Meltem Demirors Shares “Nothing Is Decentralized” at Crypto Springs Conference

Meltem Demirors Announces at Crypto Springs Conference that “Nothing Is Decentralized”

The Crypto Springs conference is a two-day conference, which ends today on October 4^th this year. The gathering is hosting is Palm Springs, California, providing an opportunity for those in the cryptocurrency world to discuss culture, technology, economics, and the future of the industry. Though there are many speakers, co-creator Meltem Demirors (CoinShares) got a lot of attention and an uproar of applause when she took the stage, margarita in hand, and proclaimed, “Nothing is decentralized.”

Though that’s not the type of sentiment that someone would typically expect from an event that included many crypto veterans, but the conference seemed to focus on how the industry can do better. Meltem Demirors told the audience,

“Decentralization is not a myth. It just hasn’t been implemented properly yet.”

However, she wasn’t the only one who held this view at the conference. Jackson Palmer, who was there for his work with YouTube and creation of Dogecoin, went after the Bitcoin Core team, calling their solution for a recent bug in the code a “centralized way” of handling the circumstance. Palmer added that,

“The Bitcoin Core code base possesses a complete lack of transparency, though the entire community could do with more diversity in their technologies.”

When speaking with CoinDesk, Palmer mentioned the confusion over why retail adoption is still taking so long to happen across the industry. He said,

“A lot of people in the space are afraid to reflect on bitcoin. If bitcoin was a startup, it would be dead. It hasn't reached product-market fit.”

Bitcoin Core developer Matt Corallo decided to get involve in the criticism, defending their protocols by saying that the extra work required for diversification could ultimately create the worst usability so far. He said,

“If you have multiple implementations that people run, then [nodes] have to run both. With multiple languages, you're going to have different behaviors…you don't want to rewrite too many things because that's how you end up with lots of bugs.”

Throughout the event, there’s one point that was repeated over and over, and Palmer said it best:

“There needs to be more talent working on [bitcoin] full-time.”

Corallo supported this statement, saying that funding certainly isn’t the reason that code reviewers aren’t available. Instead, the issue is a lack of devotion from new and skilled engineers, who could realistically change the way that the industry functions.

Corallo added,

“People who can press the big red button are much less interesting because they push the big red button when there has been sufficient review.”

As far as the bug that Bitcoin Core faced, he blames the reviewers as well, rather than placing all of the blame on the full-time contributors.

To solve this issue of short supply, Satoshi Labs co-founder Alena Vranova wants to develop online courses and grants to motivate engineers to contribute to the advancement of Bitcoin. She said,

“More implementations doesn't necessarily fix the issue of bugs. If you have forks, they can just inherit the bugs. You can either create specific bug bounties for different implementations or you can make sure there are plenty of developers who understand the code enough to do peer review.”

The first day of the conference, October 3^rd, was filled with varying opinions on the opportunity that crypto has to change the world. Corallo’s presentation is about decentralization and mining, while Lightning Labs CEO Elizabeth Stark will be talking about how corporate entities are the biggest threat.

The one with the most enterprise-friendly option seems to be Jack Mallers. Mallers told CoinDesk,

“This market is really volatile. It's really immature.” He added that the young market in futures contracts has the ability to help with the decentralization of mining. He concluded by saying, “Either bitcoin will work, and become a trillion-dollar asset, or it won’t, and it will go to zero. We're reaching that point where it will be very binary.”