Despite $100K Pledged to Charity, Adam Back Remains Silent Over Proposed Debate

2019-5-10 20:32

There’s over $100,000 on the line that could be given to charity for about an hour of Adam Back’s time. If he chooses to debate Bitcoin Unlimited’s Peter Rizun over why he thinks it’s a bad idea to scale with larger blocks, Paxful’s Ray Youssef‏ has pledged $100K in addition to Roger Ver’s initial $10K offer.

Also read: Schnorr Signatures Await Bitcoin Cash as the Next Upgrade Draws Near

The Initial Debate Challenge

On April 27, the CEO of Blockstream, Adam Back, compared people arguing for gigabyte blocks to flat earthers, citing that a majority of protocol experts agree that syncing full nodes is already too heavy. Following the tweet from Back, Bitcoin Unlimited Chief Scientist Peter Rizun told people to remember Back’s commentary when gigabyte blocks are no more impossible than a streaming video is today. Rizun detailed that there’s really no laws of physics that will prevent the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) protocol from scaling globally. “In fact, no technological breakthroughs are required — just continued state-of-the-art engineering,” Rizun asserted. Following Rizun’s tweet, Back replied stating that it is the “wrong architecture” to follow this route and said he has offered “some design outlines to some of the big blockers.”

Then Rizun decided to challenge Back to a debate on Peter McCormack’s show on the merits of scaling bitcoin onchain versus offchain. “If Peter McCormack is willing, he can moderate and use the recording as a podcast,” Rizun remarked. Another person participating in the Twitter discussion between the two individuals posted a survey which asked: “Do you want to see Peter Rizun debate Adam Back moderated by Peter McCormack on scaling bitcoin on-chain versus offchain?” Around 650 people responded and 63% responded “Yes” they would like to see this debate. The following day, Bitcoin.com’s CEO Roger Ver offered to donate $10K worth of crypto to a charity of Adam Back’s choice if he agrees to debate. Ver predicted Back won’t debate because the only way his ideology has gained traction is through using censorship on r/bitcoin. “It can’t stand up to scrutiny,” Ver emphasized.

Paxful’s CEO Ups the Ante With $100,000 for the Built With Bitcoin Charity

Back never replied to the initial offer or even stated why he couldn’t debate Rizun on the merits of keeping blocks small. Then, on May 8, the CEO of the peer-to-peer bitcoin exchange Paxful, Ray Youssef‏, decided to make things more enticing by offering additional funds to charity. Youssef responded to a Tweet from Ver and stated:

Let’s up the ante to $100K. I will match it and we can build two schools for 1200 children in Kenya. Built With Bitcoin BCH helped build the last two schools and it can help build the next.

Paxful’s Built With Bitcoin project has already constructed two schools.

Youssef‏ also asked Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) to pledge and reminded people that social good is the magical use case for crypto which showcases how this technology was “invented for helping the lil’ guy.” Paxful’s Built With Bitcoin initiative has already shown the power of crypto when the team used funds to build schools in the Kasebigege Village in Rwanda, Africa. A simple debate between two people could elevate this charity to new heights, giving a lot of value to those in need. Still, Back hasn’t responded to the offer and being an expert who has given ideas to big blockers, debating Peter Rizun shouldn’t be much of an issue.

The Sound of Crickets Verses Successful Testing, Papers, Lectures and Calculations

However, Back may have an issue debating when there’s a lot of data out there from experts showing that big blocks and even gigabyte-sized blocks can scale indefinitely. One example of larger blocks performing well was last September when BCH processed 2.4 million transactions in one day without much difficulty. Blocks were quite smaller than 1 gigabyte during last September’s stress test, but there’s been many experiments and papers on how it is quite possible to process gigabyte blocks going forward after some clever engineering.

Rizun is also known for being quite knowledgeable on the subject of gigabyte blocks after he presented the subject at Scaling Bitcoin in Milan. Alongside this, he successfully propagated a 1.0001 GB block on a blockchain testnet on Oct. 12, 2017 with Andrew Stone. Or maybe Back doesn’t want to discuss the cost associated with procuring a full node, because this also seems to be a non-issue for a society in the midst of enormous technological growth. One month ago, the blockchain engineer Corentin Mercier did some calculations on how much the cost would be for a Bitcoin node handling 1GB blocks cost today. Mercier’s calculations show the cost to run a full node with 1GB blocks in the future is quite meager compared to the price quoted by those who have said only mega data centers could run a node under such conditions. Moreover, despite the conspiracy theories, the cost of bandwidth and disk space has declined every year over the last decade.

Back could debate these subjects with Rizun, proving his expertise and at the same time help bolster a charitable effort. The offer seems like a win-win situation if Back’s argument holds weight. Over the last few years, stubborn developers have relied on propaganda and censorship tactics to make it seem like scaling is a much bigger problem than it actually is.

What do you think about the $100K on the line for Adam Back to debate Peter Rizun about onchain and offchain scaling and gigabyte blocks? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments below.

Image credits: Shutterstock, Twitter, Paxful, and Pixabay.

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