Dear bitcoin community,

I'm an ordinary user of Bitcoin and shortly I came across some information regarding Bitcoin vs. Bitcoin Cash and I kindly ask for your support to help me to better understand these issues.

It was this open letter which got my attention: https://theflippening.github.io/open-letter-to-bitcoin-miners-from-another-miner/

Some of the complaints of the author contra Bitcoin Core:

a) Bitcoin Core via the BlockStream team is too much influenced by investors like AXA. As a traditional insurance company AXA's interest may not be the best for the Bitcoin future.
Link: https://blockstream.com/about/#investors

b) The upcomming Lightning Network is patented software. The patent is held by BlockStream.
Remark: I have read BlockStreams explanation why they patent their software (https://blockstream.com/about/patent_pledge/). Which leads me to a sub-question:

b2) Wouldn't it then make sense for most Bitcoin devs and open-source devs in general to patent their software? Which I assume would not be compatible with the spirit of open source, would it?

c) The Lightning Network could impair the decentralisation of Bitcoin. Citation: "To reach anyone in a big network with a series of branching channel connections, you either need a large number of channels [-> users have to divide up their funds and cant do anything except tiny purchases], or a large number of hops [-> everyones money will be tied up routing everybody elses money]."
One conceivable solution: "the system depends on large centralized hubs"

d) The feature "Replace By Fee" broke the much more useful (for daily life transactions) feature "Zero-Conf". Zero-Conf would very quickly allow to see that a transaction is triggered. Instead with RBF a receiver of a payment needs to wait until a transaction is really processed by miners in order to be sure that the transaction will be made. Since with RBF a dishonest payer could overwrite a transaction and send it to a different address.

Further assertion of another author:
e) SegWit could decrease the security of transactions. (https://bitcrust.org/blog-incentive-shift-segwit)
As far as I understand with SegWit miners could be motivated not to verify transactions securely.

On the other hand:
f) In one video Andreas Antonopoulis explains that just increasing the block size (like Bitcoin Cash) is a too simple, short-term solution. If some day Bitcoin may have tens of thousands of transactions per second the blocks would be in the high gigabyte range - every ten minutes! Which could barely be processed by common nodes and lead to a centralisation trend as with mining today.

Ok, that's my amateurish summery. If anyone could reply to one or more of those issues and provide more insight I would be very thankful. Thank you very much!

Marcel

marcelbit

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