Bitcoin is proper kicking off at the moment. High-profile developers quitting calling it “failed” coz they’ve not increased the block-size, internal fighting leading to DDOS attacks on, effectively, bitcoin-voters.
And yesterday one of the exchanges that everyone knew was looking dodgy for a while said that they’d fallen for a trick from an engineer who took over one of the minority-coins they traded and injected a root-kit into it. Eighteen months ago.
So, nice of them to let us know I guess. Eventually.
My Cryptsy holdings are worth about 30 or 40 quid I think, but I’d been assuming for months that they were worth nothing now.
There’s lots of interesting debate on the recent Bitcoin troubles here on Hacker News.
It certainly seems to be going through a change about now. Blockchain size can be increased for the moment, but until there’s an improvement in global bandwidth you can’t do much more than double it. Quadruple it at the outside.
Perhaps you can double the blocksize as often as needed and band widths will increase coincidentally by about the right size too, but not for ever, certainly, there’s physical limits to that.
So the question threatening to fork the chain is a proper hard one. No excuse for censorship or attacks (DDOS or otherwise), but I certainly don’t personally feel like I know the answer. Probably it’s more like “Have many alt-currencies” than “make the blocksize infinitely high”.
Meanwhile, I’d increase the blocksize while we talk about it if I were Bitcoin Dictator.
Course, if there existed a Bitcoin Dictator then (assuming that person isn’t me) I’d advise everyone to run away from bitcoin.
Somehow, consensus must be achieved.