A Scrum, The Lightning Network, and the Return of the Maximalist
February 9, 2019 by Paul de Havilland
Coinscrum, the long-running London-based conference, had always been a bitcoin maximalist event. While altcoins were introduced into discussions for an interim period, the talk is now primarily about bitcoin again.
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New Maximalism Is For the Old School Maximalist
Maximalist sentiment is back in vogue. And that suits Core developer Matt Corallo just fine. At the Coinscrum event last week, the cofounder of Blockstream, and a revered figure in the crypto landscape, was introduced as “The bastard child of Satoshi”. An honor, undoubtedly.
Coinscrum has returned to its roots as a maximalist event, and for good reason. The fundamentals of bitcoin have never been better. With transaction figures now back at January 2018 levels according to transactionfee.info, bitcoin appears to be shrugging off the prolonged bear market and is moving closer to becoming the transaction currency it was originally designed to be.
The New Bitcoin Is a Lean, Mean, Fightin’ Machine
Bitcoin fees have plummeted since the end of 2017.
Over the past year transaction fees collected by Bitcoin miners have plummeted 99.5% from a high of $22,700,000 per day to a mere $110,000 per day. https://t.co/PhwRf7cZiN pic.twitter.com/AfYynlfgW0
— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) December 21, 2018
CTO of Casa, Jameson Lopp points out that:
“Lower transaction demand, improved fee estimation algorithms, adoption of segregated witness (SegWit), and transaction batching have resulted in more efficient use of block space and less contention for this scarce resource.”
With maximalists and Core developers hard at work behind the scenes on a number of improvements, Lightning Network is probably the most promising of all.
Corallo Excited, But Cautious on Lighting
At the Coinscrum event, Corallo told the room:
“Everyone’s super excited about Lightning, even in this bear market. Obviously it’s still early–there’s still a lot of user experience challenges.”
He did note that Lighting Network still had a lot of improvement and a lot of work to do, even at the engineering level, before reaching its full potential. Still, it was nice to see Coinscrum returning to its roots as the conference for bitcoin maximalists, after a brief flirtation with discussions about other cryptos. On why maximalism is beginning to grow again, Corallo explained:
‘We’ve got more experience in Bitcoin setting precedent about how things get changed. We’re more cautious. As a developer, I can’t unilaterally change the rules. I think that gives it legs over other coins.”
The Lightning Network may be causing a lot of excitement, but it is the experience and custodianship of bitcoin’s core group of believers that are key to the OG crypto regaining its place as a truly transactional currency. How that might affect its price is anyone’s guess.
Have your say. Will we see a resurgence in the bitcoin price any time soon?
Images via Pixabay
