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The Ten Commandments of Bitcoin
1. Thou shalt not centralise. This is anathema and the cardinal sin of bitcoinery. It counts for everything, by the way, not just mining, just in case thou were in any doubt.
2. On a related note, thou shalt be sceptical of government. Only those of a decidedly libertarian bent can be considered True Believers. The more centralised the government, the more suspicious thou should be. Even Switzerland is a bit dubious, frankly.
3. Thou shalt not impersonate Satoshi, nor misrepresent his arguments for political gain in the blocksize debate. I’m looking at you, Craig. I am not happy about that.
4. Thou shalt not keep thy funds on an exchange. Come on, guys, how many times do I have to tell you this one?
5. Thou shalt not dabble in alts. They are the work of the Forces of Night and a distraction from the Real Deal. Ethereum might be ok, we’re still deciding about that one. Will keep you posted.
6. Thou shalt keep control of thy private keys. Amongst other things, that means not holding funds on an exchange. They’re not wallets, thou should just pass through them after a successful trade during which thou ideally will have bought back lower. See 4.
7. Thou shalt not pronounce the name of the Beast, nor his demonic kingdom, which lieth upon the mountain called Gox.
8. Thou shalt hodl. Selling when the price is tanking is for weak hands and false believers.
9. Thou shalt not admit to losing money on bitcoin. If thou bought at $1,200 in 2013 just keep it quiet, ok?
10. Did thou take thy funds off that exchange yet? Because thou better not come round here again until thou hast fixed that abomination. Kthxbye.
Bitcoin established the viability of trustless value transfers online. Peer-to-peer transactions with no central authority are undoubtedly possible - but only a few. The problem is, blockchains in their current form aren’t capable of sustaining the thousands of transactions-per-second (tps) that would enable them to compete with conventional systems like Visa (Visa manages an average of 2,000 tps, peaking at many times that). So, how do you scale up the volume? Here are a few approaches, though there are others.
1) Make bigger blocks. This is Bitcoin Core, XT and Classic’s basic approach. The whole scalability issue comes down to the fact that each block has limited space; we’re at the point where transactions are being delayed because they’re getting bumped to the next block, and the easiest way to fix that is to make bigger blocks. It’s a fairly blunt approach, since it means the blockchain will grow exponentially - and therefore so will the bandwidth and hard drive space required to run a full node, resulting in the centralisation of the network around a small number of well-resourced providers.