Roger Ver may not be a household name, but if you’ve worked in the crypto industry for five years or more you are likely to have heard about him.
You may have heard about him and thought of an unpopular figure. “Bitcoin Jesus,” By his media portrayal of him as being a Bitcoin Cash fanatic or by his recent love for Bitcoin Cash “very bad influence that you shouldn’t play with” Note that I used this exact phrase in 2019.
With all of that in mind — and despite the fact that Ver sent me about $10 in Bitcoin Cash after an interview (hence the Bitcoin Jesus name) — I set out to read his new book, Hijacking Bitcoin, with the hunch that this would be my first book review pan.
It was a complete mistake. After finishing Hijacking Bitcoin I now believe that Bitcoin was truly hijacked and Ver was really the target of what now has been a nearly decade-long smear.
Even if Ver’s history of Bitcoin is stripped of every conjecture, the chaos and hatred that beset the community following Satoshi Nakamoto’s permanent retreat remains.
Hijacking Bitcoin was supposed to be filled with spicy conspiracy theories, as it is written both by Ver and the academic Steve Patterson. Instead, I received a carefully crafted history of Bitcoin and its blocksize battles from a very angry Ver.
Ver has chosen to ignore the emotions in order to gain a wider audience. A history written by a historian who is angry and has a vendetta would be read less often. Although I had some expectations about this, it’s nothing like that.
The core of Hijacking Bitcoin is to provide a record of all the ways in which Bitcoin has developed since Satoshi’s invention was first published on the internet.
Bitcoin was originally envisioned as an electronic cash system that could be scaled. This book’s primary thesis attempts to catalogue how Bitcoin evolved into today’s fee-heavy store of values currency.
As Ver writes: “Even if you like the changes that Bitcoin Core has made, the historical record is clear that they radically differ from the original design […] It should be clear that it’s not a question of whether Bitcoin Core changed the original design. The question is whether you like their changes.”
Ver is referring to the changes that are most controversial. “block size wars,” A period of intense debate over Bitcoin’s technology was marked by a struggle for control. A fierce debate centered on the issue of block size, which was defined as the maximum amount of data that could be stored in a blockchain block.
Satoshi set the 1MB limit in an early year after Bitcoin was launched, but it was only meant as a temporary measure. Ver may be right, but don’t just take his word for it. Satoshi wrote online at some point: “The eventual solution will be to not care how big it gets.”
The 1MB limitation created a bottleneck for transactions when Bitcoin began to gain popularity and scale. Although all Bitcoiners were aware of the need for a solution, they did not agree on its nature.
A group of Core developers resisted larger blocks out of fear of centralization. Off-chain solutions such as Lightning Network and Segregated witness (SegWit), they argued, would ensure Bitcoin’s decentralization and security.
Ver, the leader of the other side, was adamantly in favor of on-chain scaling, and larger blocks, as they felt this would be more in keeping with Satoshi’s original intention for electronic money to use the technology.
After a heated debate, a split developed within the Bitcoin Community. In August 2017, unable to reach a consensus, the blockchain underwent a hard fork — a split that resulted in the creation of Bitcoin Cash (which scaled to 8MB larger blocks) and with the Bitcoin chain eventually implementing SegWit.
Ver. Continues:
“We may never know the true motivation behind Bitcoin Core’s decision to overhaul Satoshi’s design. Maybe it happened in good faith. Maybe it happened because Core was infiltrated. Regardless, the result is the same: a small-block version of Bitcoin that is considerably less disruptive to the status quo. If interested parties did not directly corrupt Bitcoin, they certainly [benefited] from its corruption.”
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