During the opening panel of this year’s Understanding Bitcoin conference in Malta, some prominent members of the Bitcoin community reflected on the block size limit controversy and the eventual activation of Segregated Witness (SegWit).
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One of the individuals involved in the conversation was Bull Bitcoin CEO Francis Pouliot, who was working at The Bitcoin Embassy in Montreal, Canada during some of the most contentious periods of Bitcoin’s scaling debate. As part of his job at The Bitcoin Embassy, Pouliot operated a Bitcoin kiosk where he interacted with thousands of Bitcoin users face to face. According to Pouliot, this experience had a profound impact on how he viewed Bitcoin and taught him the importance of Bitcoin users operating their own nodes.
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Why Do People Use Bitcoin?
During his appearance on the opening panel at Understanding Bitcoin, Pouliot discussed how his job at the Bitcoin Embassy in Montreal helped him realize why people found Bitcoin useful in the first place.
“I came to realize that the core value proposition that was kind of unifying everyone was this aspect of censorship resistance and also this aspect of the immutability of the bitcoin supply,” said Pouliot.
According to Pouliot, almost nobody he was interacting with at The Bitcoin Embassy on a daily basis was complaining about the rising costs of transacting on the Bitcoin blockchain. Many of them were also excited about the prospect of the Lightning Network as a secondary protocol layer for payments.
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Pouliot added that, for the most part, the people who Pouliot was interacting with were simply buying bitcoin and holding it as a long term investment. These Bitcoin users weren’t on
