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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

by 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.
- CyberDildonics 10y ago
  So Gavin, Mike Hearn and Jeff Garzik founded blockstream?
jlrubin 10y ago
I'm a Bitcoin Core Dev. I'm not employed by Blockstream. I work extensively on scalability, having personality designed and written patches to Bitcoin which have drastically improved block validation times in the Bitcoin Core client. For the benefit of anyone taking your comment at face value, I'm here to say: Your response is total garbage. edit: More details, my response was written slightly in haste... 1. I'm a (non-blockstream) core dev, I've worked on patches for the last release which sped up validation up to 40% with more efficient caching algorithms. To imply that Core isn't scaling flies in the face of those improvements (and the many others, developed by blockstream and others!) 2. I also co-founded the MIT DCI, which employs several bitcoin core developers (non-blockstream). Historically, DCI also employed ex-lead maintainer Gavin Andresen (he resigned to focus on other things). DCI employs the current lead maintainer. 3. I also co-founded the Scaling Bitcoin conference (I was the first program chair). You can see the archives of research presented at the workshop https://scalingbitcoin.org https://scalingbitcoin.org 4. Blockstream isn't imposing any constraints: Bitcoin has fundamental scaling concerns, and they can't be addressed quickly (e.g., increasing blocksize) without significant drawbacks for the future of the platform. 5. here's some point by point refutation > They want to change the protocol away from a decentralized blockchain... Mining is actually highly centralized right now. There are a handful of people with a lot of control. If you simply "follow the hash power", these miners could implement whatever they want, e.g., "I get a million coins per day extra". Validating against Bitcoin's predefined rules keeps it decentralized. > Now they're following an agenda to deliberately prevent the blockchain from scaling in the way it was originally designed to. Many of the algorithms in Bitcoin would/will fail spectacularly with really large blocks, so that wouldn't work. The way Bitcoin is "designed" to scale, I would argue, is through crypto (e.g., snarks/Mimble Wimble), which allow you to compress O(n) transactions to O(1). > Why? To make the blockchain look ineffective Actually, many of the features added with SegWit make bitcoin more functional than ever; txn malleability was a major woe for users of the software. > 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. Bitcoin was always going to need fees -- otherwise why would they be in the protocol from the start? You need to pay for the bandwidth and permanent storage costs one way or another. If Blockstream has a commercialization strategy for off-chain, so be it, but fundamentally they can't be a gatekeeper to that. > This would have worked out pretty well for them except that there has inevitably been opposition to these political games. You can spin the game theory whatever way you like... what if the miners want to have larger blocks that they exclusively fill with their own garbage transaction, centralizing the network, while still charging high fees for real users in light of this artificial demand? > 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. I've looked at their designs. Sometimes you have to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough. Emergent consensus has a number of fatal flaws, a lot of other people have gone into good detail on how. > Blockstream has failed. Not yet :p > 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. Do you have a source on this? When you say majority of miners, do you mean by hashrate or by "noses"? Theres a high degree of centralization; so it's hard to truly judge. > The miners appear to be moving to Unlimited and it will most likely take over as the standard "Bitcoin" implementation at some point. Miners may be signalling for support but not actually running the code. Signalling (and getting other smaller miners to try to switch) and not actually switching is a great strategy to get a mining edge. > 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. A chain split is indeed a big deal. When the ethereum chain split, a lot of exchanges lost a serious amount of money with both tokens having replay attacks. This means that it's difficult -- nigh impossible -- for users to have a sane outcome using many of the ecosystem platforms following a hardfork.
reimertz 10y ago
Could you point me to some sources where I can read up on these claims? If all would be true, assumptions I've had about certain people would've change drastically.
- CyberDildonics 10y ago
  You can read Gavin's writing directly. After all his contributions, the lies and manipulations by the current blockstream employees are pretty disgusting. If you read /r/btc on reddit you can see a forum that in uncensored, unlike the HEAVILY censored and 'curated' (threads that don't go the way the mods want are sorted by controversial first) /r/bitcoin. Anyone on /r/bitcoin that says something alluding to censorship is banned and has their posts deleted. Anyone who mentions bitcoin unlimited is banned. The moderation logs are not open.
  - Frogolocalypse 10y ago
    /r/btc is a forum paid for by people who want to fork bitcoin, and their moderators are paid employees of Roger Ver. You can't believe a word they say.
    - CyberDildonics 10y ago
      This is of course silly, since /r/btc does not censor anyone and has open moderation logs, while /r/bitcoin is censored to a degree that would make north korea blush.
      - Frogolocalypse 10y ago
        Yes they do. They ban anyone who mentions that roger ver pays the moderators.
        CyberDildonics 10y ago
        Let's see some proof. You can go there right now and see people saying all sorts of nonsense and insulting roger ver (as if that has anything to do with the technical merits of bitcoin unlimited). Have you ever received anything from blockstream?
Geee 10y ago
The "majority of miners" are Chinese, which are thought to be controlled by the Chinese government at this point. Also, I think a 75% majority fork could leave the smaller fork vulnerable to 51% attack by a single pool.
- Frogolocalypse 10y ago
  Which is why the PoW change is being investigated now. If china-coin attacks the bitcoin network, they'll initiate an ermegency PoW change, and make all of their hardware obsolete.
brg444 10y ago
x-post of one of my reddit post. (disclaimer: I am employed by Blockstream) It's helpful to evaluate the contribution of Blockstream developers to Bitcoin Core versus other non-Blockstream developers in the last year. Let's see Greg Maxwell: 46 Jorge Timon: 17 Pieter Wuille: 163 (the only developer at Blockstream dedicated full time to Core development) Mark Friedenbach: 0 Patrick Strateman: 31 Warren Togami: 6 Adam Back: 0 Greg Sanders: 32 Glenn Willen: 0 Total commits for listed Blockstream developers: 295 Wladimir Van Der Laan: 210 Marco Falke: 170 Corey Fields: 152 Jonas Schnelli: 87 Suhas Daftuar: 73 Alex Morcos: 65 fanquake: 56 Pavel Janik: 45 Total commits for listed non-Blockstream developers: 858 So about 35%. 15% if we remove Pieter, but I can confidently say everyone at Blockstream is hugely proud of his contributions and in no way shape or form are we interested in diminishing his accomplishment. From my perspective he has been the single most important contributor to Bitcoin development for many years now. In short, this narrative is a huge disrespect to every other contributors building the software we all depend on. The obsession of certain people to lend power to specific individuals is simply an attempt to shut down their ideas by attacking their character. -- I would add that most of the Core contributors working at Blockstream had been contributing before the company was founded and certainly did not "infiltrate the Bitcoin development team". The previous lead developer had barely contributed anything before he quit out of his own volition after a series of failed attempt to politicize Bitcoin and force through a contentious hard fork. The last straw was of course when he was naively led to believe that notorious scam artist Craig Wright was Satoshi. With regards to the "off-blockchain" solutions you refer to. Here's a couple of facts: Fact 1: The Lightning Network was created by Bitcoin developers not involved with the Core project Fact 2: No Core developer is involved in a business whose revenue model revolves around the success of the Lightning Network Fact 3: There is very little profit to be made from operating the Lightning Network infrastructure/protocol. Fact 4: The Lightning Network will happen regardless of the outcome of the current contention. Fact 5: Bitcoin developers have no control over the consensus code being enforced by independent peers participating in the network. Bitcoin is a voluntary system.
- CodeWriter23 10y ago
  Quantifying commits does not correlate to who is controlling the architecture of a codebase. Someone can control the architecture with a single commit, provided that commit is large enough.

by zik 10y ago

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.
CyberDildonics 10y ago
So Gavin, Mike Hearn and Jeff Garzik founded blockstream?

jlrubin 10y ago

I'm a Bitcoin Core Dev. I'm not employed by Blockstream. I work extensively on scalability, having personality designed and written patches to Bitcoin which have drastically improved block validation times in the Bitcoin Core client. For the benefit of anyone taking your comment at face value, I'm here to say: Your response is total garbage. edit: More details, my response was written slightly in haste... 1. I'm a (non-blockstream) core dev, I've worked on patches for the last release which sped up validation up to 40% with more efficient caching algorithms. To imply that Core isn't scaling flies in the face of those improvements (and the many others, developed by blockstream and others!) 2. I also co-founded the MIT DCI, which employs several bitcoin core developers (non-blockstream). Historically, DCI also employed ex-lead maintainer Gavin Andresen (he resigned to focus on other things). DCI employs the current lead maintainer. 3. I also co-founded the Scaling Bitcoin conference (I was the first program chair). You can see the archives of research presented at the workshop https://scalingbitcoin.org https://scalingbitcoin.org 4. Blockstream isn't imposing any constraints: Bitcoin has fundamental scaling concerns, and they can't be addressed quickly (e.g., increasing blocksize) without significant drawbacks for the future of the platform. 5. here's some point by point refutation > They want to change the protocol away from a decentralized blockchain... Mining is actually highly centralized right now. There are a handful of people with a lot of control. If you simply "follow the hash power", these miners could implement whatever they want, e.g., "I get a million coins per day extra". Validating against Bitcoin's predefined rules keeps it decentralized. > Now they're following an agenda to deliberately prevent the blockchain from scaling in the way it was originally designed to. Many of the algorithms in Bitcoin would/will fail spectacularly with really large blocks, so that wouldn't work. The way Bitcoin is "designed" to scale, I would argue, is through crypto (e.g., snarks/Mimble Wimble), which allow you to compress O(n) transactions to O(1). > Why? To make the blockchain look ineffective Actually, many of the features added with SegWit make bitcoin more functional than ever; txn malleability was a major woe for users of the software. > 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. Bitcoin was always going to need fees -- otherwise why would they be in the protocol from the start? You need to pay for the bandwidth and permanent storage costs one way or another. If Blockstream has a commercialization strategy for off-chain, so be it, but fundamentally they can't be a gatekeeper to that. > This would have worked out pretty well for them except that there has inevitably been opposition to these political games. You can spin the game theory whatever way you like... what if the miners want to have larger blocks that they exclusively fill with their own garbage transaction, centralizing the network, while still charging high fees for real users in light of this artificial demand? > 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. I've looked at their designs. Sometimes you have to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough. Emergent consensus has a number of fatal flaws, a lot of other people have gone into good detail on how. > Blockstream has failed. Not yet :p > 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. Do you have a source on this? When you say majority of miners, do you mean by hashrate or by "noses"? Theres a high degree of centralization; so it's hard to truly judge. > The miners appear to be moving to Unlimited and it will most likely take over as the standard "Bitcoin" implementation at some point. Miners may be signalling for support but not actually running the code. Signalling (and getting other smaller miners to try to switch) and not actually switching is a great strategy to get a mining edge. > 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. A chain split is indeed a big deal. When the ethereum chain split, a lot of exchanges lost a serious amount of money with both tokens having replay attacks. This means that it's difficult -- nigh impossible -- for users to have a sane outcome using many of the ecosystem platforms following a hardfork.

reimertz 10y ago

Could you point me to some sources where I can read up on these claims? If all would be true, assumptions I've had about certain people would've change drastically.

CyberDildonics 10y ago
You can read Gavin's writing directly. After all his contributions, the lies and manipulations by the current blockstream employees are pretty disgusting. If you read /r/btc on reddit you can see a forum that in uncensored, unlike the HEAVILY censored and 'curated' (threads that don't go the way the mods want are sorted by controversial first) /r/bitcoin. Anyone on /r/bitcoin that says something alluding to censorship is banned and has their posts deleted. Anyone who mentions bitcoin unlimited is banned. The moderation logs are not open.
- Frogolocalypse 10y ago
  /r/btc is a forum paid for by people who want to fork bitcoin, and their moderators are paid employees of Roger Ver. You can't believe a word they say.
  - CyberDildonics 10y ago
    This is of course silly, since /r/btc does not censor anyone and has open moderation logs, while /r/bitcoin is censored to a degree that would make north korea blush.
    - Frogolocalypse 10y ago
      Yes they do. They ban anyone who mentions that roger ver pays the moderators.
      - CyberDildonics 10y ago
        Let's see some proof. You can go there right now and see people saying all sorts of nonsense and insulting roger ver (as if that has anything to do with the technical merits of bitcoin unlimited). Have you ever received anything from blockstream?

Geee 10y ago

The "majority of miners" are Chinese, which are thought to be controlled by the Chinese government at this point. Also, I think a 75% majority fork could leave the smaller fork vulnerable to 51% attack by a single pool.

Frogolocalypse 10y ago
Which is why the PoW change is being investigated now. If china-coin attacks the bitcoin network, they'll initiate an ermegency PoW change, and make all of their hardware obsolete.

brg444 10y ago

x-post of one of my reddit post. (disclaimer: I am employed by Blockstream) It's helpful to evaluate the contribution of Blockstream developers to Bitcoin Core versus other non-Blockstream developers in the last year. Let's see Greg Maxwell: 46 Jorge Timon: 17 Pieter Wuille: 163 (the only developer at Blockstream dedicated full time to Core development) Mark Friedenbach: 0 Patrick Strateman: 31 Warren Togami: 6 Adam Back: 0 Greg Sanders: 32 Glenn Willen: 0 Total commits for listed Blockstream developers: 295 Wladimir Van Der Laan: 210 Marco Falke: 170 Corey Fields: 152 Jonas Schnelli: 87 Suhas Daftuar: 73 Alex Morcos: 65 fanquake: 56 Pavel Janik: 45 Total commits for listed non-Blockstream developers: 858 So about 35%. 15% if we remove Pieter, but I can confidently say everyone at Blockstream is hugely proud of his contributions and in no way shape or form are we interested in diminishing his accomplishment. From my perspective he has been the single most important contributor to Bitcoin development for many years now. In short, this narrative is a huge disrespect to every other contributors building the software we all depend on. The obsession of certain people to lend power to specific individuals is simply an attempt to shut down their ideas by attacking their character. -- I would add that most of the Core contributors working at Blockstream had been contributing before the company was founded and certainly did not "infiltrate the Bitcoin development team". The previous lead developer had barely contributed anything before he quit out of his own volition after a series of failed attempt to politicize Bitcoin and force through a contentious hard fork. The last straw was of course when he was naively led to believe that notorious scam artist Craig Wright was Satoshi. With regards to the "off-blockchain" solutions you refer to. Here's a couple of facts: Fact 1: The Lightning Network was created by Bitcoin developers not involved with the Core project Fact 2: No Core developer is involved in a business whose revenue model revolves around the success of the Lightning Network Fact 3: There is very little profit to be made from operating the Lightning Network infrastructure/protocol. Fact 4: The Lightning Network will happen regardless of the outcome of the current contention. Fact 5: Bitcoin developers have no control over the consensus code being enforced by independent peers participating in the network. Bitcoin is a voluntary system.

CodeWriter23 10y ago
Quantifying commits does not correlate to who is controlling the architecture of a codebase. Someone can control the architecture with a single commit, provided that commit is large enough.