{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","author_name":"npub17ty4mumkv43w8wtt0xsz2jypck0gvw0j8xrcg6tpea25z2nh7meqf4qgyd","author_url":"https://nostr.ae/npub17ty4mumkv43w8wtt0xsz2jypck0gvw0j8xrcg6tpea25z2nh7meqf4qgyd","provider_name":"njump","provider_url":"https://nostr.ae","html":"📅 Original date posted:2015-05-07\n📝 Original message:\u003e\n\u003e What gives Bitcoin value aren't its technical merits but the fact that\n\u003e people believe in it.\n\u003e\n\nMuch of the belief in Bitcoin is that it has a bright future. Certainly the\nhuge price spikes we've seen were not triggered by equally large spikes in\nusage - it's speculation on that future.\n\nI quite agree that if people stop believing in Bitcoin, that will be bad. A\nfast way to bring that about will be to deliberately cripple the technology\nin order to force people onto something quite different (which probably\nwon't be payment channel networks).\n\n\n\u003e I'd argue that if we didn't force through a 20MB fork now, and we ran into\n\u003e major network difficulties a year from now and had no other technical\n\u003e solutions, that maybe we would get nearly universal agreement\n\u003e\n\nI doubt it. The disagreement seems more philosophical than technical. If\nBitcoin fell off a cliff then that'd just be taken as more evidence that\nblock chains don't work and we should all use some network of payment hubs,\nor whatever the fashion of the day is. Or anyone who doesn't want to pay\nhigh fees is unimportant. See all the other justifications Gavin is working\nhis way through on his blog.\n\nThat's why I conclude the opposite - if there is no fork, then people's\nconfidence in Bitcoin will be seriously damaged. If it's impossible to do\nsomething as trivial as removing a temporary hack Satoshi put in place,\nthen what about bigger challenges? If the community is really willing to\ndrive itself off a cliff due to political deadlock, then why bother\nbuilding things that use Bitcoin at all?\n-------------- next part --------------\nAn HTML attachment was scrubbed...\nURL: \u003chttp://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20150507/56a1fd00/attachment.html\u003e"}