# Last edited on 2017-03-16 23:07:27 by stolfilocal
# For /r/btc
# NOT POSTED

> if Roger and Jihan are successful

Bitcoin failed several years ago, when a majority of the mining hashpower became concentrated into half a dozen companie (now mostly in China). The system then came to depend on a trusted third party, namely those few companies.  The security of the protocol, which depended entirely on mining being dispersed among tousands of anonymous independent miners, was shattered.

But the damage was not evident, since transactions continued to be processed.  Bitcoiners just lobotomized the relevant part of their brain, and carried on, pretending that the trusted third party did not exist.

Another stake was driven into bitcoin's heart sometime between 2010 and 2013, when the  Core developers tacitly decided to insert the "full but non mining" relay nodes between clients and miners -- instead of having clients connect directly to miners.  That change in the design completely invalidated the arguments that supposedly ensured the security of the network.  Even assuming, optimistically, that the centralized miners will not abuse their power, the client no longer had the guarantee that his transactions would be processed, or that he would get the correct blockchain.  

Still, most transactions still contiued to be processed as they should be.  So bitcoiners just lobotomized another chunk of their brains, and ignored that damage too.

But then Greg, with Blockstream's millions, took control of development and proceeded to replace Satoshi's protocol by his own concept of what a cryptocurrency should be.  In particular, by preventing the increase in the block size limit, he let the system run into severe congestion.  Instead of the fixed low fees and 10 minute average delay of Satoshi's design, you got unpredictable fees often higher than those of legacy systems, unpredictable delays up to a week or more, and a real chance of transactions being dropped without their clients knowledge.

Unlike the previous blows, this one could not be ignored by users of the system.  Bitcoin is now *visibly* broken: the zombie is no longer walking, but crawling.  Predictably, users and developers are now shifting to altcoins.  And the prospects of fixing this problem, thus bringing it back to at least the previous zombie state, are rather uncertain -- as long as Blockstream still has capital to burn.

But somehow it is the miners and Roger Ver who are "threatening" bitcoin.  Go figure.