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The Daily Decrypt began the week of January 18th, 2016, with an episode on Bitcoin Classic, a new Bitcoin variant that is gaining traction within the industry. Bitcoin Classic is proposing an increase in the block size from 1MB to 2MB. Many notable figures within the industry have thrown their support behind the variant, including mining pools like BitMain and BitFury, companies like Coinbase and Bitstamp, and notable personalities like Roger Ver. The variant is also being developed by some notable figures, including Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik. A voting section has been deployed to the variant's homepage in an effort to bring some decentralized governance to the variant and its direction. The variant currently has just 8 nodes running its codebase, but that number is expected to increase as the code becomes more widely available. For more information or to get involved in the discussion, visit the Bitcoin Classic subreddit or request an invite to the Bitcoin Classic Slack team.
On Wednesday, host Amanda sat down with us to offer some insight as to how she got interested in money, finance and ultimately cryptocurrency. She, like many others, became interested in learning about money and economics after the 2008 financial crisis in the United States. Her research ultimately led her to the Mises Institute, a notable organization promoting Austrian economics, where she learned that competition is healthy and a cornerstone of a free and evolving economy. Cryptocurrencies, Amanda believes, are significant because they are technologically superior to traditional fiat monetary systems and are creating fierce competition for fiat currencies and therefore fueling the evolution of our monetary systems.
Because governance and money are so heavily intertwined, Amanda believes that cryptocurrency technology is the future and that it has the power to empower us as individuals in the face of the broken economic and governance ​systems of today.