Blockstream CEO: Bitcoin community is creating a 'toxic' development environment

The long-simmering debate over whether to expand the bitcoin blockchain has intensified after bitcoin developer Mike Hearn announced his withdrawal from the community.

While the exact dividing line remains fuzzy, the resulting media spotlight has created a divide between the bitcoin mining and business communities and Bitcoin Core, the largest volunteer development team in the ecosystem.

Currently, many Bitcoin companies have expressed support for Bitcoin Classic, which is a plan to increase the upper limit of Bitcoin block size from the current 1MB to 2MB through a hard fork. Bitcoin Core has expressed support for the Segregated Witness (SW, or Segregated Signature) plan, which only needs to execute a soft fork to achieve a limited expansion effect.

Supporters of Bitcoin Classic believe that the Classic solution is the simplest and will therefore succeed. They believe that Bitcoin Core developers will migrate to a new brand code base and it will not cause much impact.

However, Blockstream CEO Austin Hill refuted this claim, saying that the lack of community support for Core developers is creating a “toxic” environment.

He told CoinDesk:

“It creates an environment where a whole bunch of companies that were built on Bitcoin, that were enjoying the hard work of the developer community, instead of saying thank you, they say I don’t like your color, so I’m going to dump you.”

In the interview, Hill expressed frustration with the treatment of Core developers. He said that Blockstream did fund some prominent Core developers, including Gregory Maxwell, Matt Corallo and Pieter Wiulle, who are the most active developers in the ecosystem.

“There have been three versions of SegWit test deployments since December. I really think this is viable and market-ready,” Hill continued.

Regarding this, Bitcoin Core officially opened the isolated witness test to developers on January 21.

Judging from the official statement of the development team, these developers are trying to emphasize that the Segregated Witness solution can currently achieve more benefits than simply expanding the block size.

Audit recommendations

During his talk, Hill stressed that he believes the community has not paid enough attention to the fact that Bitcoin Core has carefully studied the proposal, a process that included two meetings, one in Montreal and one in Hong Kong.

“In the last six months, there have been 15 to 20 papers published, some of which have been turned into code and deployed,” Hill said.

Therefore, Hill suggested that a message should be sent to the development community, as well as to businesses that are interested in being behind Bitcoin Classic or similar efforts.

Hill also hinted that some developers may be frustrated by the block size increase. As reported in the New York Times, some developers have received death threats for their opinions on block size increase.

“When you have a community of developers who have invested thousands of hours into this without causing any major outages or security vulnerabilities… and then say we’re going to do a fork or two and we’re going to change the direction of this project and turn it into a democratic election system, they might say ‘that’s not what I worked so hard for,’” he argued.

Political pressure

Hill acknowledged that there are inherent politics in the debate, highlighting former Bitcoin Core maintainer Gavin Andresen and developer Jeff Garzik, who are now writing code for Bitcoin Classic.

Hill said Andresen and Garzik no longer write code every day, and he believes that the two are only speaking out for themselves and not for what is best for the community.

“I know there are some Blockstream members who are frustrated that people aren’t engaging with them, and using media outlets to advocate for an alternative is a blow to the hard work of Blockstream members,” he said.

Hill went on to suggest that the act of discussing it is far more controversial than the actual ideas, citing similar proposals such as the 2-4-8 scaling solution proposed by Blockstream co-founder Adam Back.

“It would set a dangerous precedent and frustrate Core developers if a lot of their hard work, and what they believe are the right trade-offs, were ultimately ignored,” he said.

Dangerous precedent

Hill tried to emphasize that everyone in the community should promote the common goals of a network, but the sentiment of developers is crucial because of their role in the network.

For example, he noted:

“We’ve seen some people advocate for 20MB blocks, saying if people don’t accept it, the network will fail. But the real data is that any increase larger than 3MB will likely destroy the entire network,” he said. “The Core developers are proposing a solution based on data, and we saw the data.”

Going forward, Hill hopes the industry will take these factors into account.

“It comes down to priorities,” Hill said. “To go after capacity at any cost, I think most people would agree that’s very dangerous.”

Original article: http://www.coindesk.com/blockstream-ceo-bitcoin-industry-creating-toxic-environment-for-developers/
By Pete Rizzo
Translator: Satuoxi
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/blockstream-ceo-bitcoin)