to people without former experience in related areas. Recall that many western companies have gotten themselves into dilemma situations by working with authorities to censor, filter, MITM and track internet access in various countries, some with torture programs - eg in Egypt and Libya. If NYA were to prevail, as formulated, then why will governments not also prevail on the same group of CEOs to force changes they would surely want to make. Even in US, UK, Russia etc. This is a very, very dangerous path. Allow me to tell you from pre-bitcoin experience this is really not hypothetical.

People who have been involved in encryption, pgp, remailers, Tor etc for decades have seen these kinds of threats first hand. We even know people who risked jail under this kind of pressure, former colleagues worked with activists, and even saw people murdered by oppressive governments over this kind of thing. It's disappointing to have people reject the connection and think it's a pragmatic "compromise" and all is fine, or that they trust themselves so it's ok to seize central control. Control is dangerous - we do not want it and neither should any company nor individual. Vires in numeris literally means "Strength in numbers" ie we are stronger together, peer to peer and without an identifiable leader who can be coerced, shutdown, etc. This is why the european union banking policy makers say "bitcoin can not be shutdown".

I think the way to scale is to work together and scale. We need the technical experts (https://twitter.com/jfnewbery/status/912853897504608256) and there is lots of scope. Many services have not yet integrated segwit, and lightning adds lots of opportunities whole new use case of micropayments and large retail scale. I'd sooner see the ecosystem collaborate and compete against Fiat than get stuck in what is really a puddle - 2x is a tiny number to create an ecosystem rift and confidence loss over. We need 1000x to make this story scale. It saddens me that a couple of CEOs would go down this path - collaborate with the open ecosystem and respect users and investors interests.

Please.

Submitted September 27, 2017 at 05:35PM by adam3us http://ift.tt/2ysweJX