Let's not get sidetracked by sidechains and IBLT.
The first was demolished even by cypherdoc in his econ-for-trolls thread, whence half of you came. They wil be decimated by speculators within hours, as with gavincoin.
Cypherdoc couldn't demolish a wet paper bag. More than half of his bullshit is to absurd to even respond to.
And sidechains will be unlikely to be 'decimated within hours' if it takes days to excersize the peg. For speculators who have the patience, well, as a BTC hodler, 'please don't throw me in dat der brier patch.'
The second is a blatant move towards conformity and centralisation.
"With today's p2p protocol ..."
https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2 starts USGavin, preparing our arseholes for "tomorrow's p2usg protocol".
The old bitcoin foundation added and proposed a ton of other such ways to eventually con you out of your money too, such as multisig, timelock.
Don't doubt it, but I've not seen any examples yet. Nor have I looked real hard. I was negative about the garbage because I felt it was risky and unneeded, but I've nearly come to the conclusion that I was wrong. I'm open to being convinced otherwise, and it may be worthwhile if you guys want 5.3 since I'm glad to accept the labor savings of digging the arguments up for myself.
The new one has halted all such complications and is producing a purer form of the discovery that is bitcoin. Everything that makes sense stays, everything else...
Once the crust is removed, block size and all the other elements of bitcoin can be tested without interference from or reference to Gavin, Blockstream, anyone.
I'm naturally inclined toward Blockstream until someone points me to more credible contributors than Maxwell, Wuille, Back, Frie-whatever, etc. Todd is up there and I'll carefully parse his input, but after watching things moderately carefully for a number of years now, it's going to take more than witty prose to make any seismic shifts in my orientation. Especially since what these guys seem to be up to are things which have made sense to me for about forever.