ptokb3

On the homepage,"I believe that If non-Core hard fork wins, major holders will sell BTC, driving price into the ground". That's the most small-block biased question I've ever seen. I wonder who owns that site; probably some small-block nutcase.

If we could vote in some other way to prove our funds outside of this site I will be glad to take part.

Thanks for clarifying. Perhaps the DCI could fund more developers.

https://www.media.mit.edu/research/highlights/media-lab-digi...

It's clearly part of MIT's infrastructure. What you're saying is that the money is not coming directly from MIT.

It was my understanding that Gavin and Wladimir were part of the MIT Media Lab payroll.

> you never even care to ask about that

Honestly, I don't know where that would be public information to know to ask about it.

> to own not much (to zero) Bitcoins;

That is not the case. Most people who have been very vocal pushing for larger blocks have significant Bitcoin investments.

> segwit which roughly doubles block transaction capacity

This only happens if all wallets adopt it, which makes them write/fix their wallet software upstream. That takes time. It's not a quick enough solution for an urgent problem.

Last, if you're taking money from someone there is a conflict of interest there.

"It's hard to get a man to understand something if his job depends on him not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair

Large investors usually want something back for their investments. Maybe you don't know what that is right now, but it's legitimate for regular users to be weary of it.

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.

Hey nullc,

I'm a software consultant for my own developing firm. I don't have a conflict of interest. As I've said before, this is a new account and my only account here. I've read HN for some 5-7 years now as a morning news source and have not gotten involved in the conversation until this point.

To the issue:

MIT would probably be happy to support more Core developers and that would definitely lessen the current conflict of interest.

Is it hard to see that one company paying most of the top developers in the accepted codebase is something that makes people uneasy? It does and the considerable pushback from modest on-chain scaling (which needs to happen eventually anyway) has people worried that you're (Blockstream) is trying to control or limit Bitcoin due to your funding from AXA.

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.

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.

I was pointing out the obvious logical flaw in what he said, that's all.

I'm sure he is a nice guy and maybe he's even funny.

Blockstream does need to recoup the 70 million in funding they've received though and it's a fact that they have most of BitcoinCore's top contributing developers on their payroll, with exception to Wladimir.

Clearly I'm not the only one concerned about a conflict of interest and I'm sure it's hard to see conflicts of interest if you're the one at the center of it.

One last edit, aside from a grammar correction: authority deserves scrutiny.

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.

I think he means that blocks are full and even transactions with correct fees will fail to confirm during high-volume transaction times.

It's a flaw because users did nothing wrong yet their transaction could take hours if not days to confirm if it confirms at all.

The most simple and straightforward fix is to increase the maximum blocksize from 1MB to something larger, which many users in the space have demanded. The max-blocksize was always meant to deter spam and attacks.

New users should use Bitcoin Classic, which fixes the problem and subverts Blockstream's obstruction.

You are implementing Lightning, paid by Blockstream but Blockstream has nothing to do with it?

Maybe you're just really funny and they are paying you for your incredible sense of humor.

-Blockstream Playbook-

Step 1: Buy off all of the top developers of open-source project. Check.

Step 2: Refuse to support/fix basic network operations so that transactions stop confirming just as the network needs to grow. Check.

Step 3: Create a 2nd-layer solution for growth that allows the company to siphon Billions of dollars over many years. Check.

Step 4: Censor any forum where people alert others about secret get-rich playbook. Check.