I didn't claim the current work was to the exclusion of other work,
Then what the point? "Bitcoin development is somewhat interested interested at improving the protocol for an application of it at no cost to other applications of it" hardly sounds like a thought worth expressing.
I read, and I think many people would read, an implicit claim that the attention you assert exists is to the exclusion of other activity. In fact, "protocol development steered in a way to help one particular application" seems to be saying saying pretty darn explicitly.
You can read whatever you like, but my original post was
mainly focused on how Bitcoin and Lightning have come to be so closely connected in people's minds. The fact that this close relationship seems to be motivating protocol work on
some level was explored more as a curiosity, and not as the main focus. Your response and claim to "debunk" an idle thought in a pretty non-serious thread shows you are threatened. All thoughts are worthy of expressing, particularly on a forum. I just came here to share a random thought, not to spread some grand new narrative.
just that a significant chunk of effort is being expended to make Bitcoin's protocol and the node software assist Lightning as much as possible,
Yes, you asserted this but failed to back it up with evidence. Instead, you've only shown that there is some minimal but non-zero effort there.
How many more links do you want? I can point you to the eltoo proposol for Lightning which requires a soft fork:
https://blockstream.com/2018/04/30/en-eltoo-next-lightning/. I've pointed you to the Neutrino discussion in the mailing list where the developers point out the
primary motivation for such a feature is Lightning. I can point you to the OP_CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY stuff where again the main motivations are again Lightning and other offchain stuff.
Everyone in the community is aware how Segwit was seen as a must to get merged so that Lightning could work, why do you think people were so aggressive with UASF?
It's kind of exhausting to deal with what feels like pithy narratives being used as a substitute for actual reality. We can avoid anyone feeling that way by being painstakingly concrete instead of vague.
One post in a topic that was a
random thought hardly can be called a narrative nor something "exhausting" to deal with. It's not like this is something being repeated endlessly by an army of shills.
Welp, you've continued it after being seemingly debunked-- that is step two in shill narrative land.
[Edit: And step three, your spurrious "conflict of interest" deflection]
For shame! He continues after he's been "debunked" by the great Gregory Maxwell, must be a shill.
BIP 118, which is over two years old (Feb 2017), has no activity in Bitcoin Core right now that I'm aware of, and was written by a lightning implementer. Lightning implementer interested in things that are useful for lightning isn't a newsflash.
Neutrino has plenty of activity on Bitcoin Core,
Did you make a quoting mistake or are you just intentionally changing the subject?
When I say "Neutrino" I'm talking about the set of features and merges required in Bitcoin Core to implement the feature. You said this work has no activity in Bitcoin Core, I linked you to two examples where the first PR has been merged and the second is undergoing active development:
BIP 157 work:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/14121BIP 158 work
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/12254 (merged)
Obviously this isn't actually used yet, but as you see with the continued work on BIP 157, the goal is clearly to get Neutrino running on Bitcoin Core so that the main beneficiary (Lightning nodes) can take advantage of this. Existing lite clients have no desire to use Neutrino, the demand for this functionality is only coming from the Lightning developers and its passionate users (
https://twitter.com/pierre_rochard/status/1104785795523719169?s=21)
It's quite clear the motivations for Neutrino are very Lightning specific,
In what way? Simply saying something doesn't make it true. I am aware of no way that these filters are related to lightning other than lightning folks having written the BIP for them.
So the Lightning guys wrote the BIP, the main usage of this functionality is to benefit Lightning nodes, the main demand comes from Lightning users (with many prominent Bitcoiners against such a change), and still you don't associate Neutrino with Lightning? LOL.
And it's quite obvious to anyone that Neutrino is built for and designed to be used with Lightning:
Notice it says "enabling a lite client". Their effort is just a lite client (one which happens to support lightning) and they would prefer to not use BIP37 as BIP37 is deprecated for being a DOS vector (and fairly privacy busted). Here is the original proposal for this approach to replacing BIP37:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2016-May/012636.html You may note it makes no mention of lightning, because the whole thing is lightning unrelated.
That specific proposal and approach might be Lightning unrelated, but the one I linked you too is definitely related to Lightning. Also notice it says "for lnd" right after your quote and "paving the way for the usage of Lightning on mobile phones and other devices". You literally stopped quoting right before the juicy stuff!
I don't think these support your case, if anything they contradict it-- or at least the fact that these were your only examples does since they don't show a high level of attention or interest.
I provided plenty of examples.
You provided exactly two examples. A two year old bip draft by a lightning implementer which has never been implemented in core and has no activity, which you quoted here and appeared to respond to but said nothing about, and a replacement for BIP37 which still has no network facing proposal for Bitcoin Core and which itself doesn't have any relation to lightning other than the fact that it was written by lightning folks.
I've already debunked this nonsense. Clearly it has relation to Lightning if it's designed by them for use with Lightning.
We can go even further back and look at things like OP_CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY which were something needed for sidechains and Lightning.
Indeed, CSV is useful for payment channels-- and a lot of other things-- but it's a 3.5 year old proposal. I fail to see how it supports the claim you've made about anything going on right now.
Glad you acknowledge this at least, well done, you're well on your way to admitting your error. I wonder if we can get an acknowledgement that I
might have a point out of you?
Segwit was heavily connected to Lightning
Primarily by dishonest shills and the people they've bamboozled.
And the multitude of Core developers who acknowledged that a malleability fix was needed for Lightning and users who were trained to associate Segwit with allowing for Lightning (which it does), so connecting the two isn't that dishonest. If one allows for the other you can't say people have been bamboozled if they associate the two?
with prominent developers like Luke-jr even suggesting to people not to use Segwit unless they were using Lightning, so as to avoid increasing the size of the blockchain unnecessarily
Shame on you, making this misleading comment. Luke was campaigning to reduce the blocksize limit to 300kb, and campaigning people to not use segwit was simply to try to undo the block size increase: the "unless lightning" is just there because lightning software uses it and he didn't want to tell people to not use lightning (as that would be counter-productive to his goal of reducing block sizes).
So he said exactly what I claimed him to have said?
Neutrino and all the BIPs associated with that are very obviously only designed with Lightning in mind.
You say very obviously but you provide absolutely no evidence for that. The earliest drafts of the spec had some additional filter types which, while also not lightning specific, were at least not as generally interesting, and sipa and I convinced the proposers that they weren't needed... Please tell me in what way is being able to efficiently check if a block contains a payment to a particular address (just as BIP37 does, but not so efficiently) is in any way connected to lightning?
I don't doubt that Lightning's developers will lobby for even more changes to Bitcoin's base protocol should they want for more.
No doubt, just as anyone else doing something interesting with smart contracts has done in the past and would do...
And they'll get everything they want too.
Lightning being blockchain agnostic is by design.
Can you explain how it could be anything but?
There's no need for them to support Litecoin, but they do
Lightning worked on litecoin prior to Bitcoin because their software was written expecting to use segwit but then bitmain delayed segwit activating on Bitcoin while litecoin copied the code and activated it first.
There was Bitcoin testnet. There's no need for their beta software to cater to different networks right off the bat. The fact that they do is testament to them seeing BTC as merely one component of a wider Lightning network built up of many cryptocurrencies.
they can and will pivot to something else, and all their marketing material is already preparing users subtly for this.
Or are you just explaining to us your intentions with bitcoin.org and your subtle advocacy of bcash?
My advocacy of Bitcoin Cash was limited to its use as a payment tool. I never saw it as the real Bitcoin. Your suggestion that my intentions with bitcoin.org is to make it into some Bitcoin Cash website are illogical.
Considering your previous employer Blockstream is heavily involved with Lightning (I'm not aware of how much stock you own in Blockstream), your opinions on this topic are likely to be biased and skewed by your financial interests. That's OK because we all have some level of bias, but I recommend you divest yourself from technical debates where you aren't able to exercise complete neutrality.
I have zero financial interest in Blockstream: any residual gains that came from it in the future are committed to charity, which is the maximum amount I could divest myself without extensive interaction with the company (which I don't care to have).
I think it is very interesting that you've made a number of demonstrably false claims here to attack Bitcoin's technical development, and when push comes to shove and your claims are debunked you just back into a position of making an absurd conspiracy theory "conflict of interest" allegations to try to shut down a straight forward factual debunking of your claims. Your allegation wouldn't have made sense even if that assumed financial interest existed, because I'm not advocating for those things (in fact, I've argued against adding more unverifyable p2p features, and argued against at least freeform no-input). -- in fact, your post's example of protocol work unrelated to lightning
Schnorr, Taproot, MAST are all things I've promoted, came up with, or worked on extensively; in contrast to the things you claim I'm somehow supposed to have some kind of financial bias in favour of.
How about you measure up to your own standards? I've always let people know what I was working on and where my potential interests lie, while you've done exactly the opposite.
It's not conspiracy theory to assume that a founder and C-level executive of a company working on the technology being discussed in technical debate has some financial stake in said company which skews his opinion. If the former CEO of Pepsi opined on the merits of soft drinks, one might pause and question his motives and allegiances much the same way I questioned yours. I'm very glad you cleared up that you don't in fact currently benefit financially from Blockstream.
My interests lie in Bitcoin and I presently have almost all of my wealth invested in BTC. Any activities I do that are beyond the scope of Bitcoin are not your concern, but I definitely am not associated with characters like Roger Ver and Jihan Wu as you and your former colleagues have implied in the past.
-snip-
Merited by suchmoon (9), bones261 (2), vapourminer (1), ETFbitcoin (1)
Such a waste of merit. Nothing Cobra said reflects reality; I presume the users lack Bitcoin tech-related knowledge. I'm more inclined to believe that you are a state-sponsored actor, especially given that you keep repeating provably false claims.
Your replies here aren't contributing anything of substance to the discussion. Go and busy yourself with fucking with people's trust ratings and causing drama on here as you are inclined to do, and let me and Greg go around in circles in a pointless internet dick swinging competition until one of us gives up or admits we're wrong.