This is our new feature called Daily Links, everyday in the afternoon according to EST time, we will post up four to eight of the best Bitcoin articles from around the web. Rather than trying to give our thoughts on each one, we will talk about the one or two we find most interesting and important.
Daily Links:
Scaling Bitcoin Wrapup: CoinDesk
Karpeles Officially Charged: The Guardian
BlockTrail Launches Multisig Wallet: SiliconAngle
Universities friendly to Bitcoin: CoinDesk
Bitcoin ATM in capital of Switzerland: NewsBTC
Education Prevents Bitcoin in Africa: MemeBurn
Picture of core developers at Scaling Bitcoin: CryptoBrief
The Karpeles story is interesting because we have yet to see any charges filed on the theft that led to the actual collapse of Mt.Gox. Karpeles looks guilty of what Japanese authorities are accusing him of, and much more, but as always, we will have to wait and see how things play out in court. The customers of the class-action suit already settled out of court, taking what was left of Mt. Gox’s holdings, so this shouldn’t have much effect on their restitution, if any.
The Scaling Bitcoin conference is more interesting to me because it gained a reputation for being a possible venue for advancement in the block size debate. Besides the obvious correlation in the name, Scaling Bitcoin was also the first technical conference of this size and represented the first time every core Bitcoin developer was scheduled to be in the same buildings at the same time.
According to the CoinDesk article, everything seemed to go well. That being said, I think we should temper our expectations in regards to massive progress being made in the block size debate in the next few days. For starters, Scaling Bitcoin was focused on more than just the blocksize debate. As Wladimire der Laan told me before the conference kicked off, its agenda “takes a step back and looks at the bigger picture.”
Within the context of technical discussions, that is true. They talked a lot about issues besides the block size debate. As this was a technical focused conference, we didn’t see much in regards to governance and the other debates that have sprung up, nor should we at a technical conference.
What we should be excited about is that according to all accounts, everyone got along. No fights broke out. If insults were flung, they didn’t get to the point where they seeped into the media. Things went well and for the first time in some cases, all the Core Developers were able to put a face, rather than an email, to the person they were debating with.
The dividends this could pay down the line shouldn’t be understated, but it will also take a while. When the Cold War started to thaw, it wasn’t the result of one meeting or speech. There were an untold number of meetings that, along with economic and social factors, eventually ended the standoff. We have our own high stakes discussion going on in Bitcoin now, and it will take more than just this meeting to solve it. For the Scaling Bitcoin Conference to pay real dividends, these good feelings will have to be extended to the online discussion. It will be interesting to read the development mailing list in the coming days. While things have remained civil there, I will be watching to see if there is a bit more co-operation going forward.
Will that picture posted by CoinBrief end up being something akin to the famous Yalta Conference picture? It almost does have that feeling.
There is another Scaling Bitcoin Conference in December in Hong Kong, that will provide an opportunity for the Asian Bitcoin community to give their input, but hopefully we will see a large number of Core developers there as well, so the face to face communication, and the benefits from that, can continue.