Samson Mow, the ex-COO of China’s leading Bitcoin exchange platform, BTCC has attempted to make sense of the on-going Bitcoin debate. In his recent Tweet, he mentions that the community members are currently arguing about whether the digital currency should remain decentralized or allowance should be made for increased centralization.
The Bitcoin community, especially the developers, miners, and businesses have been engaged in a debate on the cryptocurrency’s future for a while now. With no consensus among the parties involved, the popular digital currency is still waiting for concrete scaling measures. There have been numerous proposals, most of them shot down by one or the other group.
Some believe that the answer to scalability lies in increased block size. There are those who prefer other methods to optimize the performance of the network. At the same time, any changes made in the form of a hard fork is not acceptable to many as they believe that it goes against the democratization principle on which the cryptocurrency is built. Soft forks, on the other hand, are not effective, say few.
Samson Mow’s tweet puts the whole debate in a new perspective. He said,
“The debate isn’t small blockers vs big blockers, or soft-forkers vs hard-forkers; it’s actually decentralization vs centralization. #bitcoin”
The concerns of Bitcoin network getting increasingly centralized is prevalent among the community members. The concentration of hashing power among the Chinese mining pools is the leading cause. Many Twitter users have responded in agreement to Mow’s tweet.
The decentralized nature of Bitcoin makes it more secure than its other counterparts. At the same time, the issues presented by centralized services in the cryptocurrency market is quite evident with the recent developments in China. In the name of regulatory requirements, the country’s cryptocurrency exchanges have frozen Bitcoin withdrawals, cutting people off the crypto-assets they own. If the services were decentralized, then neither these companies nor the government would have been in a position to dictate terms.
While the debate continues, the transaction costs and times are increasing to make microtransactions uneconomical. Also, the increased waiting period hinders Bitcoin’s use as a standard value exchange tool.
Ref: Twitter | Image: NewsBTC
