en
Back to the list

John Cantrell: “Bitcoin Cash and BSV may not have a good ending”

source-logo  en.cryptonomist.ch 11 August 2020 13:30, UTC

Anonymous bitcoin developer that goes by the name John Cantrell was recently invited to speak on Blockspeak.io with host Monty Munford. 

“Some people thought that Bitcoin was meant to scale to billions of people on the main chain and everyone is supposed to get their coffee transactions settled on the chain, and those people went on and created Bitcoin Cash – Bitcoin SV. Their mindset was to increase the block size so that we can fit many transactions as we need.”

Started coding since the dev was ten years old and in the last years, the anonymous character has developed several programs. In the podcast, he claimed that today’s Bitcoin Cash couldn’t support the Lightning Network. In fact, the BCH devs don’t want it too.

According to John Cantrell, this loses the primary purpose of Bitcoin. The main use of Bitcoin is to separate state money from 3rd parties. You want to be able to have censorship resistance money where all your transactions cannot be censored. 

“In order to do that, it means you will have to be able to verify the transactions yourself”.

It does not seem like a solution that will thrive in the long run because the power will again lie in the hand of influential people with deep pockets. Suppose BCH and BSV keep doing what they are doing today. In that case, It is going to end up in a place where only a handful of people, primarily governments or banks will have the resources to run these nodes and the ordinary people will have to ask them to send transactions on their behalf.

John Cantrell’s Involvement in the Bitcoin space

‘Once you are in Bitcoin for a while, you realise that the base layer isn’t going to scale. You can continue to optimise it, and you can squeeze more transactions in a block, but if you want to have a system that the average user can download and verify the blocks and verify the transactions in those blocks then it needs to maintain a certain size.’ 

Cantrell is an active member of the Bitcoin lightning network dev community, and he has been actively pushing commits to make the experience better.

en.cryptonomist.ch