As someone who has been closely following Bitcoin since 2011, I do not think that article captures the current situation very well. Yes, there is a concentration of mining power in China, owed to their low costs of electricity. But it does not seem like the Chinese have found a way to use that power yet. In practice, it is a number of Western developers around Gregory Maxwell and Blockstream that calls the shots, aided by /r/bitcoin admin Theymos who recklessly removes posts that do not fit their agenda (I've received two temporary bans myself for mentioning ethereum in a comment).<p>I really hope that the Chinese miners start to make use of their power and move Bitcoin back towards its original vision. The block size limit of 1 MB was a temporary hack and the core devs who oppose an increase are in an obvious conflict of interest: if Bitcoin can scale the way its inventor envisioned (namely by simply increasing the block size limit every now and then), the business case of the company they work for falls apart. (Blockstream, who develops the Lightning Network, which aims at scaling Bitcoin by building another layer on top.)<p>What makes me hope is this sentence from the article: "He said in an email this week that if the core programmers did not increase the number of transactions going through the network by July, he would begin looking for alternatives to expand the network." Recently, I spoke to an executive of another large Chinese mining company, and he shares that opinion. If the "core team" continues to refuse to increase the block size limit, they will stop applying core's updates. For that case, some members already threatened to go nuclear and change the proof-of-work protocol, making all existing mining hardware obsolete - which is quite worrying and shows that Bitcoin development currently is not in the best possible hands.
Most of the comments here are missing the point. Read the article more closely. From the Bitcoin miner in China perspective, Bitcoin is an investment vehicle and a way to get yuan out of China. Bitcoin for retail transactions is irrelevant. More capacity for small transactions is a nuisance, not a feature. The big miners are thinking wholesale, not retail.<p>Read the view of the CEO of Huobi.[1] He sees the functions of Bitcoin as 1) a global financial asset, and 2) a financial tool for improving money transfer. (By "money transfer" he means reasonably large transactions, comparable to wire transfers.) As a payment network, he wrote "Bitcoin already works as a payment network today, but relative to competitors like PayPal and Visa, Bitcoin is very small." A bigger block size is useful mostly for the payment network application, which is not a priority for the big miners.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-in-china-an-insiders-view/" rel="nofollow">http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-in-china-an-insiders-view/</a>
For those who prefer audio/podcasts, the Planet Money companion piece covers a lot of the same material: <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/06/29/484029238/episode-708-bitcoin-divided" rel="nofollow">http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/06/29/484029238/episo...</a>
The article presents the blocksize debate as Americans vs. Chinese. I see it more as an effort by payments companies (some of which are US-based) to capture the bitcoin protocol.
I think it's important to note that it's unclear that Bitcoin Core will ever allow for a block size increase to occur: several influential Core developers have publicly stated that that are still very much opposed to any increase, and the team uses a consensus process that makes it easy to veto change.
I don't really follow bitcoin but the NPR podcast that linked to this NYT story claims that 'some bitcoin transactions are not getting processed at all.'<p>Is that really true?
<i>Ultimately, Mr. Armstrong said, “We were unable to convince them.”</i><p>Brian Armstrong from CEO of Coinbase along with some other major Bitcoin startups proposed a hard fork in the protocol to increase throughput. This proposal was to raise the block size.<p>The Bitcoin core developers rejected this along with a lot of the Bitcoin community as it may cause decentralization.<p>An alternative proposal was created that would not produce a hard fork but still allow an increase in transactions per second. A further proposal called the lightning network is in testing to allow for thousands more transactions per second that then get settled on the main Bitcoin blockchain.<p>In my opinion consensus won. Everyone will get what they want with out taking any risks with centralization.<p>The Chinese miners were right to stay on the main branch. If they had forked and the Bitcoin economy didn't follow them, they would be out of business.<p>The Bitcoin block size debate is like the Brexit. Only this time everyone wins.
Bitcoin miners don't have any incentive to make possibly risky changes to the software. Recent congestion and changes have increased fees which seems to me a strong incentive to keep the status quo of limited scalability.<p>As a network Ethereum is much more scalable, fast and more decentralised by design, Buterin has learnt from bitcoin's problems (but obviously Eth has it's own problems).<p><a href="https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/ethereum-announces-unlimited-scalability-roadmap/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/ethereum-announces-unlimited...</a><p>Bitcoin is the slow moving Java to Ethereum's c# or scala.
Ironic that Bobby Lee calls the Americans imperialistic given that BitCoin wasn't invented in China, but Chinese firms have clearly taken control.
I was surprised by the photos because I thought that these days most mining was being done via USB-connected ASICs, but the clear implication of the photos was for CPU mining. Perhaps this is just a case of "we're not showing how it really works" but it was a surprise nonetheless.
always some drama in bitcoin land<p>its almost kind of weird how my transactions get mined immediately in the next block as if there was absolutely nothing different going on