What?

The core developers (employed by Blockstream) have intentionally kept the block size at 1MB in order to support the product they're attempting to develop (lightening network layers) which lets them facilitate federated payment processors siphoning fees out.

It's a red herring to claim larger blocks increase centralization when it's just data storage. Drives are cheap. Centralization already happened once sha256 ASIC hardware was produced enmasse, preventing normal users from earning block rewards. The Bitcoin devs are lost in political dogmas, rather than improving the software for users.

Thankfully there's alternative iterations.

> The core developers (employed by Blockstream)

There are hundreds of Core developers; only about 6 of them are related to Blockstream. Your conspiracy theory does not hold up to reality.

> have intentionally kept the block size at 1MB

The block size has already been lifted to 2MB-4MB with SegWit.

> Blockstream ... support the product they're attempting to develop (lightening network layers)

Lightning Network was invented by people that have nothing to do with Blockstream, who founded their own company for that: https://lightning.engineering/team.html

There are 5 different teams developing Lightning Network implementations. Blockstream is merely responsible for the C implementation, they have no special control over Lightning.

> It's a red herring to claim larger blocks increase centralization when it's just data storage.

It's not just storage; the main issues are bandwidth, latency and IBD time. There are very real engineering limitations and trade-offs that have been discussed in depth over the years that you're just brushing off here. It's not as simple as you make it appear.

Libertarian conspiracy theorists out in full force today

Mate, please, stop with the Blockstream FUD. Blockstream make up only 20% of commits on Bitcoin. Find another strawman.

There is not a 1MB limit, the limit was lifted with the implementation of segwit, as it changed the counting mechanism to weight instead of size, as a result, you can now push upto 3.7MB worth of tx into a block.

Your proposition is wrong and people like you who constantly spout it should be called out and shamed like the fucking charlatans that you are. Blockstream has no financial interest in having Segwit, LN or anything else implemented. They have DEFENSIVE patents against the technology to stop trolls from holding up the development process. Please, locate yourself to Google Patents and search for Blockstream, then consult their Open Patents disclosure for further confirmation that you are wrong and have taken the bait of companies who have an interest in deriding the current decisions of Core.

Core is implementing a variety of changes in the future that will put many businesses against Core out of business.

Cross chain atomic swaps = exchanges More private transactions = anyone doing blockchain analysis (lolgarzik) Lightning Network = miners and anyone who processes transactions.

The most painful part of your opinion is that you can't extrapolate network rules and see that in the next 2 years, rewards are going to half, meaning that if we drop TX fees now, it will make it even harder to pull miners back. By implementing a simple situation for on-chain settlement, miners still make decent returns down the line.

Please, if you have any interest in Bitcoin, and have any decent brain about you, call people like this out for being the corporate sockpuppets they really are.

This comment breaks the guidelines in many ways. Please don't post like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Your response is insults, ad-hominem and a conspiracy theory that these are sock puppets. You won't convince anyone that way.

I don't have a leg in this debate. I just found it funny that you're both accusing each other of the same thing, and neither of you provided adequate sourcing so it's impossible for a layman/concerned bystander such as me to figure out who to believe.

I'm not the OP. My claim is about the comment that I replied to, so that is my source.

Whilst I would usually agree with you, your comments about being a conspiracy theorist are IMO entirely wrong, look at the history of the account, the lifespan of it, and the threads it posts on. I agree that ad hominem is incorrect and pretty much always a bad way to argue, but you need to have some idea of context and the active measures that have recently been taken in this scaling "debate", there is straight up disinformation being circulated.

As far as I'm concerned, I did give facts, the segwit facts are correct. The loss of business is fact. The comment about chain rewards decreasing is fact.

Even if it is a sock puppet (and isn't your account pretty new?), humans are reading here, so my advice is to take the high ground if you want to convince people.

Can you explain why chain rewards decreasing are problematic. Asic hardware is already bought, so mining still makes sense even if the rewards drop as the cost is sunk.

And in response to his fallacious proclamations that Blockstream controls core.

git shortlog -sn 4982 Wladimir J. van der Laan = Non-Blockstream 1446 Pieter Wuille = Blockstream 1101 Gavin Andresen = Non-Blockstream 639 Philip Kaufmann - Unsure 633 MarcoFalke - Non-Blockstream 559 Matt Corallo - Non-Blockstream 551 Cory Fields - Unsure 533 Jeff Garzik - Non-Blockstream 520 Jonas Schnelli - Non-Blockstream 330 Luke Dashjr - Blockstream 261 Gregory Maxwell - Blockstream 245 s_nakamoto - lol 208 Alex Morcos - Non-Blockstream 208 John Newbery - Non-Blockstream 197 Suhas Daftuar 131 practicalswift 113 Russell Yanofsky 113 fanquake 102 Peter Todd 95 Pavel Janík 86 Jorge Timón 74 Michael Ford 74 jtimon 70 Cozz Lovan 50 Patrick Strateman 40 Andrew Chow 36 João Barbosa 35 R E Broadley 34 Giel van Schijndel 32 BtcDrak 32 Eric Lombrozo 31 Daniel Kraft 30 Jeremy Rubin 29 Karl-Johan Alm 29 Nils Schneider 28 Gregory Sanders 27 Chris Moore 26 Satoshi Nakamoto 26 sirius-m 23 Johnson Lau 23 MeshCollider 23 instagibbs 21 Micha 20 dexX7 19 Warren Togami 19 gavinandresen 19 tcatm

Sorry if I didn't do them all, you're getting the idea, as you go further down the list the impact of the organisation backing them inevitably goes down.

The technical implementations and actions speak louder than words.

Bitcoin maximalists try to rationalize their design flaws, but ultimately it's simply software running a service. There are new teams working on improving designs and useful features meanwhile core has stagnated and stalled for years.

You're clearly emotionally and financially invested in advocating for a single cryptocurrency. Fortunately there are now many to choose from. :)

That’s not true at all in practice. If it were then we’d be seeing 2x as many transactions confirming after SegWit went live (we’re not).

Segwit was a soft-fork upgrade. It only takes effect if you move to a Segwit compatible wallet and send from there.

Which tells me people don't actually care enough, or they'd be doing that.

Which makes me wonder about the validity of the majority of the complaints.

Maybe because nobody's using Bitcoin as a currency and it's all speculation.

Currencies actually get used for transactions...

That's an interesting theory, considering this story is about someone using Bitcoin for a transaction.

EDIT: it's Friday, be nicer me

That doesn't fit. Per bitinfocharts.com the coin with the highest txn rate is Ethereum, followed closely by Bitcoin. The others are far behind. I'd say it's seeing a lot of use.

The capacity was increased (more than doubled). Now its a matter of utilizing this new capacity by upgrading to SegWit-supporting wallets.

Note that upgrading your own wallet to SegWit immediately saves you about 50% on mining fees, regardless of whether other network participants upgraded or not.