Don’t believe the lies, according to Dr. Craig Wright. Bitcoin is incentive-compatible.
On Tuesday, the nChain chief scientist took the stage at the inaugural Deconomy 2018 blockchain forum in Seoul, South Korea, to debunk the myths perpetuated by Blockstream, which were designed to take away the power of Bitcoin and basically tell everyone that it needed to be fixed.
“One of the issues you are told is you need to run a full node and verify everything,” Wright said. “No, you don’t. No, you can’t. You can sit there and verify things if you want, but you don’t actually do anything as a node unless you are a full node, and a full node, if you read the white paper, mines. You vote with CPU power.”
The people behind Lightning Network think Bitcoin works as a mesh, according to Wright. In actuality, Bitcoin is an overlay network that pulls everything into a tight ball as it forms, with every machine connecting to everything it can—or what is also referred to as near-complete.
“You connect as much as possible as a miner because you’re incentivized to,” he said. “What this actually means is we start connecting all over the place, so we are resilient because we connect everywhere.”
Wright also debunked the notion that an outfitted Raspberry Pi can be used as a full Bitcoin node, saying that there is not a single piece of data on the Bitcoin network that has ever been verified by a non-miner.
“By the time any Raspberry Pi ever existed on the network has verified a packet, every single miner has decided whether to mine it or not,” he said. “You’re not helping because there’s nothing altruistic in Bitcoin. Nothing. Bitcoin is money. It is working because it is competitive. It is working because people fight to get their transactions on the blockchain fast.”
Watch Dr. Craig Wright’s presentation here:
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