![]() In the English-speaking Bitcoin world, he says, the debate boils down to two issues. One group thinks one way, the other group thinks another way. Lee, who was educated in the United States but is now based in Shanghai, is also one of the rare bilingual English-Chinese Bitcoin entrepreneurs and has interpreted at international Bitcoin conferences. This is the problem that competing Bitcoin teams are running up against: no one camp can very easily wrest power away from the other without the support of the miners - and about three-quarters of their current network power is located in China.īut according to those who participate in both the Western and Chinese Bitcoin communities, the way the West has framed the issues over the last year is not the way China has, even as the West has looked to its Eastern counterparts to weigh in.īobby Lee speaking at a conference (courtesy of BTCC)īobby Lee, CEO of BTCC, one of the largest Bitcoin exchanges, is one of the few people in the Bitcoin community who witnesses these cultural variations regularly. But from the standpoint of considering economic efficiency there is still an intermediary, just a very different sort of one.” He says Bitcoin is much more complicated than a typical open source project because it involves managing and incentivizing a large network of laborers - the miners - to process the transactions. However, using Bitcoin does in fact require trusting a collective third party: the miners who process the transactions by recording the most recent transactions onto a public ledger containing every Bitcoin transaction in history, copies of which are kept on computers around the world.Īs David Evans, a lecturer at University of Chicago Law School wrote in a 2014 paper, “the fact that the public ledger is decentralized - so there is not a bank or a government acting as the intermediary - may have interesting political or social value to some. ![]() For this reason, the Bitcoin community likes to describe the currency as “trustless,” meaning that a user does not have to trust a third party such as a bank to ensure the proper processing of a transaction. Bitcoin is often described as a way to transfer money peer-to-peer, without a bank or financial institution acting as a middleman. Mining is the activity that sustains the network - and it distinguishes Bitcoin from previous Internet applications. However, that is by no means to say that we will switch our mining power to Classic.” Chief strategy officer Eric Mu wrote, “ We did use the word 支持 (translated as ‘support’), in both the CEO's statement and verbally when meeting with Classic lead developer Mr. ![]() In fact, one of the very companies listed on the Bitcoin Classic website as if it were a supporter, HaoBTC, disavowed this new version of the software in an email. However, by Thursday morning, two dozen people representing almost 20 Bitcoin companies, many of which would be directly affected by the software change (and accounting for more than half of the network powering Bitcoin) formed a group called the Bitcoin Roundtable and released a statement effectively rejecting the new software, at least for the time being. On Wednesday, one of the new teams, which has christened itself Bitcoin Classic and is supported by Coinbase, one of the most well-funded companies in the space (the original team is called Bitcoin Core), released a new version of the software making another attempt at an upgrade, which Lombrozo called “a tactic to shift power away from the Core devs.”
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