'Nothing Is Decentralized': Crypto Springs Confronts Tech's Shortcomings

In his presentation, Dogecoin creator Jackson Palmer even went so far as to lambaste the Bitcoin Core team for the "Centralized way" in which they fixed the recently discovered bug in bitcoin's code, which involved coordinating with bitcoin miners behind closed doors.

Palmer also said there is a "Complete lack of transparency" about who manages the Bitcoin Core code base, and that he believes the whole bitcoin ecosystem suffers from a lack of diversity regarding both programming languages and implementations.

"A lot of people in the space are afraid to reflect on bitcoin," Palmer told CoinDesk, questioning why retail adoption is still a rarity.

"If bitcoin was a startup, it would be dead. It hasn't reached product-market fit."

Addressing one of these criticisms, Bitcoin Core developer Matt Corallo told CoinDesk that diversifying bitcoin might require a great deal of extra work to maintain consistency across the complex network, at best, and lead to network forks that reduce bitcoin's usability at worst.

Regarding the recent bug, Corallo said Bitcoin Core's mentality is to place more responsibility on reviewers than solely on the shoulders of the few full-time contributors.

So Satoshi Labs co-founder Alena Vranova, who recently left the helm of the crypto wallet maker Trezor to found the nonprofit B Foundation, told CoinDesk her next goal is to create online courses and grants to increase the number of engineers contributing to bitcoin.

Corallo's presentation on Thursday will focus on decentralization and mining, especially bitcoin's underlying principle of censorship resistance, which the developer told CoinDesk he is still unsure could scale to a trillion-dollar market.

Financial products like a bitcoin exchange-traded fund are much more achievable in the next year than mainstream retail adoption, he added.

"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."