Full English Transcript of Gavin Andresen AMA on 8BTC, April 21st.
Raw transcript on Google Docs (English+Chinese): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p3DWMfeGHBL6pk4Hu0efgQWGsUAdFNK6zLHubn5chJo/edit?usp=sharing
Translators/Organizers: emusher, /u/kcbitcoin, /u/nextblast, pangcong, Red Li, WangXiaoMeng. (Ranked in alphabetical order)

1.crypto888
Q: What is your relationship with Blockstream now? Are you in a Cold War? Your evaluation on BS was pretty high “If this amazing team offers you a job, you should take it,” tweeted Gavin Andresen, Chief Scientist, Bitcoin Foundation.” But now, what’s your opinion on BS?
A: I think everybody at Blockstream wants Bitcoin to succeed, and I respect and appreciate great work being done for Bitcoin by people at Blockstream.
We strongly disagree on priorities and timing; I think the risks of increasing the block size limit right away are very small. I see evidence of people and businesses getting frustrated by the limit and choosing to use something else (like Ethereum or a private blockchain); it is impossible to know for certain how dangerous that is for Bitcoin, but I believe it is more danger than the very small risk of simply increasing or eliminating the block size limit.

2. Ma_Ya
Q: 1) Why insist on hard fork at only 75%? You once explained that it is possible to be controlled by 5% if we set the threshold at 95%. I agree, but there should be some balance here. 75% means a high risk in splitting, isn’t it too aggressive? Is it better if we set it to 90%?
A: 1)The experience of the last two consensus changes is that miners very quickly switch once consensus reaches 75% -- the last soft fork went from 75% support to well over 95% support in less than one week. So I’m very confident that miners will all upgrade once the 75% threshold is reached, and BIP109 gives them 28 days to do so. No miner wants to create blocks that will not be accepted by the network.
Q: 2) How to solve the potentially very large blocks problem Classic roadmap may cause, and furthur causing the centralization of nodes in the future?
A: 2)Andreas Antonopoulos gave a great talk recently about how people repeatedly predicted that the Internet would fail to scale. Smart engineers proved them wrong again and again, and are still busy proving them wrong today (which is why I enjoy streaming video over my internet connection just about every night).
I began my career working on 3D graphics software, and saw how quickly we went from being able to draw very simple scenes to today’s technology that is able to render hundreds of millions of triangles per second.
Processing financial transactions is much easier than simulating reality. Bitcoin can easily scale to handle thousands of transactions per second, even on existing computers and internet connections, and even without the software optimizations that are already planned.
Q: 3) Why do you not support the proposal of RBF by Satoshi, and even plan to remove it in Classic completely?
A: 3) Replace-by-fee should be supported by most of the wallets people are using before it is supported by the network. Implementing replace-by-fee is very hard for a wallet, especially multi-signature and hardware wallets that might not be connected to the network all of the time.
When lots of wallet developers start saying that replace-by-fee is a great idea, then supporting it at the network level makes sense. Not before.
Q: 4) . Your opinion on soft fork SegWit, sidechain, lighnting network. Are you for or against, please give brief reasons. Thanks.
A: 4) The best way to be successful is to let people try lots of different things. Many of them won’t be successful, but that is not a problem as long as some of them are successful.
I think segregated witness is a great idea. It would be a little bit simpler as a hard fork instead of a soft fork (it would be better to put the merkle root for the witness data into the merkle root in the block header instead of putting it inside a transaction), but overall the design is good.
I think sidechains are a good idea, but the main problem is finding a good way to keep them secure. I think the best uses of sidechains will be to publish “write-only” public information involving bitcoin. For example, I would like to see a Bitcoin exchange experiment with putting all bids and asks and trades on a sidechain that they secure themselves, so their customers can verify that their orders are being carried out faithfully and nobody at the exchanges is “front-running” them.
Q: 5) Can you share your latest opinion on Brainwallet? It is hard for new users to use long and complex secure passphrase, but is it a good tool if it solves this problem?
A: 5) We are very, very bad at creating long and complex passphrases that are random enough to be secure. And we are very good at forgetting things.
We are much better at keeping physical items secure, so I am much more excited about hardware wallets and paper wallets than I am about brain wallets. I don’t trust myself to keep any bitcoin in a brain wallet, and do not recommend them for anybody else, either.

3. BiTeCui
Q: Gavin, do you have bitcoins now? What is your major job in MIT? Has FBI ever investigated on you? When do you think SHA256 might be outdated, it seems like it has been a bit unsafe?
A: Yes, a majority of my own person wealth is still in bitcoins -- more than a financial advisor would say is wise.
My job at MIT is to make Bitcoin better, in whatever way I think best. That is the same major job I had at the Bitcoin Foundation. Sometimes I think the best way to make Bitcoin better is to write some code, sometimes to write a blog post about what I see happening in the Bitcoin world, and sometimes to travel and speak to people.
The FBI (or any other law enforcement agency) has never investigated me, as far as I know. The closest thing to an investigation was an afternoon I spent at the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, DC. They were interested in how I and the other Bitcoin developers created the software and how much control we have over whether or not people choose to run the software that we create.
“Safe or unsafe” is not the way to think about cryptographic algorithms like SHA256. They do not suddenly go from being 100% secure for everything to completely insecure for everything. I think SHA256 will be safe enough to use in the all ways that Bitcoin is using it for at least ten years, and will be good enough to be used as the proof-of-work algorithm forever.
It is much more likely that ECDSA, the signature algorithm Bitcoin is using today, will start to become less safe in the next ten or twenty years, but developer are already working on replacements (like Schnorr signatures).

4. SanPangHenBang
Q: It’s a pleasure to meet you. I only have one question. Which company are you serving? or where do you get your salary?
A: The Media Lab at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) pays my salary; I don’t receive regular payments from anybody else.
I have received small amounts of stock options in exchange for being a techical advisor to several Bitcoin companies (Coinbase, BitPay, Bloq, Xapo, Digital Currency Group, CoinLab, TruCoin, Chain) which might be worth money some day if one or more of those companies do very well. I make it very clear to these companies that my priority is to make Bitcoin better, and my goal in being an advisor to them is to learn more about the problems they face as they try to bring Bitcoin to more of their customers.
And I am sometimes (once or twice a year) paid to speak at events.

5.SaTuoXi
Q: Would you mind share your opinion on lightning network? Is it complicated to implement? Does it need hard fork?
A: Lightning does not need a hard fork.
It is not too hard to implement at the Bitcoin protocol level, but it is much more complicated to create a wallet capable of handling Lightning network payments properly.
I think Lightning is very exciting for new kinds of payments (like machine-to-machine payments that might happen hundreds of times per minute), but I am skeptical that it will be used for the kinds of payments that are common on the Bitcoin network today, because they will be more complicated both for wallet software and for people to understand.

6. pangcong
Q: 1) There has been a lot of conferences related to blocksize limit. The two took place in HongKong in Decemeber of 2015 and Feberary of 2016 are the most important ones. Despite much opposition, it is undeniable that these two meetings basically determines the current status of Bitcoin. However, as the one of the original founders of Bitcoin, why did you choose to not attend these meetings? If you have ever attended and opposed gmax’s Core roadmap (SegWit Priority) in one of the meetings, we may be in a better situation now, and the 2M hard fork might have already begun. Can you explain your absence in the two meetings? Do you think the results of both meetings are orchestrated by blockstream?
A: 1) I attended the first scaling conference in Montreal in September of 2015, and had hoped that a compromise had been reached.
A few weeks after that conference, it was clear to me that whatever compromise had been reached was not going to happen, so it seemed pointless to travel all the way to Hong Kong in December for more discussion when all of the issues had been discussed repeatedly since February of 2015.
The February 2016 Hong Kong meeting I could not attend because I was invited only a short time before it happened and I had already planned a vacation with my family and grandparents.
I think all of those conferences were orchestrated mainly by people who do not think raising the block size limit is a high priority, and who want to see what problems happen as we run into the limit.
Q: 2) We have already known that gmax tries to limit the block size so as to get investment for his company. However, it is obvious that overthrowing Core is hard in the short term. What if Core continues to dominate the development of Bitcoin? Is it possible that blockstream core will never raise the blocksize limit because of their company interests?
A: 2) I don’t think investment for his company is Greg’s motivation-- I think he honestly believes that a solution like lightning is better technically.
He may be right, but I think it would be better if he considered that he might also be wrong, and allowed other solutions to be tried at the same time.
Blockstream is a funny company, with very strong-willed people that have different opinions. It is possible they will never come to an agreement on how to raise the blocksize limit.

7. HeiYanZhu
Q: I would like to ask your opinion on the current situation. It’s been two years, but a simple 2MB hard fork could not even be done. In Bitcoin land, two years are incredibly long. Isn’t this enough to believe this whole thing is a conspiracy?
A: I don’t think it is a conspiracy, I think it is an honest difference of opinion on what is most important to do first, and a difference in opinion on risks and benefits of doing different things.
Q: How can a multi-billion network with millions of users and investors be choked by a handful of people? How can this be called decentrilized and open-source software anymore? It is so hard to get a simple 2MB hard fork, but SegWig and Lighting Network with thousands of lines of code change can be pushed through so fast. Is this normal? It is what you do to define if you are a good man, not what you say.
A: I still believe good engineers will work around whatever unnecessary barriers are put in their way-- but it might take longer, and the results will not be as elegant as I would prefer.
The risk is that people will not be patient and will switch to something else; the recent rapid rise in developer interest and price of Ethereum should be a warning.
Q: The problem now is that everybody knows Classic is better, however, Core team has controlled the mining pools using their powers and polical approaches. This made them controll the vast majority of the hashpower, no matter what others propose. In addition, Chinese miners have little communication with the community, and do not care about the developement of the system. Very few of them knows what is going on in the Bitcoin land. They almost handed over their own power to the mining pool, so as long as Core controls the pools, Core controls the whole Bitcoin, no matter how good your Classic is. Under this circumstance, what is your plan?
A: Encourage alternatives to Core. If they work better (if they are faster or do more) then Core will either be replaced or will have to become better itself. I am happy to see innovations happening in projects like Bitcoin Unlimited, for example. And just this week I see that Matt Corallo will be working on bringing an optmized protocol for relaying blocks into Core; perhaps that was the plan all along, or perhaps the “extreme thin blocks” work in Bitcoin Unlimited is making that a higher priority. In any case, competition is healthy.
Q: From this scaling debate, do you think there is a huge problem with Bitcoin development? Does there exsit development centrilization? Does this situation need improvment? For example, estabilish a fund from Bitcoin as a fundation. It can be used for hiring developers and maintainers, so that we can solve the development issue once and for all.
A: I think the Core project spends too much time thinking about small probability technical risks (like “rogue miners” who create hard-to-validate blocks or try to send invalid blocks to SPV wallets) and not enough time thinking about much larger non-technical risks.
And I think the Core project suffers from the common open source software problem of “developers developing for developers.” The projects that get worked on are the technically interesting projects-- exciting new features (like the lightning network), and not improving the basic old features (like improving network performance or doing more code review and testing).
I think the situation is improving, with businesses investing more in development (but perhaps not in the Core project, because the culture of that project has become much less focused on short-term business needs and more on long-term exciting new features).
I am skeptical that crowd-funding software development can work well; if I look at other successful open source software projects, they are usually funded by companies, not individuals.

8.jb9802
You are one of the most-repected person in Bitcoin world, I won’t miss the chance to ask some questions. First of all, I am a Classic supporter. I strongly believe that on-chain transcations should not be restrained artificially. Even if there are transcations that are willing to go through Lighting Network in the future, it should be because of a free market, not because of artificial restrication. Here are some of my questions:
Q: 1) For the past two years, you’ve been proposing to Core to scale Bitcoin. In the early days of the discussion, Core devs did agree that the blocksize should be raised. What do you think is the major reason for Core to stall scaling. Does there exist conflict of interest between Blockstream and scaling?
A: 1) There might be unconscious bias, but I think there is just a difference of opinion on priorities and timing.
Q: 2) One of the reason for the Chinese to refuse Classic is that Classic dev team is not technically capable enough for future Bitcoin development. I also noticed that Classic does have a less frequent code release compared to Core. In your opinion, is there any solution to these problems? Have you ever thought to invite capable Chinese programers to join Classic dev team?
A: 2) The great thing about open source software is if you don’t think the development team is good enough (or if you think they are working on the wrong things) you can take the software and hire a better team to improve it.
Classic is a simple 2MB patch on top of Core, so it is intentional that there are not a lot of releases of Classic.
The priority for Classic right now is to do things that make working on Classic better for developers than working on Core, with the goal of attracting more developers. You can expect to see some results in the next month or two.
I invite capable programmers from anywhere, including China, to help any of the teams working on open source Bitcoin software, whether that is Classic or Core or Unlimited or bitcore or btcd or ckpool or p2pool or bitcoinj.
Q: 3) Another reason for some of the Chinese not supporting Classic is that bigger blocks are more vulnerable to spam attacks. (However, I do think that smaller blocks are more vlunerable to spam attack, because smaller amount of money is needed to choke the blockchain.) What’s our opinion on this?
A: 3) The best response to a transaction spam attack is for the network to reject transactions that pay too little fees but to simply absorb any “spam” that is paying as much fees as regular transactions.
The goal for a transaction spammer is to disrupt the network; if there is room for extra transactions in blocks, then the network can just accept the spam (“thank you for the extra fees!”) and continue as if nothing out of the ordinary happened.
Nothing annoys a spammer more than a network that just absorbs the extra transactions with no harmful effects.
Q: 4) According to your understanding on lighting network and sidechains,if most Bitcoin transactions goes throught lighting network or sidechains, it possible that the fees paid on the these network cannot reach the main-chain miners, which leaves miners starving. If yes, how much percent do you think will be given to miners.
A: 4) I don’t know, it will depend on how often lightning network channels are opened and closed, and that depends on how people choose to use lightning.
Moving transactions off the main chain and on to the lightning network should mean less fees for miners, more for lightning network hubs. Hopefully it will also mean lower fees for users, which will make Bitcoin more popular, drive up the price, and make up for the lower transaction fees paid to miners.
Q: 5) The concept of lighting network and sidechains have been out of one or two years already, when do you think they will be fully deployed.
A: 5) Sidechains are already “fully deployed” (unless you mean the version of sidechains that doesn’t rely on some trusted gateways to move bitcoin on and off the sidechain, which won’t be fully deployed for at least a couple of years). I haven’t seen any reports of how successful they have been.
I think Lightning will take longer than people estimate. Seven months ago Adam Back said that the lightning network might be ready “as soon as six months from now” … but I would be surprised if there was a robust, ready-for-everybody-to-use lightning-capable wallet before 2018.
Q: 6)Regarding the hard fork, Core team has assumed that it will cause a chain-split. (Chinese miners are very intimitated by this assumption, I think this is the major reason why most of the Chinese mining pools are not switching to Classic). Do you think Bitcoin will have a chain-split?
A: 6) No, there will not be a chain split. I have not talked to a single mining pool operator, miner, exchange, or major bitcoin business who would be willing to mine a minority branch of the chain or accept bitcoins from a minority branch of the main chain.
Q: 7) From your point of view, do you think there is more Classic supporters or Core supporters in the U.S.?
A: 7) All of the online opinion pools that have been done show that a majority of people worldwide support raising the block size limit.

9. btcc123
Q: Which is more in line with the Satoshi’s original roadmap, Bitcoin Classic or Bitcoin Core? How to make mining pools support and adopt Bitcoin Classic?
A: Bitcoin Classic is more in line with Satoshi’s original roadmap.
We can’t make the mining pools do anything they don’t want to do, but they are run by smart people who will do what they think is best for their businesses and Bitcoin.

10.KuHaiBian
Q: Do you have any solution for mining centralization? What do you think about the hard fork of changing mining algorithms?
A: I have a lot of thoughts on mining centralization; it would probably take ten or twenty pages to write them all down.
I am much less worried about mining centralization than most of the other developers, because Satoshi designed Bitcoin so miners make the most profit when they do what is best for Bitcoin. I have also seen how quickly mining pools come and go; people were worried that the DeepBit mining pool would become too big, then it was GHash.io…
And if a centralized mining pool does become too big and does something bad, the simplest solution is for businesses or people to get together and create or fund a competitor. Some of the big Bitcoin exchanges have been seriously considering doing exactly that to support raising the block size limit, and that is exactly the way the system is supposed to work-- if you don’t like what the miners are doing, then compete with them!
I think changing the mining algorithm is a complicated solution to a simple problem, and is not necessary.

11. ChaLi
Q: Last time you came to China, you said you want to "make a different". I know that in USA the opposition political party often hold this concept, in order to prevent the other party being totally dominant. Bitcoin is born with a deep "make a different" nature inside. But in Chinese culture, it is often interpreted as split “just for the sake of splitting”, can you speak your mind on what is your meaning of "make a different"?
A: I started my career in Silicon Valley, where there is a lot of competition but also a lot of cooperation. The most successful companies find a way to be different than their competitors; it is not a coincidence that perhaps the most successful company in the world (Apple Computer) had the slogan “think different.”
As Bitcoin gets bigger (and I think we all agree we want Bitcoin to get bigger!) it is natural for it to split and specialize; we have already seen that happening, with lots of choices for different wallets, different exchanges, different mining chips, different mining pool software.

12. bluestar
Q: 1) The development of XT and Classic confirmed my thoughts that it is nearly impossible to use a new version of bitcoin to replace the current bitcoin Core controlled by Blockstream. I think we will have to live with the power of Blockstream for a sufficient long time. It means we will see the deployment of SegWit and Lighting network. If it really comes to that point, what will you do? Will you also leave like Mike Hearn?
A: 1) With the development of Blockchain, bitcoin will grow bigger and bigger without any doubts, And also there will be more and more companies related to the bitcoin network. When it comes to money, there will be a lot of fights between these companies. Is it possible to form some kind of committee to avoid harmful fights between these companies and also the situation that a single company controlling the direction of the bitcoin development? Is there any one doing this kind of job right now?
Q: 2) My final question would be, do you really think it is possible that we can have a decentralized currency? Learning from the history, it seems like every thing will become centralized as long as it involves human. Do you have any picture for a decentralized currency or even a society? Thanks.
A: 2) I think you might be surprised at what most people are running a year or three from now. Perhaps it will be a future version of Bitcoin Core, but I think there is a very good chance another project will be more successful.
I remember when “everybody” was running Internet Explorer or Firefox, and people thought Google was crazy to think that Chrome would ever be a popular web browser. It took four years for Chrome to become the most popular web browser.
In any case, I plan on working on Bitcoin related projects for at least another few years. Eventually it will become boring or I will decide I need to take a couple of years of and think about what I want to do next.
As for fights between companies: there are always fights between companies, in every technology. There are organizations like the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) that try to create committees so engineers at companies can spend more time cooperating and less time fighting; I’m told by people who participate in IETF meetings that they are usually helpful and create useful standards more often than not.
Finally, yes, I do think we can have a “decentralized-enough” currency. A currency that might be controlled at particular times by a small set of people or companies, but that gives everybody else the ability to take control if those people or businesses misbehave.

13. satoshi
Hi Gavin, I have some questions:
Q: 1) I noticed there are some new names added to the classic team list. Most people here only know you and Jeff. Can you briefly introduce some others to the Chinese community?
A: 1)
Tom Zander has been acting as lead developer, and is an experienced C++ developer who worked previously on the Qt and Debian open source projects.
Pedro Pinheiro is on loan from Blockchain.info, and has mostly worked on continuous integration and testing for Classic.
Jon Rumion joined recently, and has been working on things that will make life for developers more pleasant (I don’t want to be more specific, I don’t want to announce things before they are finished in case they don’t work out).
Jeff has been very busy starting up Bloq, so he hasn’t been very active with Classic recently. I’ve also been very busy traveling (Barbados, Idaho, London and a very quick trip to Beijing) so haven’t been writing much code recently.
Q: 2) if bitcoin classic succeeded (>75% threshold), what role would you play in the team after the 2MB upgrade finished, as a leader, a code contributor, a consultant, or something else?
A: 2)Contributor and consultant-- I am trying not to be leader of any software project right now, I want to leave that to other people who are better at managing and scheduling and recruiting and all of the other things that need to be done to lead a software project.
Q: 3) if bitcoin classic end up failed to achieve mainstream adoption (<75% 2018), will you continue the endeavor of encouraging on-chain scaling and garden-style growth of bitcoin?
A: 3) Yes. If BIP109 does not happen, I will still be pushing to get a good on-chain solution to happen as soon as possible.
Q: 4) Have you encountered any threat in your life, because people would think you obviously have many bitcoins, like what happened to Hal Finney (RIP), or because some people have different ideas about what bitcoin's future should be?
A: 4) No, I don’t think I have received any death threats. It upsets me that other people have.
Somebody did threaten to release my and my wife’s social security numbers and other identity information if I did not pay them some bitcoins a couple of years ago. I didn’t pay, they did release our information, and that has been a little inconvenient at times.
Q: 5) Roger Ver (Bitcoin Jesus) said bitcoin would worth thousands of dollars. Do you have similar thoughts? If not, what is your opinion on bitcoin price in future?
A: 5) I learned long ago to give up trying to predict the price of stocks, currencies, or Bitcoin. I think the price of Bitcoin will be higher in ten years, but I might be wrong.
Q: 6) You've been to China. What's your impression about the country, people, and the culture here? Thank you!
A: 6) I had a very quick trip to Beijing a few weeks ago-- not nearly long enough to get a good impression of the country or the culture.
I had just enough time to walk around a little bit one morning, past the Forbidden City and walk around Tianmen Square. There are a LOT of people in China, I think the line to go into the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall was the longest I have ever seen!
Beijing reminded me a little bit of London, with an interesting mix of the very old with the very new. The next time I am in China I hope I can spend at least a few weeks and see much more of the country; I like to be in a place long enough so that I really can start to understand the people and cultures.

14. Pussinboots
Q: Dear Gavin, How could I contact you, we have an excellent team and good plans. please confirm your linkedin.
A: Best contact for me is [email protected] : but I get lots of email, please excuse me if your messages get lost in the flood.

15. satoshi
Q: Gavin, you've been both core and classic code contributor. Are there any major differences between the two teams, concerning code testing (quality control) and the release process of new versions?
A: Testing and release processes are the same; a release candidate is created and tested, and once sufficiently tested, a final release is created, cryptographically signed by several developers, and then made available for download.
The development process for Classic will be a little bit different, with a ‘develop’ branch where code will be pulled more quickly and then either fixed or reverted based on how testing goes. The goal is to create a more developer-friendly process, with pull requests either accepted or rejected fairly quickly.

16. tan90d
I am a bitcoin enthusiast and a coin holder. I thank you for your great contribution to bitcoin. Please allow me to state some of my views before asking:
1. I'm on board with classic
2. I support the vision to make bitcoin a powerful currency that could compete with Visa
3. I support segwit, so I'll endorse whichever version of bitcoin implementation that upgrades to segwit, regardless of block size.
4. I disagree with those who argue bitcoin main blockchain should be a settlement network with small blocks. My view is that on the main chain btc should function properly as a currency, as well as a network for settlement.
5. I'm against the deployment of LN on top of small block sized blockchain. Rather, it should be built on a chain with bigger blocks.
6. I also won’t agree with the deployment of many sidechains on top of small size block chain. Rather, those sidechains should be on chain with bigger blocks.
With that said, below are my questions:
Q: 1) If bitcoin is developed following core's vision, and after the 2020 halving which cuts block reward down to 6.125BTC, do you think the block transaction fee at that time will exceed 3BTC?
A: 1) If the block limit is not raised, then no, I don’t think transaction fees will be that high.
Q: 2) If bitcoin is developed following classic's vision, and after the 2020 halving which cuts block reward down to 6.125BTC, do you think the block transaction fee at that time will exceed 3BTC?
A: 2) Yes, the vision is lots of transactions, each paying a very small fee, adding up to a big total for the miners.
Q: 3) If bitcoin is developed following core's vision, do you think POW would fail in future, because the mining industry might be accounted too low value compared with that of the bitcoin total market, so that big miners could threaten btc market and gain profit by shorting?
*The questioner further explained his concern.
Currently, its about ~1.1 billion CNY worth of mining facilities protecting ~42 billion CNY worth (6.5 Billion USD) of bitcoin market. The ratio is ~3%. If bitcoin market cap continues to grow and we adopt layered development plan, the mining portion may decrease, pushing the ratio go even down to <1%, meaning we are using very small money protecting an huge expensive system. For example, in 2020 if bitcoin market cap is ~100 billion CNY, someone may attempt to spend ~1 billion CNY bribe/manipulate miners to attack the network, thus making a great fortune by shorting bitcoin and destroying the ecosystem.
A: 3) Very good question, I have asked that myself. I have asked people if they know if there have been other cases where people destroyed a company or a market to make money by shorting it -- as far as I know, that does not happen. Maybe because it is impossible to take a large short position and remain anonymous, so even if you were successful, you would be arrested for doing whatever you did to destroy the company or market (e.g. blow up a factory to destroy a company, or double-spend fraud to try to destroy Bitcoin).
Q: 4) If bitcoin is developed following classic's vision, will the blocks become too big that kill decentralization?
A: 4) No, if you look at how many transactions the typical Internet connection can support, and how many transactions even a smart phone can validate per second, we can support many more transactions today with the hardware and network connections we have now.
And hardware and network connections are getting faster all the time.
Q: 5) In theory, even if we scale bitcoin with just LN and sidechains, the main chain still needs blocks with size over 100M, in order to process the trading volume matching Visa's network. So does core have any on-chain scaling plan other than 2MB? Or Core does not plan to evolve bitcoin into something capable of challenging visa?
A: 5) Some of the Core developer talk about a “flexcap” solution to the block size limit, but there is no specific proposal.
I think it would be best to eliminate the limit all together. That sounds crazy, but the most successful Internet protocols have no hard upper limits (there is no hard limit to how large a web page may be, for example), and no protocol limit is true to Satoshi’s original design.
Q: 6) If (the majority of) hash rate managed to switch to Classic in 2018, will the bitcoin community witness the deployment of LN in two years (~2018)?
A: 6) The bottleneck with Lightning Network will be wallet support, not support down at the Bitcoin protocol level. So I don’t think the deployment schedule of LN will be affected much whether Classic is adopted or not.
Q: 7) If (majority) hash rate upgraded to blocks with segwit features in 2017 as specified in core's roadmap, would classic propose plans to work on top of that (blocks with segwit)? Or insist developing simplified segwit blocks as described in classic's roadmap?
A: 7) Classic will follow majority hash rate. It doesn’t make sense to do anything else.
Q: 8) If most hash rate is still on core's side before 2018, will you be disappointed with bitcoin, and announce that bitcoin has failed like what Mike did, and sell all your stashed coins at some acceptable price?
A: 8) No-- I have said that I think if the block size limit takes longer to resolve, that is bad for Bitcoin in the short term, but smart engineers will work around whatever road blocks you put in front of them. I see Bitcoin as a long-term project.
Q: 9) If we have most hash rate switched to classic's side before 2018, what do you think will be the fate of Blockstream company?
A: 9) I think Blockstream might lose some employees, but otherwise I don’t think it will matter much. They are still producing interesting technology that might become a successful business.
Q: 10) If we have most hash rate still on core's side before 2018, what do you think will be the fate of Blockstream company?
A: 10) I don’t think Blockstream’s fate depends on whether or not BIP109 is adopted. It depends much more on whether or not they find customers willing to pay for the technology that they are developing.
Q: 11) If we have most hash rate still on core's side before 2018, what do you think will be the fate of companies that support classic, such as Coinbse, bitpay, and Blockchain.info?
A: 11) We have already seen companies like Kraken support alternative currencies (Kraken supports Litecoin and Ether); if there is no on-chain scaling solution accepted by the network, I think we will see more companies “hedging their bets” by supporting other currencies that have a simpler road map for supporting more transactions.
Q: 12) If we have most hash rate switched to classic's side before 2018, will that hinder the development of sidechain tech? What will happen to companies like Rockroot(Rootstock?) ?
A: 12) No, I think the best use of sidechains is for things that might be too risky for the main network (like Rootstock) or are narrowly focused on a small number of Bitcoin users. I don’t think hash rate supporting Classic will have any effect on that.
Q: 13) Between the two versions of bitcoin client, which one is more conducive to mining industry, classic or core?
A: 13) I have been working to make Classic better for the mining industry, but right now they are almost identical so it would be dishonest to say one is significantly better than the other.

17. Alfred
Q: Gavin, can you describe what was in your mind when you first learned bitcoin?
A: I was skeptical that it could actually work! I had to read everything I could about it, and then read the source code before I started to think that maybe it could actually be successful and was not a scam.

18. sina
Q: 1) Hello, what's a better strategy for bitcoin holders if it hard forks at 75%? Is it worth holding of the coins in the minority chain? Or better selling them? Will the value of coins in the majority chain be weakened or reinforced? Thank you
A: 1) BIP109 does not hard fork at 75%, it hard forks 28 days after 75% has been reached-- so when the hard fork happens, there should be almost zero hash power on the minority chain. So there will not be a minority chain.
If I am wrong and blocks are created on the minority chain, people plan to get enough hash power to replace those blocks with empty blocks, so it is impossible to make any transactions on the minority chain.
Q: 2) if Bitcoin split into two chains, will it cause panic in the market, then the overall market capitalization fell?
A: 2) Bitcoin split into two chains accidentally in March of 2013, and there was panic selling -- the price dropped from $48 to $37 within a few hours. But the mining pools very quickly agreed on which branch of the chain they would support, the problem was resolved within a day, and a week later the price was over $60.
That shows the strength of consensus and incentives-- the mining pools did what was best for Bitcoin because that is what is best for themselves in the long term.
Q: 3) Now it requres 60-70G space for a full node wallet, also it takes severals days for synchronization. Technically, Is it possible in the future that a full node wallet only cost a little space and can be quickly synchronized? (Do not use light wallets and other third party wallets)
A: 3) You can run a pruned node that does not store the full block chain today (I’m running six right now on inexpensive servers around the world to test some new code).
It is technically possible to get fast synchronization without giving up any trust, but it would require miners do more work (they would have to compute and store and validate an “unspent transaction output committment hash” in the block chain). There are also schemes that would give you fast synchronization at a lightweight-wallet level of trust, but worked towards no trust if you were connected to the network for long enough.
Some developers say that you are not really using Bitcoin unless you run a full node, but that is wrong. Bitcoin was designed so that you can make the choice of speed and convenience versus trust. You give up very, very little trust if you run a lightweight wallet that supports multisignature transactions, and I think that is what most people should be running.
Q: 4) What do you think about Ethereum? Can Bitcoin achieve all the same functions claimed by Ethernet? Thank you
A: 4) I think most of the interesting things you can do with Ethereum you can also do with multi-signature Bitcoin transactions. I haven’t seen a really great use of Ethereum yet, and I think there will be a big problem with Ethereum smart contracts that are designed to steal people’s money, because very few people will have the skill necessary to tell if a complicated smart contract is correct.
I’m watching the rootstock.io project, which brings Ethereum contracts to Bitcoin.
Q: 5) Is it possible that Nakamoto may still participate in the development of Bitcoin by a pseudonym? What is the last time he contact you? Will he be back?
A: 5) Yes, it is possible. I tell reporters who ask me about Satoshi:
The idea of Bitcoin is important; who invented it is an interesting mystery, but I think it should remain a mystery until whoever invented it decides to step forward. We should respect Satoshi's privacy.
Q: 6) Now some government can prevent people from accessing foreign information using technical method(like the Great Firewall), people need to get across the wall first if they want to know information abroad. So technically speaking, is it possible that the government could block and damage the usage of bitcoin? If it is, is there any method to get across the wall?
A: 6) If a government controls network access into and out of their country (like the Great Firewall), they could easily block connections to and from today’s Bitcoin peer-to-peer network. Connections are not encrypted in any way, and most connect to port 8333, which would be easy to block.
However, blocking connections inside the country would be much harder. And it only takes one encrypted or satellite or microwave or laser connection that bypasses the firewall to get around the blockage and get blocks and transactions flowing across the border again.
I think governments that decide they don’t like Bitcoin are more likely to pass laws that make it a crime to use a currency other than the official government currency to pay for things.
Q: 7) You insist on hard fork at 75%, while Chinse Mining Pools insist at 90%. So it may be easier to get support from China If Classic changes to 90%. Have you ever considered to communicate with Chinese mine pool( such as convening a meeting) to reduce differences?
A: 7) Yes, I was in Beijing a few weeks ago to better understand what some of the Chinese mining pools are thinking. It was a productive meeting, and I look forward to communicating more with them soon.
Q: 8) How will halving and block size increasing impact the bitcoin price in your opnion? Thanks.
A: 8) The price, today, is a reflection of confidence. If people think Bitcoin will be valuable in the future, they are willing to buy it and hold it.
Everybody knows the halving will happen, so, theoretically, that should not affect today’s price.
I believe that increasing the block size limit would be very good for the price, because Bitcoin is more valuable the more people who are able to use it.
Q: 9) Technically, bitcoin should also have drawbacks. Some disadvantages may be improved in the future , while some may be difficult to improve. What are those shortcomings for bitcoin to hard to improve in your opinon? Are you an optimist thinking that all technical shortcomings are temporary, and they will all likely to be improved in the future?
A: 9) Every successful technology is full of shortcomings. It is always easier to look backwards and see your mistakes. Smart engineers are very good at working around those shortcomings, and wise engineering managers know when to work around a shortcoming to remain compatible with the existing technology and when it makes sense to break compatibility because eliminating a shortcoming would have large benefits.
Q: 10) If there is a kind of altcoin in the future goes beyond Bitcoin, it must has the advantage Bitcoin can not have, right? Conversely, if Bitcoin itself evolves fast, improves and adds new features, it will be difficult to be surpassed and eliminated, right? What does Bitcoin scalability and evolution capability look like?
A: 10) People are funny -- I can imagine an altcoin that has no technology advantages over Bitcoin, but some people prefer it for some reason. I live in a town where a lot of people care a lot about the environment, and I could imagine them deciding to use a “GreenCoin” where all miners must be inspected regularly and must use only solar power.
I think many engineers tend to over-estimate the importance of new features, and under-estimate the importance of reliability, convenience and reputation.
Satoshi designed Bitcoin to be very scalable, and to be able to evolve. I think the best way for any technology to scale and evolve is competition -- make the technology open, and let companies or teams compete to build the most reliable, convienent and secure products. That looks like (and is!) a very messy, chaotic process, but it produces better results, faster, than a single person or team deciding on on approach to solving every problem.
Q: 11) If R3 succeeds, will it challenge bitcoin in transnational remittances?
A: 11) Maybe -- if banks involved in R3 could make it very convenient to get money into and out of their blockchain. They might not be able to do that because of regulations, though. But I don’t know much about the international remittance market and what regulations the banks will have to deal with.
Q: 12) Can blockchain only be secured by mining? Some private blockchain do not have mining property, are they really blockchain?
A: 12) Security is not “yes it is secure” or “no it is not secure.” Proof of work (mining) is the most secure way we know of to secure a blockchain, but there are less secure methods that can work if less security is OK. And less security is OK for some private blockchains because if somebody cheats, they can be taken to court and money can be recovered.
Q: 13) Will public chain, private chain and R3 chain coexist for a long time? Or only one chain survive finally? What is the relationship among Bitcoin block chain, private chains and R3 chain , complementary or competitive? Will Bitcoin block chain eventually win?
A: 13) My guess is all of the “blockchain for everything” excitement will die down in a year or two and a lot of people will be disappointed.
Then a few years later there will be blockchains for everything, running quietly inside stock markets and currency exchanges and lots of other places. Some of them will use the Bitcoin blockchain, some of them won’t, and nobody besides blockchain engineers will care much.
Throughout it all, I think it is most likely Bitcoin continues to grow, hopefully with less drama as it gets bigger and more mature.
Q: 14) Some people think that it is difficult for the outside world to understand the technical details if lightning network is controlled by blockstream or another company, resulting in technological centralization, what’s your opinion?
A: 14) I don’t worry about that, the lightning protocol is being designed in the open as an open standard. It is complicated, but not so complicated only one person or company can understand it.
Q: 15) What is the procedure Bitcoin Core modify the rules? Take the 2M hard fork proposal as an example, I saw there are concerns that if one of the five core developers who have write access reject the proposal will be rejected. So If happens, does that mean the launch hard ford in July will be abandoned? What is percentage of agreement in Core developers to write code for such a major bifurcation matter like 2M hard fork? Are there any specific standards? Or the lead developer has the final decision?
A: 15) That is a good question for the current active Core developers. When I was the lead developer, I would make a final decision if a decision needed to be made.

19. JR13
Q: What do you think about the future of increasing bitcoin block size limit?
A: It will happen sooner or later -- almost everybody agrees it must happen. I am still working to make it happen sooner, because the longer it takes, the worse for Bitcoin.

20. vatten
Q: What decision making process you think should be used for future bitcoin development?
A: For example, WuJiHan's proposition of service providers and mining pools collecting individual miner/user opinion. Or, a non-profit making standard making committee like IEEE, consists of people with enough expertise in bitcoin and economy, finance?
I think we should look at how development of other very successful technologies works (like email or the http protocol). I am not an expert, but open standards and open processes for participating in creating standards that are either adopted by the market or not (like the IETF process) seem to work the best.

21. kcb
Q: From my experience on Reddit, people now start to understand that evil is not Blockstream/Core's intention. They simply have a very different vision on how Bitcoin network should be running and on how future development should be heading. They do whatever they can to protect their vision, even dirty tricks, because they feel they are bringing justice.
Similarly, in Chinese community, we do see the same situation. Many Chinese Bitcoiners that showed strong enthusiasm in the past differ with each other. This even happens among my own real-life friends.
My question is: How can we separate these two groups of people who have widely divergent visions? Bitcoin cannot proceed when carrying two totally different visions.
A: I don’t know! It is always best if everybody is free to work on their own vision, but for some reason some people seem to think that the block size limit will prevent big companies from taking over Bitcoin.
I think all they will accomplish is making the technology much more complicated. And big companies are much better able to deal with and control highly complicated technologies.

22. XRP
Q: Please share your comments on ripple, Mr. Guru.
A: I haven’t paid very much attention to Ripple- the last time I looked at it was probably two years ago. Back then I thought they would have trouble with governments wanting to regulate their gateway nodes as money transmitters, but I haven’t even taken the time to see if I was right about that.

23.Lory
Q: Hi Gavin, I think you had a disagreement with the Nakamoto roadmap in Bitcoin design. Can you explain why? Thank you.
A: I assume you mean the part where Satoshi says he doesn’t think a second implementation will ever be a good idea.
I just think Satoshi was wrong about that-- if you look at very successful protocols, they all have multiple compatible implementations. We understand a lot more about what it takes to be completely compatible and have much better tools to ensure compatibility. And the fact that there now are multiple compatible implementations working on the network (btcd being probably the best example) shows both that it is possible and that the other implementations are not a menace to the network.

24. HuoDongFaBu
Q: 1) For the dispute between Core and Classic, can we refer to the theory of “Common-pool resources” (Commons) in the Western cultural tradition to understand and grasp the public and neutral property of bitcoin so at to strive for a solution which can balance interests of all parties?
A: 1) Maybe. The blockchain could be considered a Commons today-- a common, limited resource. But if control of the block size limit was given to miners, then I don’t think it fits the definition any more, because miners would have the freedom to restrict its use however they saw fit, on a block-by-block basis. That is just a simple, pure market, with transaction creators on one side and miners on the other.
Q: 2) For the application requring "bitcoin multi-signature script", can you recommend any programming language, libraries or tools?
A: 2) BitPay has some good tools: https://github.com/bitpay/bitcore
I haven’t worked on any multisignature applications since writing the low-level protocol code-- there are probably other great libraries and tools that I just don’t know about.

25. zhuoji
Q: Hello Gavin, are you now still developing Classic? Will Classic proceed? Would you give up Classic and return to Core?
A: Yes, yes, and there is no “return to” -- I plan on contributing to lots of projects.

26. jieke
Q: 1) If there are one million entrepreneurs who require fund and asset securitization via block chain technology, is it possible?
A: 1) If there are ten million investors willing to fund those entrepreneurs, sure it is possible. The technology won’t be a problem, one million is not a large number for today’s computers.
Q: 2) Why can we trust Bitcoin and what are the advantages of bitcoin in online payment and settlement? Its commission fee now is not as cheap as before, besides, the time for one confirm is not fast enough. Your opinions on pros and cons of Mining and PoW?
A: 2) For people in places with good-enough banking systems like the United States or China, purchasing things inside their own country, bitcoin does not have much of an advantage over existing payment systems. But if you are buying something from somebody in another country, or you live in a place where there are no good payment systems, Bitcoin works very well.
Proof of work and mining is the most fair, decentralized way to distribute new coins. They are also the best way of securing the network that we know of so far. Perhaps in 30 years when essentially all of the new coins have been mined and computer scientists have thoroughly studied other ways of securing the network it might make sense for Bitcoin to start to switch to something other than mining and proof-of-work to secure the network.
Q: 3) How likely the possibility of replacing the existing legal currency with virtual currency?
A: 3) Very unlikely in a large country. I can imagine a small country that uses a larger country’s currency deciding to switch to a crypto currency, though.

27. IMJENNIM
Q: 1) You have always insist on larger block. Some people share the same view, they just want to increase the block size, regardless of network bandwidth restrictions in China and other developing countries. How do you see this criticism?
A: 1) Most people are using Bitcoin over very limited bandwidth connections-- most people use lightweight wallets.
If you run a business that needs a fast connection to the Internet, then it is not expensive to rent a server in a data center that has very good bandwidth. Even inexpensive servers have plenty of bandwidth and CPU power to keep up with much higher transaction volume.
If you insist on running a full node from your home, average connection speed in China today is 3.7 megabits per second, which is almost 1,000 transactions per second. Latency through the Great Firewall is a bigger issue right now, but there are several software solutions to that problem that people (including myself) are working on right now.
Q: 2) In addition, I'm curious what is your opinion on the current Bitcoin Core team? There is no doubt? If so, why not act as a Core developer contributing code in Bitcoin Core to solve these problems?
A: 2) I like most of the people on the current Bitcoin Core team, they are great. But there are a couple of people on that team I don’t want to work with, so I have decided to limit the amount of time I spend with that project.

28.ShaSiKaEr
Q: 1) Hello Gavin, I would like to ask you how long since your last contribution in Bitcoin Core or others related? Expect the big influence as one of the earliest contributors, do not you think you ought to talk about the code, mostly for the coutribution of development of Bitcoin?
A from pangcong: 1)The last commit in bitcoin core made by Gavin is on September 30, 2015, after that Gavin was busy with bitcoin XT and bicoin classic. His actual development in bitcoin has never stopped, these records are very clear on github, if you want to ask questions which are obvious, please investigate first.
A from Gavin: 1) Also: I submitted some patches to Bitcoin Core a few days ago.
Q: 2) Also, you were a neutral software engineer before, seriously committed to improving the bitcoin. But now you're playing political means to enhance your impact on the future of Bitcoin, how do you respond with it?
A from KuHaiBian: 2) Now the biggest problem in Bitcoin is not block size limit, but that there is only one development team, it is as dangerous as the situation that there is only one mining pool mining bitcoin. This is the biggest problem Gavin is trying to solve.
A from Gavin: 2) I just give my honest opinion, and try to do what I can to make Bitcoin more successful.

29.Xseraph2
Q: There is no systematic process for Bitcoin upgrades. Is there any regulation/restriction on the power of Core devs? How do we balance the conflict between the centrilized power of the devs with interest of the community consensus? Do you think Bitcoin need to learn from R3 chains or distributed ledger systems? I.e. setting up regulations to constrain the power of the devs, so that only devs with “restricted access” can contribute, not everyone.
A: Competition is the best solution. If the Core team does not make their customers happy, then they will be replaced. It might take a year or more for another team to get the reputation for high-quality code that the Core team has acquired over the years.

30. ZhongBenCong
Q: In 2016, you propose to increase block size limit to 8M, then doubled every two years. Is it still the most promising expansion plan in your opinion now? If it is, do you think it possible that the block size reach 8GB in 2036, particularly given the network speed and bandwith in developing countries.
A: I think it would be best to eliminate the block size limit entirely, and let the miners decide if they should accept or reject blocks. The miners want Bitcoin to succeed, and will not choose a size so large the network cannot handle it.
I don’t know if people would agree to eliminate the limit, though. A dynamic limit that grows, but prevents an extremely large ‘attack block’ would also be a good solution.
The growing-8MB idea came from the idea that it should be possible for somebody on a home Internet connection to continue to validate every single transaction. However, more research showed that the bottleneck is not the connection from the Internet to our homes (even in China there is plenty of bandwidth there) but connections across international borders. In particular, the Great Firewall can sometimes greatly restrict bandwidth to and from China.

31. FengFengZhongXuYaoNi
Q: Gavin, hello! What is the reason do you think the community rejected Bitcoin XT?
A: It was a mistake to try to make more changes than just simply increasing the block size limit.

32. ShaSiBiEr
Q: Now the problem of block size limit is not so serious as before when Bitoin was attacked, and the Segwit has been deployed, so what is the controversy? Why have to argue to the bitter end, must we argue until bitcoin die? Gavin, we all know your contribution to Bitcoin. But in 2015, when you said in bitcoin software development, we need a "dictator" to resolve the dispute. I think you want to be this dictator. http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-June/008810.html
A: Must we argue until bitcoin die: I think is is in the nature of people to argue, so I think we will be arguing about lots of things until either we die or Bitcoin dies. I think in a few years we will look back and wonder why there was so much arguing, but I also think some good things have come from all of the argument.

33. HuoDongFaBu
Q: 1) What do you think about Ethereum? Can smart contract run based on Bitcoin?
A: 1) (This question is repeated. Please see Q18-4)
Q: 2) What are the problems Miners may have to face after halving in July? Thanks!
A: 2) There is a small risk that the halving will make a good fraction of the miners stop mining, because they will get about half of the bitcoins they got before the halving. And that might mean blocks take longer to create, which means less space for transactions, which might mean people get frustrated and leave Bitcoin. Which could drop the price even more, causing more miners to stop mining, more frustration, and so on.
Miners tell me they have already planned ahead for the halving and this will not happen, which is why I think it is a small risk and I don’t think the halving will be a big problem for most miners.
Q: 3) Where can we get the whole code and code review of bitcoin?
A: 3)
Bitcoin Core is at: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin
Bitcoin Classic: https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/bitcoinclassic
btcd: https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd
bitcore: https://github.com/bitpay/bitcore

34. Lory
Q: https://petertodd.org/2016/mit-chainanchor-bribing-miners-to-regulate-bitcoin
What is your relationship with Chainanchor project, or a similar project?
A: I have never heard of Chainanchor until this question. I don’t have any relationships with any projects that are working on digital identity.

35. xraysun
I found out this link: http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-June/008810.html
, Gavin, you said: [But even before stepping down as Lead I was starting to wonder if there are ANY successful open source projects that didn't have either a Benevolent Dictator or some clear voting process to resolve disputes that cannot be settled with "rough consensus."]. I think you are quite right. Wladimir’s roll is hard, huge responsibility with unfitting return. However, that’s not the reason for demanding unanimous support for changes to take place, allowing one-vote veto. What’s the different between having Wladimir and a robot then?
My question is: Other than trying to be “decentrilized”, is it also because that you found the leading dev roll with too much responsibility but too little return, so that you gave up your power? After that, realizing the 5-dev-group (the devs with commit access) need to be somehow centralized, have you ever tried to abolish one-vote veto, and change it to a majority rule. If it was changed to majority rule now, we might need another leading dev. Are you willing to lead the development again?
A: I think I am much better at writing and communicating and thinking about ‘the big picture’ than I am at managing and keeping track of hundreds of small details.
People have encouraged me to be “the Linus Torvalds of Bitcoin,” but I looked at what Linus actually does and I don’t think I would be very good at it or enjoy it. He spends a lot of time with the details of pulling in changes to the Linux kernel, and that is the kind of thing a lead developer needs to spend time doing. Wladimir is good at that.
Even if the Core project changed from “overwhelming consensus-- one or two people can veto a change” to “majority rule” I don’t think I want the lead developer role. If there was nobody else to do it, I would return, but I think there are now lots of people who would be good lead developers. Some of them are leading projects like Bitcoin Unlimited or btcd or Bitcoin Classic, and that is great!

36. ls-a
Q: Lots of people say that “Bitcoin is dead”. What’s your opinion on this? Does Bitcoin still have a future?
A: Bitcoin absolutely has a future. It has been declared dead dozens of time, and I am sure it will be declared dead dozens of times more before people get tired of saying that it is dead.

37. redl
Q: Bitcoin has been stably running for seven years, why not the core developers act like Satoshi, just watch it, so as to avoid development centralization?
A: Good developers always want to make things better!
And there are changes that must be made as more people use Bitcoin.

38. Ma_Ya
Q: What’s your opinion on Dogecoin? Is it possible that Dogecoin becomes one of Bitcoin’s sidechains, so that it can helps the traffic on Bitcoin mainchain?
A: I like the 21-million bitcoin limit. I think it makes sense for there to be a limited, predictable supply of money.
So I don’t like altcoins that create even more money; you can think of it as a sneaky way of increasing the 21-million coin limit. If Dogecoin was just a sidechain, without its own currency, then I would like it more.
39. Gladpay
Q: Gavin, what’s your opinion on Ethereum? Any comment on the trend that the industry started to talk about blockchain without mentioning Bitcoin?
A: I answered another question about Ethereum.
As for “we like Blockchain” instead of “we like Bitcoin” : I don’t have a strong opinion about that. I answered another question about private blockchains; I think they make sense for some things, and not for others.

40. frankf
Q: Can you explain why it is not possible to solve the congestion problem by reducing block generation time? Is reducing block generation time the same as increasing blocksize?
A: It would be even more controversial to reduce the block generation time than it is to increase the block size limit. It is technically more difficult to safely reduce the generation time, and would require more changes to more software. In particular, lightweight wallets that just download block headers might have to download many more headers, increasing their bandwidth usage.

41. ZhongBenCong
Q: Hi, Gavin, I‘m curious why you always change your idea in the size of block limit? Why not insist on one hard fork solution? I think you did not think about it carefully on how to increase the limit, what’s your opinion?
A: I have been trying very hard for a long time to find a solution that most people can agree on, and have made just two proposals (BIP101 and BIP109).
I have thought very carefully about how to safely increase the limit. Part of the problem is it can be done in many ways, and it really doesn’t matter which way is chosen-- it is more important that SOMETHING is chosen. Those are the decisions that are the hardest to make, because it is easy for people to have different opinions about what way is best.

42. FengFengZhongXuYaoNi
Q: Sure, I’m gonna ask something other than blocksize and Classic vs. Core. Gavin I just want to ask you a question as an ordinary trader. Do you believe that Bitcoin can serve as a good store of value? Because you said on bitcontalk that Bitcoin cannot become a significant instrument for storing value https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=204.msg1714#msg1714
. Do you still think so?
A: That feels like a very long time ago I said that…
I still think that the best store of value is in diversified investments that are investing in people that are working hard to make the world a better place. So the part of my personal savings that is not Bitcoin is mostly invested in diversified stock mutual funds.
Having some of your savings in a very safe investment makes a lot of sense; something like precious metals is probably the safest investment right now.
Hopefully some day Bitcoin will be safer than gold, and it will make sense to hold Bitcoin as part of your “safe from stock market craziness” money. Today, I think it makes sense to hold some Bitcon as part of your “high risk but maybe high future reward” money.
But please don’t invest all of your money in any one thing!

43. ShaSiBiEr
Q: I just want to ask that, Gavin, you have a title “Chief Scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation”, what does it mean? What’s the main responsibility, and who assigned it to you?
A: There was a meeting in Seattle where we created the Foundation. I don’t remember who suggested the “Chief Scientist” title, but it seemed better than the rest of the possible titles we were thinking of.
I am fortunate to have very few responsibilities. I am given the freedom to do what I think will be best for Bitcoin. I tell people I have almost no gray hair (I should have gray hair, I will be 50 years old at the end of the year) because I organize my life so that I do not need to manage people and almost never have to talk with lawyers.

44. pangcong
Q: How did you know Satoshi at the very beginning, did he come to you, or you were attacted by the Bitcoin project and contacted him?
A: I contacted Satoshi on the bitcointalk forums. Here is my first message to him:
Hey Satoshi:
I want to help make Bitcoin a success. I've started by creating freebitcoins.appspot.com, and plan on doing a couple of other small projects like it.
But I think I might be able to help in lots of other ways. I was the chief architect of the VRML 3D-graphics-on-the-web standardization effort (which is STILL a solution in search of a problem, unfortunately), and had the unpleasant experience of taking it through the ISO standardization process.
I've also written a lot of C++ code (I'm very proud of the code I wrote as part of the Open Inventor team at Silicon Graphics), although it's been a while (I've switched to Python).
I'm very curious to hear more about you-- how old are you? Is Satoshi your real name? Do you have a day job? What projects have you been involved with before?
Anyway, Bitcoin is a brilliant idea, and I want to help. What do you need?
-- Gavin Andresen

45. XiaoMaYi
Q: Gavin, last time when you were in Beijing, what did you say in that meeting?
*A: *The first and only time I’ve been in China was the end of last month (March).
The purpose of the trip was to meet with some of the mining pools and miners, to better understand what they are thinking about the block size limit, segregated witness, the halving, and anything else that is an issue right now.
I did not say a lot-- just made clear some technical points about BIP109, and explained what I have been hearing from large and small companies in the West.

46. Satoshi
Q: Gavin, what do you think is the best way to introduce / explain Bitcoin to an average Joe?
A: I usually start by saying that Bitcoin is one of those ideas that sounds crazy when you first hear it. And then I describe it as “money for the Internet, that is designed to be like the Internet-- with no single person or government or company in control.”
Then I let them steer the conversation and ask questions if they are interested. Some people want to talk about what governments think, some people want to know about the technology, some people want to know if they should invest or how easy it is to use… there are lots of things to talk about!

47. QiBuShangTianTang
Q: Gavin, you’re working for bitcoin as a career, is there anyone around try to deride or attact you about what you’re doing? How did you move on and continue your work? What do you think about the current situation of bitcoin development?
*A: *There are always people on the Internet who seem to like attacking other people. I don’t know if it is better or worse with Bitcoin; probably worse, because people care so much about it.
I get many more people thanking me for the work I do on Bitcoin than people attacking me, so usually it is easy to move on and continue my work. I am most hurt when I am attacked by people I have worked with in the past; that is discouraging.
I think overall Bitcoin development is stronger than it has ever been. There are more people contributing, not just to Core but to other projects, and more innovation happening.
But moving from there being just one implementation of the protocol to multiple competing implementations is necessary, but difficult. I wish developers did not see that transition as being some sort of personal attack.

48. kcb
Q: Hi Gavin, SegWig had a PR a couple of days ago, however, the blocksize limit is still 1MB, the amount of transactions can be processed are still the same per block. I really want to know that when we can benefit from SegWig, and when can we actually have blocks that can process more transactions?
A: If everything goes perfectly, we might see a significan number of SegWit transactions in three months. I would guess it will take six months for the miners to adopt segwit and then wallets to start producing segwit transactions, but it could take a year.
Unfortunately, transaction volume was growing more quickly than that, so even if Segwit helps, it will not help quickly enough.

49. ZhongBenCong
Q: Hi Gavin, you said in 2015 that having 1-minute block generation time is a good idea. Do you still believe so? If yes, can you share your strategy on dealing with the security issues and the higher orphan rate? https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/35hpkt/please_remind_me_once_again_why_we_cant_decrease/cr4wk0g
A: Yes, I still believe Bitcoin would work just fine with a one-minute block generation time.
I don’t think we should change that right now, though, because it would be a big change that requires changing lots of software.
I’m not sure what security issues you are talking about, perhaps you could be more specific.
As for higher orphan rates: if everybody has a higher orphan rate, then that is not a problem (unless orphan rates get very high-- say 5-10% or more). Even worries about larger miners having an advantage at higher orphan rates could be addressed with some protocol changes.
But, again, all of that is a much longer discussion that I don’t think we should have right now. Increasing or eliminating the block size limit is much simpler.

50. BiTeCui
Q: Hi Gavin, how many hours do spend on working every day? Do you still write code nowadays?
*A: *It depends on what you mean by “working” -- does answering email after dinner count?
I try not to work too much; I need to get more exercise, and like to spend time with my family (my children will be going to college in just a few years). I am usually at my office maybe seven hours, five days per week, and on good days I do get to still write code.

51.pangcong
Q: Hi, Gavin, how many children do you have? :-D How do you balance between your life and bitcoin?
A: Two children, a girl and a boy, both teenagers. The trick to balancing life and bitcoin is to say “no” a lot (“no, I’m sorry, I cannot speak at your conference in Botswana”).

52. fermi
Q: Hi Gavin, I’m very worried about bitcoin may split to two coins, which is very bad. So I once posted on 8btc to discuss how to prevent bitcoin from splitting in future. http://8btc.com/thread-30758-1-1.htm
. Simply put, we just add all different opinions into one wallet, and the network automatically hard fork based on the vote result of the wallet. In this way, there would be no splitting ever happen. Do you think this idea would work out? (See above image as an illustration of the idea)
A: Agreeing how the vote would work would be hard (would transactions vote? For how long? 51% agreement or 75% or 95%?) Only transactions in blocks count as voting? (if not, then somebody could send lots of transactions to vote multiple times) And what if miners decide not to mine transactions that vote for something they disagree with?

53. BiTeCui
Q: Gavin, do you think large institutions wil join in Bitcoin ,like big fund or bank? There are news mentioned about safery regulations and risk factors in bitoin, may they be eliminated? Or will bitcoin be a game for ordinary people forever?
A: If Bitcoin continues to grow, then yes, I think large institutions will start to accept Bitcoin. We have already seen some big technology companies like Microsoft work with Bitcoin.
Most of the risk with Bitcoin is caused by new, immature companies (like Mt. Gox). The risk is smaller today, because larger, more stable, better funded companies with better engineers are involved, and I expect that will continue.
I hope Bitcoin will also be used by ordinary people forever!

54. baowj
Q: What are you most proud of since you've join in Bitcoin development?
A: All of the testing infrastructure that I put into place. My first contribution was the Bitcoin testnet, and if I remember correctly I also put the first unit tests in place and the first regression tests.

55. kcb
Q: Hi Gavin, do you mind further share some insights on why you think Bitcoin cannot replace the fiat system and become a true global currency?
Bitcoin is a better instrument as store of value, it has better liquidity, also better against counterfeiting, and can even truly make people's wealth inviolable to anyone! (no more confiscation and capital control.)
Therefore, Bitcoin obviously is a better currency comparing to fiat. When a better currency appears, people tends to adopt it naturally, and gradually abandon the old currency. (just like how people abandoned shells, when they realized that gold is better form of money with excellent monetary attributes.
*A: * It could eventually replace the fiat system, but I don’t think that will happen in my lifetime. I hope I am wrong about that!

56.altcoindev
Q: Hi, Gavin, welcome to 8btc!
I am a altlcoin dev ,do you like one or some altcoins? And what do you think of the coins developed by Chinese Teams, like the VPNCoin、Dacrs(SmartCoin)、Antshares or others projects(these are all high light shown on 8btc.com).
Have you ever tried to understand such altcoins?
Best Regards!
Your fans
A: I don’t like altcoins that are created just to create more money, because I like the 21-million bitcoin limit.
Altcoins that have some innovative technology in them (like Ethereum or Zerocash) are more interesting, but I would rather they were done as sidechains to the Bitcoin blockchain. I think you should have a very good purpose for creating a new currency, and if you don’t have a good purpose, you should use the Bitcoin currency.

Gavin: Thank you very much for the great questions, and BIG thanks to the translators for their hard work!

kcb: Thank you Gavin!! It’s great to have you here!!

WangXiaoMeng: Thanks a lot Gavin!!!