The Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin was involved in a discussion on Twitter yesterday, where he said that Bitcoin was initially designed to be a P2P Cash and not the digital gold as we know it today. In our latest news today, we find out the other benefits of bitcoin and what Buterin meant.
Replying to Zack Voell, a Blockstream employee, the Ethereum Creator Vitalik, said that the narrative about bitcoin being the digital gold has changed since 2011.
“I joined Bitcoin land in 2011 and back then I remember a clear vibe that Bitcoin was P2P cash first and gold second.”
Buterin believes that Bitcoin was initially intended to be peer-to-peer electronic cash that will be shared by the community and is backed by the Bitcoin whitepaper itself, published by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. The first line of the whitepaper says:
“A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”
The conflict between these views comes to the surface as one of the developers considers the difference between P2P cash and digital gold. Gold was valuable and quite scarce and not used as a common transaction currency. Still, to this day, it cannot be carried or divided, so it’s useless for micropayments unless it is watched over by a centralized network of processors a.k.a banks. In this scenario, the high transaction fees become a fundamental matter. The P2P cash, on the other hand, is a currency that can be transacted between two people without the need for a third party, which is one of the many benefits of Bitcoin.
The Bitcoin developers refuse to increase the block size of Bitcoin to scale, but it only resulted in high transaction fees and another hard fork of the code into a new chain, which is now known as Bitcoin Cash. Today, the Bitcoin fees are among the highest of all crypto assets, reaching $1.76 by the end of March. Over the past 24 hours, the average bitcoin transaction fees were somewhere between 617% and 645,900% higher than other cryptocurrencies. However, the supports accept the digital gold narrative, and the charges are only a manifestation of the top security of the network.
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