This week on Building Better Money we continue the conversation with Steve Patterson! After zooming in on the foundations of Bitcion in our first episodes we are zooming out to talk about some of the history of Bitcoin. Specifically around the debate about the block-size limit which culminated in the fork creating Bitcoin Cash in the summer of 2017.
Steve is the author of “What’s the Big Deal About Bitcoin?”, which, in my opinion, is the best introductory book out there to learn about bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Make sure to check out the book: “What’s The Big Deal About Bitcoin?” on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Big-Deal-About-Bitcoin-ebook/dp/B00RF3BQDU
Learn more about the Bitcoin Cash Fork with Steve’s interviews with Ryan X Charles:
* Episode 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGYo1EUaeKI
* Episode 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvOd6lL2fio
Note: This interview was recorded in March 2019.
And find out more about Steve at steve-patterson.com
In this episode:
- A quick background for the block-size limit and debate around increasing the block-size limit. What early assumptions were and how the conflict in visions for Bitcoin grew leading up to the creation of Bitcoin Cash
- Super-basic overview of a fork
- Basic overview of potential concerns with big blocks and with a small block-size limit
- How politics and social media impacted the outcome of the block-size debate
- Bitcoin as a cryptographic and economic experiment, but also as a governance and political experiment
- The importance of the political actors within the Bitcoin system, and how focusing on the technological or economic side of it led people to underestimate certain movements
- Learning as a society about how governance of open source projects work
- Overviewing the different groups of stakeholders involved in the block size debate
- A timeline of the different unfulfilled compromises
- How does BTC, BCH, and BSV all having the same mining algorithm using the same mining algorithm affect their security
Listen to the episode here or subscribe to Building Better Money here.
