Slush, the CEO of Satoshi Labs, the company behind the Trezor Wallet and other efforts in the cryptocurrency space, also the founder of one of the first Bitcoin mining pools, stirred up a bit of a discussion on Twitter recently when he said that he believed scaling changes are being rushed.
The debate on the scaling of Bitcoin and the various solutions that aim to make that happen is to reach a tipping point on August 1st, with mining nodes either signaling or not the way forward that they want to go. In one scenario, miners which do not signal in favor of a certain proposal will be blacklisted from the larger blockchain. Scenarios like this can lead to chain splits. Chain splits can lead to market uncertainty.
Recently, it seems there was a significant dip in the value of Bitcoin, and then a requisite rebound already took place. This rebound is incomplete, of course, for people who bought at the high. Those people may have some time yet to wait, as the volatility that may come along with impending uncertainties will play its role on the price as well as usability of Bitcoin proper.
Many comments on the Twitter thread suggested that running Bitcoin Core and the BIP91 patches is the best way forward.
Nevertheless, in a separate Tweet, Slush clarified that his pool would be going with the flow of things, not fighting some political agenda:
@slush_pool will start signalling #BIP91 tomorrow. Please calm down everybody, we don't play any political game.
— slush (@slushcz) July 19, 2017
Non-politicized stances would have been preferable all the way through the scaling debate. Instead, hyper political activities on both sides of the debate led to all time high and a fever pitch of raging pitch forks going both ways. Neither side was quite sure why they were so angry at the other, but both sides took to the web with all the vitriol of jilted lovers. The whole scene did not give a good look to Bitcoin as a whole, and whether you believe there was a bubble or not, newcomers witnessing such nonsense in a season of such robust price rising were probably spooked. That this contributed, in part, to the downfall of the recent all time high cannot be disputed – certainly Bitcoiners do not look like much more than a childish bunch of accidentally wealthy libertarians from a high level view, after a certain point. Not the sort of thing to throw a lot of money into, in short – although these episodes fade, and then fresh money flows in, inevitably, as we’ve seen over the past few years.
All things being equal, less drama would lead to a better Bitcoin. Those that want to make Bitcoin great again should argue for less arguing.