Quotes from the interview between Cryptoverse and Synth (early Bitcoin developer). Links below.
The most interesting thing about Bitcoin and what I don't think people really understand is G Maxwell's role. So Bitcoin looks like it's this piece of perfect crystalline mathematics that will withstand a thousand years, but people don't understand the human element behind Bitcoin. They haven't met the miners, the mining pools and the developers. One of the things about Bitcoin is the early people said it was a social experiment. Today people believe that Bitcoin is the dominant cryptocurrency and that Bitcoin will be with us for the next 10,000 years and that is none of the people who work on it believe that. What happened is Bitcoin is a social experiment and it can fail because of the miners, because of the incentive, because of flaw in the cryptography library, loss of public confidence, or because the miners are greedy. For instance, if you want a billion people using [Bitcoin] you need to have this many transactions per second, but the higher the transaction fees, the more money the miners make. So the miners will actually inject fake transactions that can just the network to drive up the transaction fees so they make more money. If you try to fix this in the code the miners will reject your code change and threaten to fork Bitcoin, so you actually have to get consent of the miners to make changes. The developers say we're going to improve Bitcoin and we're going to add this feature but it's going to reduce your mining reward and you're going to make less money and the miners will say we're not doing that. So the miners are going to drag Bitcoin down with them.
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G Maxwell's is the most interesting person in Bitcoin. You have this currency that's worth two trillion hundreds of billions of dollars and we might see it hit a trillion dollars in the next few years. You have this currency with this massive market cap and which people believe is an immutable store value. They believe it's a digital gold. That it's mathematics and it's immune the human irrationality that basically drives the rest of society, but the developers say it's a social experiment. What do they mean by that? They mean is there are a hundred reasons why Bitcoin could fail.
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G Maxwell is absolutely critical because there are a hundred idiots and this guy wants to add this feature and that guy wants to add that feature and this guy wants to add this feature and that guy once said this feature. And this guy wants to do this thing that's going to destroy Bitcoin and G Maxwell says “no we're not doing that” And these guys say “well let's compromise, let's do it 50 percent” let's commit suicide 50 percent and G Maxwell says “No, we shouldn't do that at all” so he sits there and he holds back this wall of idiots that is constantly trying to attack and subvert Bitcoin. Because of him and his tolerance, is basically the reason why Bitcoin has survived to this day, but people like that they're going to grind him down year after year after year.
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There's a funny story about G Maxwell . When people trying to add this thing called The Merchant Protocol which was supposed to make payments easier. They had spent five years almost removing open SSL dependencies from Bitcoin and then they added this thing in called The Merchant Protocol that added like an X 11 certificate thing from Verisign and it added this dependency on something they had spent the last five years trying to get rid of. And G Maxwell said “no let's not do that or let's make it optional”. He couldn't stop them from adding it and then he said this is stupid and we should never do this, but they did it and disabled it by default. Four days after the first version of Bitcoin was released that had The Merchant Protocol in the source code, but not enabled by default, they had this bug called Heartbleed and basically if you had Merchant Protocol enabled, someone could send one packet to your Bitcoin node and steal all of the private keys and then grab the coins. This applied to any Bitcoin node connected to the network.
Cleaned up the conversation a bit, so if you want to watch it in full:
Time-stamped for the section above
https://youtu.be/S-ChyzmUaW0?t=7m10s
Edit: Some spelling and grammer
Submitted April 01, 2018 at 01:29AM by CryptoWherewolf http://bit.ly/2pW9vDz
