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22 commentsCordus vs ethereum phase
A long-running debate about how best to scale the network has created a rift in the bitcoin community, culminating in a game of chicken between the factions that could split the currency into two competing versions. I stand by my old headline: Whether bitcoin could sustain the low latency and low fees of the early days was beside the point.
And perhaps bitcoin helped push that toward reality. Five years ago, such a goal was scarcely on the horizon in the U. Nor is it the pseudonymous nature of bitcoin addresses, a privacy feature that voyeurs, gossips and stalking exes as well as law enforcement can circumvent by analyzing the flow of funds on the public blockchain.
No, the key thing about bitcoin is its censorship-resistance — something that I only obliquely touched on in my original post, when I mentioned that the currency could be used to purchase drugs on the dark web or send donations to WikiLeaks, which was then operating under a blockade by the major payment networks. Censorship-resistance solves a real problem, and not just for drug dealers or ransomware attackers.
Centralization may offer certain efficiencies, but it also creates single points of failure that are vulnerable to political or social pressure. As I wrote a year later, in Set aside whatever you may think about WikiLeaks or Julian Assange.
Just take a step back and consider this: Lawmakers strong-armed financial institutions into cutting off payments to a publisher that embarrassed the government. But WikiLeaks continued to accept donations via Bitcoin. That's the benefit of having a decentralized system, where payments are validated by "mining" computers scattered around the globe.
There's no company with nervous shareholders for the demagogues to bully. WikiLeaks was an edge case, you say? Nobody cares about the edge cases, until they become one. Constitutions, due process, the presumption of innocence, reasonable doubt and cryptocurrency all provide valuable protections for edge cases. Permission to pay As the world goes digital and physical cash transactions continue to decline — egged on by payments companies aiming to expand market share and by governments seeking to maximize tax revenues — there will likely be a lot more attempts to turn trusted third parties into choke points.
The writer Brett Scott warned about this last year:. Now, when I hear a blowhard spouting conspiracy theories on TV, I laugh and change the channel, and I avoid going to see plays that try way too hard to be topical and edgy. Financial institutions will be a favorite target for enlistment, since they sit in the middle of so many transactions. Again, this is not far-fetched. Bitcoin, blessedly, was designed to be apolitical. If an undocumented migrant worker in California wants to send bitcoin to his aunt in Mexico, President Trump cannot stop the transaction though he could make it harder to exchange dollars for bitcoin on this side of the border.
If a lonely man in a wheelchair wants to pay a consenting adult in another city bitcoin to take her clothes off in front of a webcam, the combined forces of the religious right and the carceral left cannot stop the transaction. The downside of censorship resistance is that genuinely dangerous people like ISIS might take advantage of it too. According to a recent article by Rand Corp. Suffice to say that long-term solutions to terrorism might fall outside the scope of financial services policy.
Politics is hard to get away from. And unfortunately, politics may break bitcoin. An oversimplified version goes like this:. Bigger blocks would shorten confirmation times, allow more transactions to be processed per second, and hold fees down.
Users who want their transactions processed quickly have to pay higher fees to coax bitcoin miners, who record transactions on the ledger, into prioritizing them. Another camp has wanted to proceed more cautiously. Larger blocks, they point out, would require more powerful computers, reducing the number of nodes that can store a copy of the entire blockchain and double-check the work of miners. Mining itself is already too centralized, with much of the processing power located in China.
Various compromises have been floated, but the debate has grown increasingly acrimonious and the camps distrustful of each other. It will all come to a head on Aug.
Which of the two coins would be the real bitcoin? Ethereum, the second-biggest cryptocurrency network, weathered a similar split last year, and both Ethereum and so-called Ethereum Classic have their devotees. There are hundreds of other cryptocurrencies.
A few are interesting, such as Monero and Zcash, each designed to be more anonymous than bitcoin. None of these coins have yet achieved the network effect of bitcoin. The world needs faster and cheaper international payments, but above all it needs censorship-resistant ways to transact. Banks ought to be able to provide the former, maybe using some of the technologies bitcoin has spawned; aside from physical cash, bitcoin remains our best hope for the latter. On-site registration will be available.
In , Anthony Comstock persuaded Congress to ban the mailing of obscene materials. Bitcoin users were not affected. Video Making smarter small business lending decisions Learn about the new datasets and capture methods we are exploring to enhance the predictive scoring of small business. Partner Insights Sponsor Content From: Small business lending July 1. More from this Author Equifax breach: BankThink submission guidelines BankThink is American Banker's platform for informed opinion about the ideas, trends and events reshaping financial services.
View our detailed submission criteria and instructions. Posted by Common Sense. Marc's article demonstrates a real understanding of what Bitcoin is, why it's important, and what differentiates it from various private blockchain ventures which are neither censorship resistant, nor as secure.
Thank you for publishing this, and for helping others gain a foothold in this new world. More from American Banker. Who stood out, who stumbled. Bank reputations fall for first time in five years: Like what you see? Make sure you're getting it all Independent and authoritative analysis and perspective for the banking industry.