Peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

 

Bitcoin provides a solution to the problems created by increasingly manipulated fiat monies. Bitcoin is hard money. Bitcoin is a savings technology. Bitcoin encourages holders to think long-term by forcing them to trade off between short-term profits and long-term gains.

Should Bitcoin have multiple implementations?

No.

Multiple implementations are often pitched as a way to improve decentralization and reliability. Research and the results in practice give strong reasons to doubt these claims.

With regards to decentralization most users simply do not want to run multiple implementations of the same thing. Instead implementation adoption is Pareto distributed, as most users settle on and build against a single reliable and high-quality implementation.

With regards to reliability there are strong reasons to doubt that it can be improved by multiple implementations. Reliability is only improved if different implementations fail independently, but a NASA study on "The Design Error Problem" rejected this independence assumption with 99% confidence.

Finally, on the more practical front multiple implementations fragment limited developer attention and resources.

incoming(2): eric scrivnerresearch

Last update on 7E4B15, edited 1 times. 1/1thh