The second episode of the official Bitcoin.com Podcast is now live. This episode features Erik Voorhees, a huge name in the Bitcoin industry. Our host Zach Doty talked with Voorhees about several topics surrounding the highly contentious Bitcoin block size debate.
Also read: Bitcoin.com Podcast Episode 1 Recap: Andreas Antonopoulos
Erik Voorhees: Block Size & Community Politics
Voorhees has earned a lot of respect in the Bitcoin community, especially from the libertarians among us. Since the beginning of his Bitcoin career, Voorhees has always been a proponent for free markets and privacy, putting action behinds his words when he founded the totally anonymous ShapeShift exchange, and subsequently ending its services in New York when the BitLicense went live.
When it comes to the heated block size debate, Voorhees says that he initially tried to distance himself from the issue. Not being a technical expert on Bitcoin, he felt it best to leave the debate to the people who know more about it than him.
However, after witnessing the ruthless censorship regarding the debate imposed by Theymos on his Bitcoin forums, Voorhees felt the urge to get involved.
Since then, Voorhees has been preaching the importance of social cooperation, rather than backing a particular block size solution. He says that the debate has gone far beyond “professional disagreement,” and that “people are assuming the worst in each other.” Voorhees would like to see the block size debate return to as state of productive discussion, instead of petty politics and ad hominems.
The biggest problem is the social cohesion in the bitcoin community. It is not the size of the blocks.
Doty and Voorhees went on to discuss various other topics related to the block size, including hard forks and soft forks, the debate around scalability in general, and ways to address scalability issues.
If you want to listen to this discussion in detail, you can find the podcast at the bottom of the article, or you can visit soundcloud directly. Additionally, you can now subscribe to the podcast via RSS.
If you haven’t been following the Bitcoin.com Podcast, now would be a good time to start. We came out of the gate strongly with our first two guests, Andreas Antonopoulos and Erik Voorhees, and we have a growing list of big names for future episodes.
What do you think about Erik Voorhees’ views towards the block size debate? Let us know in the comments below!
Images courtesy of ShapeShift.io
