Quote from: justusranvier on December 31, 2014, 05:50:09 PM

Quote from: adam3us on December 31, 2014, 10:00:52 AM

Sidechains are not a proprietary technology. Everything is FOSS, open IP. And we invested a fair bit of mental energy and legal review already into making sure it stays that way, even if blockstream management were someone replaced or blackmailed

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Its not our softfork - its a softfork to enable a generic extension mechanism. We have no monopoly (and wouldnt want one) on use of the op code. Our only defence is meritocracy - if we build better, more secure sidechains and people prefer to use them. We wont be getting the fees off the sidechain either because those go to miners. If we have the technical edge and people use our stuff that seems sort of fair enough to me.

What I see in this answer is statements that safeguards have been established, without any description of what they are or why we should assume they'll be effective.

The primary safe guard is what I said Everything is FOSS, open IP. Thats just like bitcoin right. If the company changes management later down the road after investment rounds or whatever, and it tries to do something bad (which would sabotage its investment as the ecosytem would reject it), we could all leave (which would cripple its ability to maintain code nor execute its plan). Or if it was us under blackmail or some legal threat, the same logic as applies to bitcoin applies: if the core does bad things, a new core can fork it and undo the bad things.

Clear enough?

We also did a bunch of stuff in terms of GMaxwell and Pieter Wuille's contract that was mentioned (can walk and continue to get paid if company does bad stuff) as was mentioned, and chose investors with similar and compatible ethos (understanding of FOSS, need for decentralisation, need for open IP, etc. they get it and get bitcoins value hinging on its decentralisation. ) Reid Hoffman is you might notice Chairman of the Mozilla foundation and you can find videos online where you can see he's enthused about bitcoin potential himself pre-blockstream.

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I also see a lot of appeal to past performance which amount to, "trust us."

Well kind of what we said is "dont trust us"

ie if we succeeded in the cant be evil you dont have to trust us, and we cant be coerced because we have no control or power. And if you think about it, its in our interests individually to not have a position of power or control as potentially even governments or organised criminals (there's a difference) might get interested in abusing control.

You know not to troll you, but Justus you also work for a for profit company - Monetas/Open Transactions - right? Nothing is known about the funding of that company. We dont know what your motives are. The OT network voting trusts escrow everyones bitcoins so are a form of trust. Should we trust you. You dont have to answer.. just illustrating the sorts of questions you're asking so you can think about them and see the perspective on the receiving end.

I am quite happy for people to ask tough questions. Indeed it would be kind of surprising and disappointing if they did not given how important it is for bitcoin to remain decentralised, neutral and free from proprietary control.

I am also quite happy to voice my opinion if I see bad stuff (take a look at the coinvalidation redlist thread for example). You might notice Greg doing the same.

I suppose the cipherdoc version of such questions is that he's biased to the value of his bitcoin hoard. Personally I think thats a pretty healthy bias. And as maybe Greg said or maybe implied (or not) everyone at blockstream has some bitcoins. Anyway Daniel Krawisz view is that the investors are driving bitcoin so the extent he's right and certain things about bitcoin must not change or it isnt bitcoin.

Adam