Everything Adam Back said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Back: Everyone agrees Bitcoin needs a block size increase
“If we need to increase the block size, which I think everybody agrees with at this point in time.”
Back: Raising Bitcoin block size to 1GB would cause network failure
“If we jumped up the block size to a gigabyte now, security would fail, the network would probably fail.”
Back: Three or four colluding mining companies could influence Bitcoin policy
“You know, it's probably the case that you could, you know, If you could get collaboration from three, four companies in various parts of the world, you could start to apply some policy influence to Bitcoin.”
Back proposes scaling Bitcoin block size limit to 8MB over four years
“So the proposal I made was to increase to two megabytes failure immediately, as soon as we can roll out change, which to be clear, any of them would take about six months to roll out. Increase to four megabytes after two years, and eight megabytes after four y…”
Back: 99% of Bitcoin transactions occur off the main blockchain
“Estimates are something like currently 99% of them are happening off the blockchain.”
Back: Lightning Network could scale Bitcoin capacity up to 10,000x
“There's also right now quite active work on this sort of Bitcoin enhancement called lightning, which is a best described as a kind of right caching layer for Bitcoin, which might scale Bitcoin by a factor of a thousand or 10,000.”
Back: Massively scaling Bitcoin sacrifices decentralization, turning it into PayPal
“You can scale massively and lose the decentralization, and at that point, Bitcoin loses most of its distinguishing features, and you're left with a kind of PayPal situation With all the things people gripe about with PayPal.”
Back: Bitcoin hard forks require full ecosystem compromise to succeed
“Because of the nature of hard forks where everybody has to upgrade at once, it's essentially, you know, it's essential that all of the participants, including the users, the miners, the ecosystem players providing different kinds of services to users, that the…”
Back: Bitcoin soft forks require 95% miner consensus to activate
“These things don't activate until 95% of the miners are upgraded, so, and there's a long window of warning that the upgrade is happening, six months or so.”
Back: Bitcoin blocks are half full, half under one dollar
“The blocks are maybe a third to a half full on average, and if you look at, if you analyze the transactions in the block, about half of them are under a dollar.”
Back: Lightning Network implementations will yield results within six months
“There's a GitHub and a development mailing list, and there are now three, I think maybe four companies who've come forward with implementations of the early stages of it, and we're hopeful that we'll see results from that within the six-month time frame.”
Adam Back
a16zLEDGER