Taylor Gerring, the Director of Technology at Ethereum and former Vice President of Engineering at Hive Bitcoin Wallet, has recently triggered a controversial discussion in various online Bitcoin communities with his statement on social media.
On Twitter, Gerring wrote, “Bitcoin needs to fork BlockStream. Their mission and goal is no longer aligned with the community,” criticizing the behaviour of the Bitcoin Core developers who don’t support the demands of the community and users in the network. He specifically condemned the disability of the BlockStream team to work on short-term scalability of the Bitcoin network, which he believes is causing the network’s growth to slow down.
@Codiox Thier behavior makes stated goals irrelevant. Community (including miners) losing trust in BlockStream
— Taylor Gerring (@TaylorGerring) August 19, 2016
Response to criticisms
As a response to his criticisms Bitcoin experts and Core developers, including Peter Todd, presented a series of arguments which disproved Gerring’s contradictory statement. Todd explained that the BlockStream team is solving the issue of scaling and has presented several ideal solutions including Bitcoin Core developer Matt Corallo’s block propagation, which is being created for on-chain scaling.
Members of the Bitcoin community quickly pointed out the irony in Gerring’s statement, suggesting that the trust towards BlockStream is stronger than ever because of the Ethereum foundation and developers’ execution of hard fork to save the drained funds of the DAO network.
Computer scientist and hacker Andrew Desantis wrote:
@TaylorGerring @Codiox ? thanks to your transaction-reversing hard fork, faith in @Blockstream is at an all-time high.
— Andrew T. DeSantis (@desantis) August 19, 2016
More supporters of the Bitcoin community called out Gerring for trying to undermine the Bitcoin network and community and for attempting to desperately legitimize the operations of the Ethereum foundation. However, a substantial portion of the Bitcoin community still disagrees with the vision and long-term proposals of BlockStream. Various projects and groups including /r/btcfork have emerged with an attempt to scale the Bitcoin network in the short term.