Gregory Maxwell, ex-Blockstream and Bitcoin Core developer on the Bitcoin White-paper: “...amazing and historically interesting but practically irrelevant document on a website that can easily be found in thousands of other places.”

Gregory believes that the Bitcoin White-paper is irrelevant because Bitcoin lives-on through code (which his affiliates happen to maintain) and the BTC instance of Bitcoin.

Greg is actually mistaken.

The Bitcoin White-paper is extremely important.

For example, BTC today is NOT the Bitcoin described in the White-paper: Bitcoin was never meant to be limited in its transaction capacity nor was it meant to have those extremely high transaction fees BTC currently suffers from. The opposite is true: Bitcoin is meant to always offer near-free (and even free) transactions.

The Bitcoin white-paper is NOT irrelevant, it’s actually extremely important as it anchors that Bitcoin is peer to peer electronic cash.

The other use-cases such as Gold 2.0 and Store-of-Value are the result of Bitcoin’s frictionless utility as peer to peer electronic cash with 0 trusted third parties, and with a very specific set of incentives distributed among its users and miners.

People value utility, and you can store value in what other people value.

There is no value without utility, and utility in Bitcoin is the result of solving the Byzantine generals problem.

BTC today cannot offer Bitcoin’s utility (peer to peer electronic cash) at global and cash-like scale without compromising the Byzantine generals problem solution presented in Bitcoin (and defined in the White-paper).

Lightning Network, Liquid and all off-chain solutions inherently violate the Byzantine generals problem solution presented in the Bitcoin White-paper.

The reason Gregory considers the White-paper as irrelevant is because BTC fails the Bitcoin description in the White-paper, and for all that he cares, good riddance.

Bitcoin as described in the White-paper continues unchanged and full throttle as peer to peer electronic cash for the world here on Bitcoin Cash (hence the name).

As for BSV and other forks of Bitcoin, the very reason for which the Bitcoin White-paper is being discussed today is the reason for which I’d never ever use them.

Source of Greg’s statement: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/l1uieu/bitcoinorgs_response_to_legal_threats_by_csw/gk1y8h9/

submitted by /u/wisequote
[link] [comments]

source https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/l32vbi/gregory_maxwell_exblockstream_and_bitcoin_core/