CryptoSlate recently spoke to Alex Pasfield, the 14-year old developer behind Bitcoin Voice, a platform that has been built for the Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin community to vote on important issues.
The young creator believes that censorship is prevalent in the BTC community and that voting mechanisms such as Bitcoin Voice will help to prevent additional hard forks in the future.
What is Bitcoin Voice?
Bitcoin Voice is an application that shows public messages tethered to blockchain transactions that are sourced from live data. The website states that it may be utilized as a verifiable voting record of blockchain users weighted by their transaction amounts. According to Pasfield:
“Bitcoin voice gives an official, uncensorable and verifiable voice to coin holders and allows them to be represented in community decisions, which has not been possible in the past.”
Censorship leads to Bitcoin Voice
At only 14, Alex Pasfield is an active participant in the Bitcoin Cash community. The young developer was introduced to programming and the cryptocurrency community by his father. In a recent article that was published on Bitcoin.com, they discussed how Bitcoin Voice could impact the community.
Bitcoin.com states that it is a balanced news feed, however, it has a very strong pro-Bitcoin Cash feel, and many of the projects featured on the website are designed for BCH.
Bitcoin Voice is no different although it can be used for both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, the creator has strong views on which of the cryptocurrencies is the true direction of Bitcoin. When asked why he decided to focus on BCH as opposed to BTC on his twitter feed he said:
“The primary reason is that the Bitcoin Cash community has a much larger appreciation for censorship-resistant governance and voting mechanisms such as Bitcoin Voice as a result of the censorship our ideas and proposals experienced within the Bitcoin community prior to the fork.”
So, Pasfield decided to develop Bitcoin Voice after he and his friends closely observed the censorship that occurred in the /r/Bitcoin subreddit, where advocates for the increased block size were banned from the popular group.
Pasfield felt that the people who were in favor of the fork were not being heard, and whenever they voiced their opinions they were quickly shut down and banned from the group.
“This tradition of censorship of ideas within the Bitcoin community resulted in a large portion of their community not being represented in governance decisions which has resulted in Bitcoin no longer being usable for its intended application: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.”
This is why Bitcoin Voice was created, users are literally putting their money where their mouth is. BTC and BCH users will be able to vote on important subjects using Bitcoin Voice. However, some users question this plan, believing that it will just give more power to those in the community with more money in their wallets.
Bitcoin vs. Bitcoin Cash
Bitcoin Cash was launched in August 2017 and has since become Bitcoin’s most popular cryptocurrency that has forked from bitcoin network. According to Pasfield:
“Bitcoin’s primary solution to scaling is the Lighting network. I do not think that the Lightning Network is a good scalability solution as it doesn’t solve the problem of how to route transactions through channels in a scalable and decentralized manner.”
The currency forked, with BCH users wanting bigger block sizes, lower fees and faster transactions. This has created heated debates on both sides of the fork, with both parties believing that their version of Bitcoin is Satoshi Nakamoto’s true vision of the decentralized cryptocurrency.
Pasfield described his thoughts on the Bitcoin Cash fork:
“I think that Bitcoin Cash’s strategy of increasing the blocksize will work in the mid-term but that if it is to scale to the throughput of cash, it will need to adopt other strategies for scalability.”
Parting thoughts…
According to Pasfield:
“Ultimately, if any cryptocurrency is going to be able to scale to this extent, without becoming centralised to the point that it is no longer censorship resistant, it will need have a sharded network topology (one where each node only processes a fraction of all transactions).”
