The current criticism of Bitcoin Core may seem like a joke in a few years.

What is the hottest topic in the past six months? It is the debate over Bitcoin expansion. Core was once criticized by thousands of people (including me expressing negative opinions about Core in my articles), but as time goes by, many people can see that Core's faults are not worth mentioning compared to its merits. In my opinion, the overall situation is basically determined after ETH hard forks into ETH and ETC. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that Bitcoin must not be hard forked. I estimate that even if Bitcoin really hard forks, it can survive and its market value will still increase. What I want to express is: since ETH hard forked into ETH and ETC, the balance has begun to shift towards the rational end, and the irrational fanatic voices have begun to decrease.

However, recently, fanatics have started to spread conspiracy theories against Core, and even attacked Core supporters personally. Many veterans in the mining and technical fields could not stand it and pointed out that "your goal is not to expand capacity, but to hard fork" and "stop making trouble." Since they have said what I wanted to say, I will explain the details in this article.

1.Core has changed the underlying structure, deviating from Satoshi Nakamoto’s original design intention. Is Bitcoin still Bitcoin?

Why can't the underlying structure be changed? If Satoshi Nakamoto hadn't disappeared, would you have been sure that he would not change the underlying structure? Let me give you some technical examples: Before Windows 3.X, the system was non-preemptive multitasking, that is, if there was an infinite loop in a program, the entire system would freeze; the earliest version of Linux, 0.11, did not use the paging mechanism to implement memory allocation under multitasking, but used the old thinking segmentation mechanism, resulting in that even with 4G memory (addressing space), each process could only use 64MB at most, and the number of processes was at most 62. To break through these limitations, the underlying structure must be improved. Now some people say that the underlying structure should not be changed if it can be left unchanged. If you don't change the underlying structure, you will just have to wait for those who are willing to change the underlying structure to surpass you.

2. Changing the underlying structure is very risky. We must prevent Core from doing such a risky thing.

The person who expressed this was a 1,000-coin candidate with a technical background, who had posted many appeals on Babbitt. Using the risk as an excuse to not make progress is more like the responsibility of programmers. Are lazy programmers justified? I am surprised. If we didn't take any risks, would we have today's technology? Driving a car is very risky. It can kill people and explode, not to mention airplanes and rockets. Let's not talk about that. Let's talk about Windows. Windows was quite fragile in its early days and was very prone to blue screen crashes (Windows 9X and before). In order to solve the defects once and for all, Microsoft made up its mind to abandon the old kernel. The new version is the infamous Windows 2000, with the kernel version number NT5.0. After the release of Windows 2000, there were so many vulnerabilities that Microsoft's patching was not mature until SP4. At this time, the capacity of the complete patch was almost catching up with the capacity of the system itself. You may say that Windows 2000 has been eliminated long ago, but without Windows 2000, would there be the classic Windows XP later? The kernel version of XP is NT5.1, which is based on Windows2000. Since then, unless there is a problem with the driver or hardware, ordinary programs will no longer cause the entire system to crash. It is not terrible to have software bugs. Satoshi Nakamoto himself wrote a bug that allowed unlimited Bitcoin transactions (the specific method was to make one of the outputs of TX negative, and there was no negative value check at the time). Later, Satoshi Nakamoto made all transactions that used this bug invalid with an upgrade.

3.Core is just a slow process, not as fast as Classic and Unlimited

This is an old topic in the IT industry. How do non-technical people evaluate the work of technical people? The underlying structure is not unchangeable, but not everyone can change it. It seems that Classic and Unlimited "did an excellent job" and "completed the work quickly and well", but the Bitcoin project is completely open source, and even the development progress is announced in real time. The progress of programmers is all displayed on GitHub.

This is Core: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin
This is the Bitcoin Classic: https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/bitcoinclassic
This is Unlimited: https://github.com/BitcoinUnlimited/BitcoinUnlimited

Please pay attention to the Issues and Pull Requests columns, one for testing and the other for submitting code (closed items are not displayed by default, it is recommended to display all for comparison). It can be clearly seen that in the same period of time, the workload of Core is dozens of times that of Classic and Unlimited! In addition to completing the expansion, Core is also developing many new features in parallel, and the workload of isolated verification itself is several orders of magnitude larger than the workload of the 2MB (or unlimited) hard fork solution. Some people actually advocate that most of the computing power should be switched to Classic and Unlimited, which are relatively weak in technology. It is simply a joke! There is a step in software engineering called QA, which means testing in vernacular. Unlimited dared to go ahead without doing stress testing of super-large blocks. On the other hand, Core's QA (see Issues) is very detailed, and some problems with old codes will also be raised. At present, Core has the strongest and most reliable development strength. Who else can we follow if not Core? What are the coins with stable market capitalization in the top five? Bitcoin, Ripple and Ethereum have all made great innovations. It is almost a dream for coins without development strength to stay in the top five. (Litecoin at least has an innovative mining algorithm, Dogecoin copied it, and its market value is obviously lagging behind. ETC's recent sharp decline is also due to this.) In short, big funds generally recognize technical strength rather than political disputes (funds do not recognize verbal battles).

4.Core is dishonest and unethical

First of all, Core is not a company, not even an organization, but just a loose open source community. Now many fanatics are always YY Bitcoin Core wants to establish a dictatorship and monopoly, which I think is very funny. How can Core make promises when it doesn’t even have a legal person? Even if Core is a company, what’s wrong with delaying the release? You boycott the company because the product is delayed? Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA have all delayed their releases, so do you stop buying computers? Or do you only use Loongson? They are all paranoid thoughts!

5. Core deliberately delays expansion

After reading all of the above, do I need to explain this one? Core's work efficiency is acceptable. The mining-side segregated verification code was released in August, and the full version is almost finished, which is close to the effect of hard fork 2MB (but I personally recommend that you use a small amount to test new features first). The so-called Hong Kong consensus does not have any legally binding contracts, and the developers did not participate. It is harmless to postpone the time. The development cycle of the underlying changes is long, and QA also takes time. It is completely a lie to say that Core deliberately does not expand.

I know some people want to debate, and I will add other aspects later.

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