Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: So it looks like Cobra is planning on passing on the Bitcoin.org domain
by
Room101
on 24/05/2020, 14:34:47 UTC


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.

I tend to agree, more-so over time.  Huge blocks may not be the answer, corporate take overs and stupid backroom segwit2x agreements are definitely not the answer, but the fact that reasonable discussion around small blocksize increases and hardforks in general are now verboten is bad for bitcoin. It doesn't help that the Blockstream corporate strategy seems to be based around being insufferable internet trolls who both simultaneously love to mock everyone who disagrees with them, whilst crying victim when anyone mocks them in return.

It seems Bitcoin now has fucking "influencers" who use social media and combative shit posting to raise their profile in order to personally profit from bitcoin, gain influence and raise their fucking twitter followers. A plague on all their fucking houses.

Personally I think lightening is not terrible code, which is basically pretty high praise, but putting all eggs in one basket, especially an unbuilt, untested basket is fucking stupid, and while the most simple solution of a small block increase may very well not be the correct one, it should be open for discussion. Bitcoin at a high price will make >100 sat/byte unaffordable to anyone who isn't rich, which is not the kind of censorship resistant money I want or got involved for.