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This seems suicidal, what a terrible idea to change things in this way just when the idea was getting some traction. It will set a precedent that there is a lot

This seems suicidal, what a terrible idea to change things in this way just when the idea was getting some traction. It will set a precedent that there is a lot more uncertainty in cryptocurrencies and hold back adoption.

zik 10y ago
There's a lot of back story behind this. The story as I see it is this - a bank which opposes bitcoin in its current form funded a company called Blockstream to kick the lead developer off the Bitcoin development team and take control of it. They want to change the protocol away from a decentralized blockchain which they can't control to a payment channel system which provides a potential financial services marketplace for banks. Now they're following an agenda to deliberately prevent the blockchain from scaling in the way it was originally designed to. Why? To make the blockchain look ineffective - and now we have high fees and slow confirmations as a result. Bitcoin is badly affected by the congestion and so people are becoming desperate and clamouring for Blockstream's forthcoming off-blockchain scaling solution. This would have worked out pretty well for them except that there has inevitably been opposition to these political games. A couple of other development teams have sprung up with forks which are more closely aligned to Satoshi Nakomoto's original scaling vision. These groups have been vociferously attacked by Blockstream and Blockstream has generated terribly misleading FUD about them in order to try to retain their control of the ecosystem. Blockstream has failed. One of the alternate implementations "Bitcoin Unlimited" has all but won the war because the majority of miners are worried that the ecosystem is being damaged by Blockstream. Miners care about the value of their bitcoins and that's being eroded by the Blockstream-imposed congestion. The miners appear to be moving to Unlimited and it will most likely take over as the standard "Bitcoin" implementation at some point. The whole "chain split" thing is mostly more FUD. A hard fork isn't a big deal if handled sensibly. The minority chain will quickly die off naturally because it'll be uneconomic to mine on it. This is just as it was designed to work by Satoshi Nakomoto. No doubt people from the other side of this debate will see things differently but that's how it looks to me.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- nadaviv 10y ago
  > funded a company called Blockstream to infiltrate the Bitcoin development team kick the lead developers off it. Blockstreeam was founded by long-time bitcoin lead developers. The rest of your post is paranoid nonsense.
  - zik 10y ago
    Gavin Andresen was left as lead developer by Satoshi Nakomoto. He was forced out.
    - chx 10y ago
      Forced? I thought he have withdrawn voluntarily and then during the Craig Wright controversy Wladimir took one good look at https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits?author=gavinandresen https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits?author=gavinandre... and said, you know what, Gavin is barely committing any more, let's not just have that access lingering around.
    - nadaviv 10y ago
      Forced out by who? He stopped contributing on its own for a long, long time prior to losing his commit access (due to fears of his computer getting hacked, in addition to him not actually using that commit access). He's still welcome to contribute (hundreds of people contribute to Core, only 3 of them has commit access), but it doesn't look like he's interested in that.
    - nullc 10y ago
      > left as lead developer by Satoshi Nakomoto No he wasn't, he granted himself that title. Then largely left on his own in ~2013 to focus on the (now discredited and defunct) "Bitcoin Foundation" that he created. The people developing the Bitcoin project have been pretty stable since 2011. There is this lovely time coded git-blame chart that was put up last year: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1337008.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1337008.0 People like Mike Hearn were always outsiders to the project, and have spent a lot of time doing this like arguing for blacklisting, blocking tor, and other things that most contributors think of as strongly at odds with the principles of the project.

zik 10y ago

There's a lot of back story behind this. The story as I see it is this - a bank which opposes bitcoin in its current form funded a company called Blockstream to kick the lead developer off the Bitcoin development team and take control of it. They want to change the protocol away from a decentralized blockchain which they can't control to a payment channel system which provides a potential financial services marketplace for banks. Now they're following an agenda to deliberately prevent the blockchain from scaling in the way it was originally designed to. Why? To make the blockchain look ineffective - and now we have high fees and slow confirmations as a result. Bitcoin is badly affected by the congestion and so people are becoming desperate and clamouring for Blockstream's forthcoming off-blockchain scaling solution. This would have worked out pretty well for them except that there has inevitably been opposition to these political games. A couple of other development teams have sprung up with forks which are more closely aligned to Satoshi Nakomoto's original scaling vision. These groups have been vociferously attacked by Blockstream and Blockstream has generated terribly misleading FUD about them in order to try to retain their control of the ecosystem. Blockstream has failed. One of the alternate implementations "Bitcoin Unlimited" has all but won the war because the majority of miners are worried that the ecosystem is being damaged by Blockstream. Miners care about the value of their bitcoins and that's being eroded by the Blockstream-imposed congestion. The miners appear to be moving to Unlimited and it will most likely take over as the standard "Bitcoin" implementation at some point. The whole "chain split" thing is mostly more FUD. A hard fork isn't a big deal if handled sensibly. The minority chain will quickly die off naturally because it'll be uneconomic to mine on it. This is just as it was designed to work by Satoshi Nakomoto. No doubt people from the other side of this debate will see things differently but that's how it looks to me.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
nadaviv 10y ago
> funded a company called Blockstream to infiltrate the Bitcoin development team kick the lead developers off it. Blockstreeam was founded by long-time bitcoin lead developers. The rest of your post is paranoid nonsense.
- zik 10y ago
  Gavin Andresen was left as lead developer by Satoshi Nakomoto. He was forced out.
  - chx 10y ago
    Forced? I thought he have withdrawn voluntarily and then during the Craig Wright controversy Wladimir took one good look at https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits?author=gavinandresen https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits?author=gavinandre... and said, you know what, Gavin is barely committing any more, let's not just have that access lingering around.
  - nadaviv 10y ago
    Forced out by who? He stopped contributing on its own for a long, long time prior to losing his commit access (due to fears of his computer getting hacked, in addition to him not actually using that commit access). He's still welcome to contribute (hundreds of people contribute to Core, only 3 of them has commit access), but it doesn't look like he's interested in that.
  - nullc 10y ago
    > left as lead developer by Satoshi Nakomoto No he wasn't, he granted himself that title. Then largely left on his own in ~2013 to focus on the (now discredited and defunct) "Bitcoin Foundation" that he created. The people developing the Bitcoin project have been pretty stable since 2011. There is this lovely time coded git-blame chart that was put up last year: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1337008.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1337008.0 People like Mike Hearn were always outsiders to the project, and have spent a lot of time doing this like arguing for blacklisting, blocking tor, and other things that most contributors think of as strongly at odds with the principles of the project.