Charlie Shrem.
Charlie Shrem, a longtime bitcoin supporter, has joined the cadre of Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) skeptics, calling it “glorified polling” in a recent tweet, adding that there is nothing to hard fork to. Shrem’s lack of confidence in BU is one of several recent developments in the struggle for dominance between BU and Segregated Witness (SegWit).
Almost 600 BU nodes came down crashing yesterday, falling from around 720 to 180. While the nodes slightly recovered to 458, with mining nodes apparently unaffected, recent indications are uncertain. BU’s hashrate share continues to be at around 41%.
BU’s Rough Going
BU suffered a blow in mid-March after attackers unleashed a new bug that crashed the system.
A new mining pool that recently shot to around 8% network share, 1Hash, publicly posted on China’s version of twitter earlier this month that “BU has violated the BTC consensus agreement.”
The F2Pool recently reversed its position and announced support for SegWit, saying that bigger blocks can come later.
Shrem’s Reservations
Shrem, for his part, tweeted in March that while larger blocks may be a good idea, BU’s technical incompetence caused him to lose confidence in its code.
He said that looking at the code leaves him believing users should upgrade to SegWit ASAP and revisit larger blocks later.
“Better to have the devil you know, than the devil you don’t,” he tweeted. “I implore everyone to run #SegWit ASAP and we can revisit larger blocks.”
Shrem recently joined real estate investor Jason Granger in forming Intellisys, which allows investors to invest in companies buy buying a digital token backed by real assets. Intellisys seeks to modernize private equity and offer investors the opportunity to reap returns of strong businesses in the U.S. they currently don’t have access to, amid profit-erasing fees of mutual funds, high-risk equity picks and low-yielding bonds.
Shrem was arrested in 2014 on charges of money laundering and acting as an unlicensed money transmitter. He was released last year after serving time in a federal prison camp in Pennsylvania after being sentenced to two years in prison.
Also read: Bitcoin Unlimited nodes crash due to memory leaks
BU Leads SegWit
SegWit currently stands at around 32% while BU, a proposal that increases the maximum block size in a decentralized manner as chosen by miners and nodes, currently stands just under 40%.
BitGo, a multi-signature bitcoin wallet, advised its customers in March what to do in the case of a new chain, whether it is Bitcoin Unlimited, which BitGo deems unsupportable, or SegWit, which it considers supportable.
Images from Shutterstock and Wikimedia.
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