I'd like to comment about something I realized when reading your post. About the difference between the Bitcoin development/community and the Ethereum one. If you want to completely oversimplify it, the Bitcoin community appears to be full of fear, anger, attacks and competition among themselves. While Ethereum seems to be compromise, inclusion, discussion, working towards a greater goal. You see a change proposed, and one developer comments that they think it's a bad idea for certain reasons. Then after a month of discussion he will come back and say that, yeah, I was wrong, it's actually a good idea.

The recent multi-sig wallet hack was due to some bad refactoring by one of the developers on the Parity node/wallet team. Gavin Wood wrote a post about it, and instead of blaming his employee, he blamed himself, that he didn't put enough security into the Solidity language itself. And then he proposed some changes to make it safer.

There definitely was some ugliness with the ETH/ETC fork and controversies, but now we have pull requests from ETC developers that help improve ETH.

There seems to be a lot less ego in the Ethereum developer community. The fighting inside the Bitcoin community leads to attacking other communities too. Whenever there is a setback or hack or just the Ether price drops a bit, the threads are full of Bitcoiners coming in to laugh, attack, 'concern troll'. But you rarely see the reverse. Usually the attacks on Bitcoin come from the people who think all cryptocurrencies are a scam, they target everyone equally. Of course there are exceptions, there are amazing people in Bitcoin and horrible people in Ethereum. I'm just making a broad generalization on the feeling someone gets when reading and talking in their communities.

It's no wonder that Ethereum has the largest developer interest, it's just a really nice place to work.

Exactly. To make an analogy, consider what would happen if the president/congress appointed an incompetent fool as the chair of the Federal Reserve. The whole world would lose confidence in the dollar, and another currency would take over.

This is why I agree with Mike Hearn that the "Bitcoin experiment has failed"[0]. In fact it already did so in late 2015.

He makes technical arguments there which you could debate (some of his technical arguments have been shown to be misleading[1]).

But I think where he hits the nail on the head is that Bitcoin is now simply a circus. Unless the community can be united again, it won't last.

The Reddit censorship, DoS attacks, "scaling" conferences where solutions are not allowed to be proposed. It's childish, and almost shocking that people have stood behind their ridiculous behavior for so long, when they are on the verge of changing the world economy.

[0] https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14833567

I rarely comment on Bitcoin these days, although I do still read things about it from time to time. I realise we're mostly in agreement, but on the technical arguments I'd like to briefly defend myself here - the arguments I made were not misleading or dishonest in any way. It's rather the post you link to which is.

No particularly special Bitcoin knowledge is required to figure out why, just careful study of that post with a critical and analytical mind (and not the mind of a "fan"). I wasted far too much of my life dealing with people Peter Todd had deliberately confused back in those years - it's a Sisyphean task that simply never ends if you let it - so I don't wish to write out a long rebuttal now, especially as I don't know you. But see if you can figure it out. Like I said, you don't need me to explain if you study things carefully.

Thanks! I will certainly re-read it.

As I said to Peter Todd in that thread, I'm a neutral observer and a fan of both of yours. Having been a programmer for over a decade, it's a shame that even someone like me can get so lost in the rhetoric of this debate.

Thanks for all your blog posts, I point people to them all the time. My greatest wish (something I tried to communicate to Peter Todd) is that Core would write some thoughtful, clear, well-argued posts like yours.

But I suppose it doesn't matter, because as we both agree, the experiment has already failed.

There's also no shortage of the Ethereum community patting themselves on the back too. The Ethereum community isn't toxic because it hasn't encountered serious questions about the future of the protocol yet and the price is constantly going up (in the medium/long term).

I'd say the Dao hack and fork was a very serious question, getting right down to the entire point of a blockchain itself, immutable or not. And the fact they are now able to work side by side (eth/etc) on some code issues is a very good indication on how the dev community there works differently.

During that crisis it got quite ugly though. Maybe it could be argued Bitcoin is going through a much larger, multi-year ugly period, and that things will settle down and cooperation will happen in another couple years. But many of the people claiming leadership and some of the core developers are outright toxic, and that 'trickles down' into the community.

> Yes, and it seems also out of spite. They could have increased to 2MB in order to avoid the horrible congestion on the network for a couple years. Once that was in place, they could have continued the SegWit work.

This statement demonstrates a very shallow understanding of the blocksize debate. There are a large number of reasons to object to any hardfork (causes instability and chaos, breaks compatibility, is a point of control for the people dictating the hardfork, is potentially opposed by many users, no easy way to measure support), and even more reasons to oppose a block size increase hardfork (doubling the blocksize worsens bottlenecks that are already significant, buys only a few months of time, is not a repeatable strategy to achieve real scalability, and the fight seems much more about control and pride than the actual block size - otherwise segwit would have been adopted immediately).

As bitter as the fighting has been, the opposition to a block size increase hard fork stands on very solid ground.

Right. I've been describing it like this: That Bitcoin doesn't have a Good King anymore (Satoshi). Ethereum has Vitalik, and Linux has Linus. Projects with a Good King typically defer tough decisions to the king, and the project is (usually) overall better off for it. But with Satoshi gone, everyone has their own ideas about what's "best" for Bitcoin, and there is no unifying force. Ethereum development is sane because Vitalik is heavily involved in it. I believe that is why Ethereum will succeed over Bitcoin in the long run.

All good kings eventually die. So projects without a good king are more future proof if they survive because they have already priced that reality in. The other projects could very well collapse once their good king dies.

Perhaps. But which project is more likely to survive into the future: Bitcoin, or Ethereum? I think having a good king steers a project well enough to future-proof it in most cases, if for no other reason than that it's engineered better along the way.