Jonas Schnelli on Why Elected Officials May Not Be Good for Bitcoin

Jonas Schnelli joins other Bitcoin developers who are sponsored by high-caliber Bitcoin companies.

The long-lasting block size dispute has catapulted into the center of attention again. One of the most talked-about developments is Segregated Witness, of which a public testnet iteration was launched last week. The innovation as recently proposed by Blockstream co-founder and Bitcoin Core developer Dr. Pieter Wuille is a centerpiece of a scalability “roadmap” set out by Bitcoin Core. To find out where the broader development community stands on Segregated Witness, Bitcoin Magazine reached out to library and wallet developers; those who will need to do the heavy lifting in order to utilize....

Although the block size debate has been the main point of conflict within the Bitcoin community over the past year, the reality is that this conversation is more about the larger topic of scalability. Different Bitcoin users would like to see the network scale via specific methods, and the two main parties in this debate are now Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Classic. Along with the block size limit, the Lightning Network, and Segregated Witness, another Bitcoin feature that has been covered in controversy is Replace-by-Fee (RBF). Bitcoin Core Contributor Jonas Schnelli recently discussed this....

What’s wrong with increasing the block size limit? This is the question that a portion of the Bitcoin community has been asking almost nonstop since the controversy around this possible alteration to the protocol went into hyperdrive last year. In a recent appearance at Bitcoin Meetup Switzerland, Bitcoin Core Contributor Jonas Schnelli covered at least one possible issue with raising the block size limit too quickly: the effect larger blocks have on wasted resources for miners. It should be noted that Schnelli has decided not to take an official, public stance on the block size debate. A....

Day one of last month’s MIT Bitcoin Expo featured a panel discussion on various improvements to Bitcoin that are either currently in the works or already deployed on the network. Participants on the panel were Blockstream mathematician Andrew Poelstra, Blockstream Core Tech Engineer Mark Friedenbach, Lightning Network co-creator Joseph Poon and Bitcoin Core contributor Jonas Schnelli. During the Q&A portion of the panel, an audience member asked the participants to share their opinions on the previous presentation, in which the World Bitcoin Network’s James D’Angelo posited the idea of....