Hijacking Bitcoin is an eye-opening book by one of the most prominent Bitcoin entrepreneurs and evangelists, Roger Ver.
Roger gave me permission to use excerpts from the book, and while I originally planned to create a shorter version, the content of the book is so well-structured that as I worked, I kept adding more.
Roger Ver presents a compelling case for how Bitcoin was captured, with its original vision distorted and its disruptive potential diminished.
Hijacking Bitcoin is undoubtetly a valuable read for anyone interested in cryptocurrencies and the underlying technology.
You can find Roger Ver’s book on: www.hijackingbitcoin.com/
Petition (important): https://www.change.org/p/roger-ver-a-cryptocurrency-pioneer-deserving-justice-and-freedom
Although I agree with much of what Roger Ver is saying, it can’t be denied that his criticisms are filled with the contradiction “It’s okay if we do it but not if you do it.” For instance, he says that having a Benevolent Dictator For Life like Satoshi is good but then criticises that Bitcoin Core for being a dictator that blocked his changes. You can’t have it both ways. Understandably, he’s trying to express that he wants Bitcoin to be like Linux with its BDFL but Linux works because the “Linux Core” under Linus is more a reference implementation than anything else and each version or fork of Linux does not have to be compatible with each other. But they don’t have to be. This can’t work for currency. Granted, Linux forks as of late have adopted unifying standards like Snap and Flatpak that span different distributions to bring unity in diversity but currency requires much more unity than this in order to work.
They were not his changes. The increase of the block size was the plan all along as the 1MB limit was only put in as a temporary anti-spam measure, the plan was derailed by a few devs who had conflicts of interest working for a company that stood to profit from a congested chain by selling off chain solutions. Roger had nothing to do with any technical code changes to bitcoin.
The core devs should have forked bitcoin and started their own coin instead oh hijacking bitcoin with their idiotic ideas that have crippled bitcoin.
You’re missing the point. The core devs were responsible for their implementation. A BDFL can delay changes indefinitely and add or remove controversial features. Satoshi did with some features that were re-added to BCH. According to Vitalik, ETH might never have existed if some of the changes Satoshi reverted were kept in. BTC was never set up as a reference platform and probably couldn’t have been without destroying via fragmentation hell. But even if it was, they would not need to fork off the reference since they are The Reference. You might not like the decision of the core team. Many Linux developers did not like that C++ was banned from the Linux kernel because it is not pure, only to have Rust be accepted despite being fundamentally a bigger difference to C than C++, but that’s the BDFL’s decision to make. If you don’t like it, you make a fork which is what BCH ultimately did and what many Linux forks continue to do. With 20/20 hindsight, BCH should have just maintained a separate fork (made in the most backwards compatible way so all BTC features were BCH features) and created a parallel Reddit Forum (perhaps call it something like Bitcoin Complete), but that would require a new BDFL which you might not end up agreeing with on other points. If such a fork was done early enough, Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Complete might have been forced to co-operate or come to an arrangement like “no new feature goes into Bitcoin Core unless it first goes into Bitcoin Complete and people are free to use either coin”.
You are over-complicating the matter. A temporary limit on the block size was put in early on to prevent the network being spammed since transactions were free at that time. By 2014 there was no such concern anymore and there was no technical reason not to increase this limit. It could have easily been increased to at least 2MB with zero impact on anything. They crafted a new narrative about not being able to run a node on a nintendo so we must stall all progress to accommodate 3 people that want to run a node on a laptop with 515MB of ram.
It was total sabotage.
Perhaps, but there are at least 5 factions mentioned even in Roger Ver’s account. Project management is hard, especially for a research project (i.e. trying to build something that’s never been built before) and people dig in for the dumbest reasons. Usually, developers can hash out a compromise solution but when non-developers try to “help” like the Reddit moderator or the companies putting out the ad to pressure the core team to change, things can get very messy and factions solidify to the point where nothing moves forward. IMO, if developers were to just sit down together to resolve this, a new structure would have formed. Bitcoin Next Generation would contain all the advanced experimental changes such as those that eventually got into Etherium. Bitcoin Preview would contain all Bitcoin Next Generation which have a solid chance of being accepted into Bitcoin Core but need proving time. Finally Bitcoin Core would be the most conservative Bitcoin branch which would only contain changes from Bitcoin Preview. Yes, they would be 3 different coins but they would work towards being mutually compatible and would be able to satisfy all parties. If you want to see how well this would work, look at Debian which has the “Unstable, Testing, and Stable” branches. All three branches are in use. Note, “stable” is ossified (like Bitcoin Core). It’s old but it was proven.
Sounds like you are trying to obfuscate and rationalize the hijacking of bitcoin.
Facts: 1MB limit on blocks was put in to prevent spam early on with a clear plan to raise it as the network grew, then the project was infused with shady corporate money and they changed the story that 1MB blocks are essential for decentralization which coincidentally provided blockstream (the corporate entity) with a revenue model.
It was a deliberate attempt to cripple bitcoin so it could not compete with the banking system for payments.
