Bitcoin Tech #6 - The Threat of Internet Centralisation with Shinobi & Dhruv Mehta - WBD376

Mr Obnoxious

Peter McCormack

Technology, News, Politics, Money, Investing, Finance, Bitcoin

4.8 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2021

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

SHOW DESCRIPTION

Location: Remotely
Date: Wednesday 21st July
Project: Block Digest & Bitcoin Core
Role: Host & Developer

A core fundamental feature of Bitcoin is decentralisation. Being a distributed and decentralised network, Bitcoin allows anyone to transfer money to anyone else without relying on a third party or intermediary to authorise or facilitate the transaction.

For years bitcoiners have fought to keep Bitcoin as decentralised as possible. A segment of the Bitcoin community wanted to increase the block size to allow for more transactions in each block. However, the tradeoff of this proposed change would increase the size of blocks and thus the size of the blockchain, making it harder to run a node on standard hardware.

While the debates around decentralisation are generally around the protocol rules, Bitcoin also relies on the Internet, something outside of bitcoiners’ control. Some aspects of the Internet are highly centralised and could potentially be used to attack Bitcoin.

So, how significant is this threat? And, what can be done to stop it?

In this interview, I talk to Shinobi, the host of Block Digest, and Bitcoin Core Developer Dhruv. We discuss the importance of decentralisation, the protocols that power the internet and how a centralised internet threatens Bitcoin.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
0:04.0	How prevalent is an attack is not really an important question.
0:08.0	How possible is an attack is the important question.
0:11.0	When the value is 10X of today or 20 x of today,
0:15.4	what people are willing to spend to attack it also goes up.
0:18.6	Hello there from Bedford in the United Kingdom,
0:20.7	how are you all doing?
0:22.2	Did you enjoy the big debate? How amazing was Kathy Wood.
0:26.0	Jack also killed it and congratulations. Great work there from Steve, an amazing debate, learned
0:31.0	a lot from all of them.
0:32.6	Anyway, welcome to the What Bitcoin did podcast, which is brought to you by Gemini,
0:36.5	the only place I am using for buying Bitcoin.
0:38.8	I'm your host, Peter McCormack, and today I've got quite the technical interview.
0:42.8	I've got Shinobe back and this time with Drewv where we are going to be discussing the threats posed to Bitcoin by internet centralization.
0:50.0	But before we get into that I do have a message from my show sponsors and today we kick off with sports bet dio
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1:11.0	All you have to do is to complete the mission of the day and once you
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1:17.9	until August the 8th and enjoy the Olympics even more with Sports Beto. So to find
	...

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