Quote from: nullius on Today at 02:08:41 PM

Ultimately, what has actively stopped BCH from winning the public-relations mindshare war is that an unorganized, decentralized cadre of Bitcoiners who have pushed back unequivocally. This set very visibly includes Greg Maxwell, and also his former colleagues at Blockstream—Dr. Back, et al. It very visibly includes laanwj and harding, whom Lauda mentioned. It very visibly does not include you, the exclusive controller of bitcoin-dot-org.

Bitcoin Cash had no chance of ever getting called "Bitcoin" on major consumer services like Coinbase and wallets and payment rails. The attempts I fought against would have been presented as "Bitcoin" had they succeeded. At best, Bitcoin Cash might have confused and tricked a few people, but it wasn't as bad as the three wave of attacks that I was against. Adam Back supported something called the "Hong Kong agreement", a precursor to the "New York agreement" which Segwit2x was based off. Unfortunately, Adam for a brief moment also bought into the idea that Bitcoin could be changed by deals made between businesses.

There was no need for me to fight against Bitcoin Cash, because it clearly posed no risk to Bitcoin. It helped Bitcoin since big blockers left Bitcoin and focused their efforts on Bitcoin Cash. Some people just believe in scaling on-chain, others with solutions like Lighting, there was always going to be a split. The question was just whether it would happen by Bitcoin tearing itself apart, or by the big blockers just forking off into an altcoin.

Quote from: nullius on Today at 02:08:41 PM

To anyone with technical expertise, their self-evident agenda is, “Don’t trust us: Keep Bitcoin trustless.” I like that: Keep down the blocksize so that ordinary people can keep running nodes (I say this with real-world experience needing to run Bitcoin on inexpensive hardware), and promote Lightning as the future of scaling and privacy. For as long as that remains the agenda demonstrated by their actions and their code (not merely their words), I will continue to defend Blockstream’s reputation in public discussions.

For a company's who's motto is "don't trust, verify", all their products require quite a bit of trust. Let's go through and evaluate:

Blockstream Satellite: A service that broadcasts the Bitcoin blockchain to the entire world with the aim of reducing Bitcoin's dependency on internet access. It isn't hard to see where things fall apart here. First, you can't obviously do an initial sync from a satellite, it just broadcasts the latest blocks. Secondly, if you run the satellite receiver, you are putting all your faith in Blockstream's uplink to give you the right blocks. Should you find yourself in a situation with no internet, and only a satellite, you are blindly putting faith in Blockstream's version of the Bitcoin blockchain. It's even worse than running an SPV node, Blockstream is basically sybil attacking you. At any time they can just choose to stop sending you new blocks and you're shit out of luck.
Blockstream Green: Claims to be a simple and secure Bitcoin wallet. It isn't simple, nor secure. It uses 2-of-2 multi-sig, between you and Blockstreams' server. All transactions you do require Blockstream's signature. If their server goes down, you can't do any transactions, since they can't sign off on it. All your amounts are co-owned by Blockstream. It's even worse than running an SPV wallet. Because they sign all your transactions, they can also see all your transactions, and your IP addresses, destroying your privacy.
Blockstream's Liquid sidechain: A federated sidechain that lets you do faster transactions and apparently gives you privacy. Here, users are asked to hand over their BTC to a federation, so that it can become L-BTC, the federation can literally steal all your bitcoins and block any transactions you make. They tried to market it as "trustless", until one of their own co-founders called them out on it: https://twitter.com/TheBlueMatt/status/1060101587584991233.

They present themselves as in support of trustless solutions, but everything they put out there is inevitably worse than the very stuff they used to criticize so much. These were the guys rallying hard against SPV wallets, and now they push a wallet in which you can't even transact without their permission. These were the guys criticizing other projects because their networks were too centralized, now they run a network that will gladly gobble up your BTC, give you some L-BTC, to let you transact faster, all while giving them the power to steal every last satoshi from you, but "Bitcoin Cash is a scam!" right?

Let's assume for a moment that Adam Back owned bitcoin.org, would you character assassinate him for supporting the Hong Kong agreements? Or what about Luke-jr, would you smear him because he pushed UASF very hard which could have split the network? What about Peter Todd, for pushing that shady coin Viacoin? Maybe you would claim Jameson Lopp is a scammer because he once supported Bitcoin XT? Andreas is obviously a scammer too, he says good things about Ethereum and wrote a book about it, ETH is pre-mined garbage, fuck him too right? Can't trust him. theymos must be a scammer too, he said too many good things about Grin, screw him too right?

Some of you really need to chill out. The Blockstream propaganda of "Cobra is evil!" really has you totally duped.