theymos controls too many resources, it's better to pick somebody else, even though he's obviously very trustworthy.


Smart people can waste decades on things that don't turn out to lead to anything. Academia is filled with scientists and mathematicians who spent a good portion of their life creating new systems and concepts that, with respect to them, can be described as a waste of time and a net negative for the world, because that person could have been pursuing better ideas with their time. I personally know a physicist who regrets spending years involved in string theory research. You would be surprised at how common it is for smart and highly technical people to fall into toiling away at flawed projects.

Lightning has a lot of flaws. How do you train users that to spend money, they need to put it in a channel first? OK. Maybe the wallet can automatically open channels. How do you explain that some of the users money is gone because transaction fees spiked on Bitcoin, and more satoshis had to be reserved for when the channel needs to be closed? OK. I guess you can put a disclaimer, or alert. How do you explain watchtowers? How about backups? The user probably expects to receive arbitrary amounts of value, but you're going to need to tell them to get some inbound capacity if they want to receive anything substantial. At some point, Lightning Labs will choose to abstract all this away, but that's going to pressure them to centralize (a centralized directory of liquidity providers, watchtowers, well connected nodes, etc).

Blockstream is a hostile actor in the space. They don't want Bitcoin to succeed. There are some good people working there, but those few good apples mostly collect their salary and focus their time on Bitcoin Core and cryptographic research, they tend to distance themselves from Blockstream's damaging products. Have you ever seen Pieter Wuille shilling Liquid? Nope. It's unclear to me how they ever plan on making money, but they will no doubt abuse their position of influence in the community for their own business interests at some point. They already attempted to market Liquid as "trustless", which lead to founder Matt Corallo publicly shaming them on Twitter.

The worst thing Blockstream has done: they made a block size increase on Bitcoin absolutely impossible. They whipped up a mob to such an extent that, for the foreseeable decade, we're not going to get any increase because a mass of uneducated morons will oppose it. I don't ever see a hard fork in general as a possibility, which sucks because some nice things could have been fixed with a hard fork, and the "no hard fork" mentality hurts Bitcoin as more and more technical debt will accumulate because of ever messier soft forks. I suspect this is what they want: an ugly system, that is slow and congested, so they can market their sidechains as better alternatives.

Before Blockstream, the general consensus was that hard forks could be done in the future, carefully and far ahead in advance. They ripped that consensus out of the community. Any Bitcoiner who doesn't view Blockstream with some level of suspicion has no intellect; you don't need to call them a fucking conspiracy, but you better raise a bloody eyebrow when there exists a company that benefits from Bitcoin not working.