Craig Wright's New Company is Building a Bitcoin Core Competitor

By Pete Rizzo
CoinDesk
Tuesday, May 2, 2017

http://www.coindesk.com/craig-wrights-new-company-developing-bitcoin-core-alternative/

Former Bitcoin Foundation director Jon Matonis doesn’t waste any time asserting that his new employer is seeking to disrupt bitcoin’s established development process.

Matonis, who joined the secretive startup nChain today, is quick to state that this is the ambition of the London and Vancouver-based operation he now claims has 60 full-time employees, including infamous developer Craig Wright.

As reported by Reuters, nChain was started by Wright, the 46-year-old computer scientist who claims to be bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto (though he hasn’t offered much evidence). To date, nChain hasn’t offered much to support its assertions that it’s now the industry’s best-funded startup either, hinting only that it has received more than $100m from Malta-based high-tech private equity fund SICAV plc as part of an acquisition.

Long the subject of criticism for the significant financial support it provides to developers working on bitcoin’s open-source protocol and its primary implementation Bitcoin Core, Blockstream has been villainized for that group’s roadmap for scaling bitcoin, specifically its decision to prioritize innovations that don’t alter a hard-coded limit on block size.

Matonis told CoinDesk:

“I immediately recognized nChain would be an effective challenger to Blockstream, which is definitely needed in the space.”

In conversation, Matonis echoes a familiar refrain, that Blockstream and Bitcoin Core are too intertwined, and that Core’s roadmap doesn’t have broad community support.

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