> Step 1: Buy off

We founded the company.

> all of the top developers

A couple people out of a community of around 50-200 depending on the phase of the moon.

> Step 2: Refuse to support/fix basic network operations

Uh. You know that Bitcoin is a decenteralized system that no one controls; right? We do a lot of fixes, but we're not your personal code monkies. There is a LOT going on in Bitcoin, and it's working pretty darn well at the moment.

> Step 4: Censor any forum

Via our magical mind control rays, I suppose? Blockstream doesn't control or influence any forums.

Wheres your playbook? Which step does "Create throwaway accounts on hacker news to slander people" fit? Is it before "profit" or "suppression of inconvenient technology"?

Again, these are lies from Gregory Maxwell (Blockstream CTO).

Please provide details on funding. Specifically, how much AXA paid?

"A couple people out of a community of around 50-200 depending on the phase of the moon."

Again a lie. The top Core devs are Blockstream employees.

Blockstream has created a toxic environment and a huge ivory tower.

"Uh. You know that Bitcoin is a decenteralized system that no one controls; right? We do a lot of fixes, but we're not your personal code monkies. There is a LOT going on in Bitcoin, and it's working pretty darn well at the moment."

Meanwhile 80%+ of the hasrate is concentrated in a single country and in the hands of a handful of entities.

Ironically, Blockstream goes graet lengths to exploit this (HK roundtable farce).

"Via our magical mind control rays, I suppose? Blockstream doesn't control or influence any forums."

People associated with BlockstreamCore support censored and manipulated forums, interestingly owned by a single individual (theymos)

Gregory, you are the most pathetic individual in the Bitcoin space.

> Please provide details on funding. Specifically, how much AXA paid?

Dunno, not enough to be broken out on the reports I have. They're not an investor that I've ever met with-- we have a lot of investors. Though it's a cute technique that y'all have been using where you try asking something that would be confidential, to try to inhibit a response on the long list of leading questions that follows.

>> "A couple people out of a community of around 50-200 depending on the phase of the moon."

> Again a lie. The top Core devs are Blockstream employees.

I gave a breakout in another post; if you want to go by top you end up with three out of the top 10, all of whom were founders of the company. wooo.

> Blockstream has created a toxic environment and a huge ivory tower.

What does that even mean? or another way, how could someone falsify that claim?

> Meanwhile 80%+ of the hasrate is concentrated in a single country and in the hands of a handful of entities

Unfortunately, the block size limit was set too large and this created outsized returns for large consolidations. More recent improvements have caught things up a bit but it will take a while for the damage to equalize out.

> People associated with BlockstreamCore support censored and manipulated forums,

What the @#$@ are you talking about? Citations? Or are you just saying that anyone of the vast majority of people who are supportive of our work is "associated"?

>Unfortunately, the block size limit was set too large and this created outsized returns for large consolidations.

Can you clarify this statement?

Thanks for answering Greg.

This isn't a throw-away account. I've lurked for years without needing to become involved. The larger public needs to know that:

> We founded the company.

Obviously you're the CTO but not all of the other 'employees' paid by your company founded it with you.

> You know that Bitcoin is a decentralized system that no one controls; right?

Actually you've locked down the codebase. Any one developer can make a common sense change contentious and prevent it from being merged. That's kinda centralized don't you think? Getting a few people to disagree is a pretty low barrier if a government was bent on destroying Bitcoin. We need decentralized development to match Bitcoin's decentralized nature.

> Bitcoin, and it's working pretty darn well at the moment.

Does that include transactions that don't go through even with correct fees? What do you say to the new user that did nothing wrong and has to wait 3 days for his coins to reappear in his wallet because he tried to send a transaction during a high-volume time? Does that also include overly expensive fees approaching 50cents and could reach several dollars within the year?

Limiting transaction velocity and making transactions artificially expensive is a bad idea at this point in Bitcoin's existence.

You need to stop ignoring that network operations are failing.

> Via our magical mind control rays, I suppose..

No, by calling alternate code bases altcoins - even though they operate on the same blockchain - you have setup an environment where they are not allowed to be honestly discussed at length on /r/bitcoin. Further, even though positive posts are banned, negative posts about other Bitcoin wallet/mining software are allowed. Any outside person can clearly see that is censorship. Moderators point to CoreDevelopers as the reason for that censorship. I also know you know Theymos so you can't say you're not buddies with him. I'm sure if you wanted you could ask for it and have posts removed/deleted.

> but not all of the other 'employees' paid by your company founded it with you

The "top developers of Bitcoin" you were referring to did.

> Actually you've locked down the codebase.

So, there is a concrete claim of an action. But you're not specific. Locked down how? What are you referring to? Please provide hyperlinks for clarity.

> We need decentralized development

Every developer has their own codebase, the community tends to cooperate because its efficient and makes sense. But participating at all requires making your own fork, and anyone can at any time promote their fork for public use. Some have, but the ones created to rewrite Bitcoin's rules with a hardfork so far have not been supported by engineers and languish largely stillborn.

> Does that include transactions that don't go through even with correct fees?

I'm not aware of any issues like that, can you point me to a trouble ticket?

> Limiting transaction velocity

How have we done that? The design of Bitcoin and physical reality create limits and select trade-offs.

> No, by calling alternate code bases altcoins

We have?

> even though they operate on the same blockchain

The people who are calling things like the deceptively named Bitcoin "classic" altcoins do so specifically because when they activate they will not operate on the same blockchain.

> you have setup an environment where they are not allowed to be honestly discussed at length on /r/bitcoin. [...] I'm sure if you wanted you could ask for it

I, nor anyone at my company, have any control over /r/bitcoin's policies, and-- in fact-- I argued vigorously against them (before I saw what the unmoderated feed looked like-- a non-stop stream of brand new sockpuppet accounts promoting rule rewrites, often with dishonest claims, outnumbering all other posts 20:1)...

> I also know you know Theymos

What does that mean? I've had a few conversations with him, yes-- and in the ones where I tried to convince him to not use a fairly restrictive moderation policy in /r/bitcoin I failed.

Thanks again for the reply.

By the expression "locked down" I mean that no reasonable change can happen if any one of the main core devs don't want it to. Some of the core devs think the max-blocksize is too large. I won't name names, but a modest larger blocksize is reasonable.

Additionally hard-forks are the safest way to make large important changes. They are safer than soft-forks (limbo) and for the blocksize one would be required. I'm sure you know all of this, but the reason for a hard fork was because it's an important and critical change. At one point it was on the core scaling roadmap I believe (or promised by your CEO to Chinese miners in Hong Kong).

> when they activate they will not operate on the same blockchain

Hard-forks have happened twice before and people aren't calling the current version an altcoin of the original Bitcoin. Bitcoin Classic's change has safety mechanisms like a 30 day grace period before activation, it wouldn't disrupt time-locked coins, and it has other checks that prevent attacks on hard to process transactions. It also only changes if there is overwhelming miner consensus well above the regular 51% 'Nakamoto' consensus. Unanimous consensus works for trivial matters but the big stuff, the important stuff should go with a large majority and not be held back by a stubborn minority. Classic also removes the hard-fork if it doesn't happen by a certain date.

> I tried to convince him to not use a fairly restrictive moderation policy in /r/bitcoin I failed.

I'm glad your being vocal about the censorship and expressed your opinion to Theymos. An entire sub of 19,000+ users arose out of those policies. On /r/bitcoin most of the posts are positive white-washed pump the price news rather than genuine discussions. A big genuine thanks for talking to him about it, and I hope you can keep that process moving towards non-censorship.

You mentioned: > stream of brand new sockpuppet accounts

People created new accounts because their main accounts were being banned for talking about the benefits of on-chain scaling. Sure some of those were FUD, but a lot of them were also genuine.

You're an idiot. If you actually understood how lightning network works, you would understand what a HUGE leap this is for bitcoin. This solves the problem of miners downloading and transferring too much data, it solves the zero confirmation problem, it solves the micropayment problems, and it solves the scale-ability problem... All this, just by using bitcoin timelocks and transaction channels. It's a pretty cool trick, that's completely secure.

It's difficult to convince people with facts when their mind is already made up.

How does Step 3 work? How is Blockstream able to siphon Billions from Lightning?

Well, they say that "anyone can use" a 2nd layer lightning network but realistically nobody is going to trust any basement-dweller to intermediate their off-chain transaction. This will centralize off-chain scaling to large players like Blockstream.

Blockstream will run a Lightning hub and make money off of facilitating transactions before settling them on-chain. Since blockspace is limited they will make (or have made) agreements with miners like BTCC in China - that way they will always be able to settle, but on-chain transactions might get kicked off and be forced to use their centralized system. It's really rather insidious.

Lightning is also not the peer-to-peer solution that the Bitcoin Whitepaper promotes in its abstract. The first few sentences describing the reason for Bitcoin to exist in the first place make peer-to-peer the number one priority.

Why do you think Blockstream would capture a large part of that market? They are only known by people who care specifically about the implementation of bitcoin. If you did a survey of just users I doubt more than 50% would know them. Their are much more well known entities in the space that are far more likely to win a battle to be primary hubs.

Bitcoin can't scale in a peer to peer way to handle any real kind of volume. It's kind of the downside of distributed systems is that they suck at scaling and throughput.

I'm guessing you want them to increase the block size to 2mb but what does that get you? 6tps? So we go to 20mb and you're up to 60tps? You can't scale it on chain and get anywhere near the tps needed for it to be globally successful.

So your options are offchain scaling or limiting its uses with fees.

Our implementation will not be biased towards Blockstream's hub if they ever make one. In fact, it's designed to work in a scale-free network topology.

You can find it at https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd

What the heck Joseph, when you first started talking about lightning I spent considerable effort trying to convince you that "hub" was a bad model for thinking about or describing these things.

Blockstream has no intention of ever monetizing lightning on Bitcoin in any way (nor do I have any idea how we could do so); our interests for it in the case of Bitcoin are only to promote and expand the use of Bitcoin. (We also hope to use it to enable other kinds of asset systems).

Sorry Greg! I didn't mean it in the sense that Blockstream is planning for a hub at all! I was being sarcastic, but perhaps that wasn't conveyed properly in text. I thought the "if they ever make one" was sufficient, but it didn't properly convey the cultural apprehension towards those types of systems and could be seen as deeply disrespectful. We were definitely in agreement from the start that decentralization in the protocol layer was immensely important.

I thought it was obvious that the parent poster was being ridiculous, but should've ended the post with :^)

No problem! Understood. It's a bit tough with so much crap being flung to stay clear of it. :)

nullc,

I'll take your word for it that Blockstream will never run a Lightning network hub.

We understand how the Lightning network works and you also have to admit that it has the potential to centralize into a few large hubs -- even if they aren't by Blockstream -- that will be able to provide the lowest transaction costs in order to keep track of user transaction data.

The problem with Lightning is that it's really far off, and it might not even work.

Meanwhile the network is breaking at the edges while we wait for this pie-in-the-sky solution. Increasing the blocksize is the best approach and it's safe to do as a hard-fork. The delay and push back from CoreDevs is what makes people not trust you. We've had enough "my transaction didn't confirm" posts.