Bitcoin Foundation CEO Dismisses Allegations on a Breakup in Bitcoin Community

News and Analysis
16.05.2016

Bruce Fenton, CEO at Bitcoin Foundation, attempted to shed some sunlight on myths around Bitcoin in an interview with RT. He stated that most problems associated with the system are a consequence of poor knowledge of cryptocurrency in general.

Speaking about notorious exodus of Mike Hearn, and addressing his statements of bitcoin’s demise, Fenton said:

“I think the news from Mike Hearn, one of the developers, was widely covered, but I don’t think it’s really that significant to Bitcoin overall. I mean, certainly, a developer that made great contributions to Bitcoin programing and ecosystem over the years, but Bitcoin doesn’t rely on anyone person or even several people to succeed and continue.”

However, Fenton acknowledged that bitcoin might be more centralized than some in the community would like it. Anyway, he stressed that developers, regardless of how much of them there is, have no exclusive authority to change the code at their own discretion.

“There’s also no central CEO or organisation of any kind that has any authority over Bitcoin – it’s really an entirely voluntary type of system totally distributed. So, it would be nice to spread that, you know, on people who are working on it, and spread that even further, and have even more people involved, but I don’t think that it’s controlled by any small group of people,” he said.

Fenton also noted that bitcoin was an open source project, so anyone may participate in its further development. However, he acknowledged that the BIP mechanism turned out to be impractically complex.

“Those five people control what is now known as Bitcoin Core – which is the main core code that Bitcoin runs on. But, anyone could make a proposal, and, first of all, those people could basically have it accepted after a lot of discussion and a technical review process, or someone could just create an entirely different version of Bitcoin, called a “Fork” where they could make any changes and if the majority of users, particularly represented by Miners, the people who are validating transactions, agreed – then that would be the new sort of main Bitcoin. So, it’s not really as centralized as it may seem, because anybody can make those changes or requests anytime,” Fenton elaborated.

Speaking about the scalability issue, Fenton stated that the problem is overrated, and is mainly related to choosing between Bitcoin Classic and the Bitcoin Core‘s solution.

“We have a really fascinating thing that’s happening right now, and in an effort to try and be as fair as I can to both sides, of the issue – and it’s really not even two sides, there’s more than two sides to it, but, in very simple terms: basically, you have the majority of the technical people who have done by far most of the work on Bitcoin, the core programming, over the last couple of years who want to take one path, and then there are a couple of very well known developers, specifically Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik are two very respected and very well known developers who did a lot of work early on in Bitcoin, have another path that they want to take. So, the majority of the current technical opinion wants to go one way, and these couple other developers want to go another way. The interesting thing is that most of the CEOs and many of the major Miners are with the kind of minority technical opinion, and basically what that is in simple terms – it’s about the way that Bitcoin is scaled in order to accommodate more transactions, and everyone agrees that it needs to be scaled, some people have different opinions on whether Bitcoin should try and compete with something like Visa or not, and then the big disagreement is on how exactly to do that scaling,” he said.

Bruce Fenton earlier worked at investment company Atlantic Financial and Morgan Stanley. He’s been Bitcoin Foundation’s CEO since last April.

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