---
title: Bitcoin crisis
author: nek0
tags: english, bitcoin
description: Loks like the Bitcoin network is about to break
---

It has been a while, since I posted something on the topic of Bitcoin, since I am only an uninvolved bystander in the whole matter. From what I could perceive, the Bitcoin network was groing and doing rather well.

It naturally struck me with surprise, when I learned, that the Bitcoin network is in grave danger. I have read [this][bt] article by a former Bitcoin developer, which describes the current Situation rather clearly and with great detail. I will try to summarize it as good as I can, because the article is rather lengthy.

The underlying technical problem the network currently has, is the blocksize limit enforced by the protocol. But it's not the limit itself causing the problems, but rather the setting of this limit in the implementation. When Bitcoin emerged for the first time, the block size limit was arbitrarily set to 1MB and has not been changed ever since.

This does not mean, that there have not been attempts to increase this limit, most notably by the [Bitcoin XT][xt] client and the developers behind it. But the technical and philosophical divergence from the original bitcoin client was and still is not well accepted from certein influential members of the bitcoin community and a wide scale deployment of this client is now strongly discouraged because of the DDoS attacks on larger operators of this cleint in the past, which even led to the downbreak of a whole ISP network.

I hope very much, that the community as well as the developers keep in mind, what the whole Bitcoin experiment is about: The creation of a currency, which can not be controlled by a small possibly malevolent but surely selfish minority.

[bt]: https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7
[xt]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_XT
