David Schwartz of Ripple and Emin Gun Sirer Head to Head About Bitcoin Mining Ecosystem

Once again, BTC has overcome the 10K mark. Even so, the bitcoin community has managed to question some preconceived notions about bitcoin miners. UCL Center for Blockchain Technologies Research Fellow Angela Walch poised and provided her answers to the question of “why people think Bitcoin miners [including hashers, mining pool operators, and cloud mining companies] are not intermediaries.” An intermediary is also known as a middleman in this context.

Ripple CTD David Schwartz seems to take the position that Bitcoin miners are not middlemen, nor do they have the duty or right to be so. He stated, “A middleman is someone who stands in the middle with some right or obligation to complete the transaction. The system is arguably a middleman. The miner who later discovers their block survived isn’t. Is the internet provider a packet went over a middleman in online banking?”

Walch appears to take the position that miners could be middleman. For instance, miners are able to censor, order, or delay transactions. However, there are some limits because they do not have many rights. Another person, Emin Gun Sirer, opined that miners determine the context of a blockchain, adding

“They voluntarily include txts, based on how much the users pay the miners with fees. They can sensor. If 51% so choose, they can render certain addresses immobile, certain tx’s includable in the chain.”

Schwartz then indicated,

“There is no force, no authority. Bitcoin is whatever its stakeholders want it to be and saying it’s not bitcoin anymore is sophistry and arbitrary line drawing.”