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This statement confuses me since Blockstream has positioned itself to be the central authority. They seem to be attempting to remove power from users, businesse

This statement confuses me since Blockstream has positioned itself to be the central authority. They seem to be attempting to remove power from users, businesses, and miners in order to centralize and consolidate power so they are the only people who make decisions regarding Bitcoin. Effectively, a company that's only been around for a few years has been attempting to put itself into a monopoly controlling position of a 100-billion dollar commodity.

hudon 9y ago
https://i.redd.it/q0334spe5fny.png https://i.redd.it/q0334spe5fny.png 2 out of the top 10 committers work for Blockstream (matt works at Chaincode Labs now). Care to revisit your conspiracy? Or is something wrong with the data?
- tomglynch 9y ago
  There's 3.
  - hudon 9y ago
    re-read my comment please
- ericb 9y ago
  They've managed to kick or drive out anyone who has disagreed, so yeah, the sheep that are left are not problematic and produce only the appropriate agreeable noises. Garzik, Hearn, Andresen. Gone.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - nullc 9y ago
    This is simply untrue, and not a claim that even any of those people have had the audacity to make. The extent of Hearn's involvement in the project was a couple commits in 2013 and 2014. Gavin-- once a fairly active and appreciated contributor-- sunsetted himself years before, primarily to focus on creating the "Bitcoin Foundation" though he later alienated himself completely after the foundation discredited itself and largely imploded with rather abusive public attacks ("should be fired") and by vigorously backing a pretty obvious scammer. But in spite the bad blood there, you don't see support for your conspiracy theories -- because there really just isn't any substance to them. If you look at active project competition most of the same people who are most active today have been most active pretty much all along: /----------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Non-merge commits in Bitcoin project git | 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 All | Active months |----------------------------------------------------------------------------- |Wladimir 1 349 159 115 384 193 197 93 1491 | 73 |Pieter 0 51 227 111 170 89 156 112 916 | 75 |Matt 0 101 71 38 25 54 100 143 532 | 66 |Gavin 17 152 139 112 47 17 1 2 487 | 61 |Garzik 0 38 106 35 48 7 0 0 234 | 36 |Hearn 0 0 1 7 2 1 0 0 11 | 8 ...
    - needs 9y ago
      Just for the reader awareness: this guy right here in Gregory Maxwell, a key person working for Blockstream. Nullc actively support 1Mb block to artificially cripple the blockchain and thus create artificial demand for their centralized and bank-like product: side chains and LN hubs. That's said, Gavin was driven out of Bitcoin development at the time by you and your team blocking any block size increase with dumb arguments. The interested reader will search bitcointalk for such recurring discussion. He then created Bitcoin XT wich included a voting system for miners to vote for bigger blocks. XT nodes were the target of massive Ddos attacks, and some miners were as well. XT failed because of that, despite a growing support for big blocks. From that day Gavin and Mike gave up knowing that small blockers had taken control of Bitcoin, thanks to the $70'000'000 AXA and other investors put into Blockstream. The whole Bitcoin foundation was a side project of him, and did not discredit itself. But since /r/bitcoin and bitcointalk was already controlled by people supporting small blocks, and very complaisant with Blockstream, you and Luke Jr and others used those channels to spread misinformation about this foundation run by people supporting big blocks. Today, such discussions channels are so censored that only remains (probably paid) trolls, small blockers and newcomers completely lost in this shitshow. Banned people created /r/btc and this sub is growing quite fast and sometime has more active users than /r/bitcoin does. Fun fact about you: you used the same kind of practice when you were contributing to Wikipedia. Indeed, you were aggressively blanking user page because of supposed copyright violation no one but you cared about. After dozens of complaints you received a ban but in the meantime you automated the process using a sock puppet account. Hopefully at the end they got you out, the "toxic" and "insane" "gmaxwell". Last but not least, comparing commit number does not highlight the role of each individual. Gavin was a project leader and could see the big picture. It's like saying Linus Torvalds is useless because he barely does non-merge commit. Gavin saw the small block shitshow coming from miles away, he saw the fee rising from miles away. Bitcoin is in a very poor state, blocks are full, the fee market makes no sense ans is quite unstable, sides chains were proven impractical to reach VISA level of transactions, and LN is no more than a take over of banks on Bitcoin. We are talking of fees bigger than a dollar for a classic transaction, already micro transactions are not possible anymore with Bitcoin. No wonders why Ethereum is taking the lead. Anyway I will stop here, it's a pain to write comments on mobile phones. If this interests you, have a look to the sticky post in /r/btc, it contains sourced and well written links about the current Bitcoin situation and how we got there.
  - e3b0c 9y ago
    They sought to promote themselves to the managerial/business roles that no longer required to write much code. That makes them less involved with the development, not the other way around. I don't think the reason for them to start a business is because someone else urges them to stop writing code for bitcoin.
- zik 9y ago
  blockstream has incredible influence on Core no matter which way you split your hairs. Greg Maxwell, Luke Dashjr, Adam Back and Andrew Poelstra act as spokespeople for Core in various forums on a daily basis.
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    If by influence you mean proven ability, sure.
  - once_inc 9y ago
    I'm so glad that this discussion is held in literally every forum I frequent that mentions bitcoin. I never tire of it. /s
    - tree_of_item 9y ago
      There's a lot of money at stake, what do you expect?

hudon 9y ago

https://i.redd.it/q0334spe5fny.png https://i.redd.it/q0334spe5fny.png 2 out of the top 10 committers work for Blockstream (matt works at Chaincode Labs now). Care to revisit your conspiracy? Or is something wrong with the data?

tomglynch 9y ago
There's 3.
- hudon 9y ago
  re-read my comment please
ericb 9y ago
They've managed to kick or drive out anyone who has disagreed, so yeah, the sheep that are left are not problematic and produce only the appropriate agreeable noises. Garzik, Hearn, Andresen. Gone.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- nullc 9y ago
  This is simply untrue, and not a claim that even any of those people have had the audacity to make. The extent of Hearn's involvement in the project was a couple commits in 2013 and 2014. Gavin-- once a fairly active and appreciated contributor-- sunsetted himself years before, primarily to focus on creating the "Bitcoin Foundation" though he later alienated himself completely after the foundation discredited itself and largely imploded with rather abusive public attacks ("should be fired") and by vigorously backing a pretty obvious scammer. But in spite the bad blood there, you don't see support for your conspiracy theories -- because there really just isn't any substance to them. If you look at active project competition most of the same people who are most active today have been most active pretty much all along: /----------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Non-merge commits in Bitcoin project git | 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 All | Active months |----------------------------------------------------------------------------- |Wladimir 1 349 159 115 384 193 197 93 1491 | 73 |Pieter 0 51 227 111 170 89 156 112 916 | 75 |Matt 0 101 71 38 25 54 100 143 532 | 66 |Gavin 17 152 139 112 47 17 1 2 487 | 61 |Garzik 0 38 106 35 48 7 0 0 234 | 36 |Hearn 0 0 1 7 2 1 0 0 11 | 8 ...
  - needs 9y ago
    Just for the reader awareness: this guy right here in Gregory Maxwell, a key person working for Blockstream. Nullc actively support 1Mb block to artificially cripple the blockchain and thus create artificial demand for their centralized and bank-like product: side chains and LN hubs. That's said, Gavin was driven out of Bitcoin development at the time by you and your team blocking any block size increase with dumb arguments. The interested reader will search bitcointalk for such recurring discussion. He then created Bitcoin XT wich included a voting system for miners to vote for bigger blocks. XT nodes were the target of massive Ddos attacks, and some miners were as well. XT failed because of that, despite a growing support for big blocks. From that day Gavin and Mike gave up knowing that small blockers had taken control of Bitcoin, thanks to the $70'000'000 AXA and other investors put into Blockstream. The whole Bitcoin foundation was a side project of him, and did not discredit itself. But since /r/bitcoin and bitcointalk was already controlled by people supporting small blocks, and very complaisant with Blockstream, you and Luke Jr and others used those channels to spread misinformation about this foundation run by people supporting big blocks. Today, such discussions channels are so censored that only remains (probably paid) trolls, small blockers and newcomers completely lost in this shitshow. Banned people created /r/btc and this sub is growing quite fast and sometime has more active users than /r/bitcoin does. Fun fact about you: you used the same kind of practice when you were contributing to Wikipedia. Indeed, you were aggressively blanking user page because of supposed copyright violation no one but you cared about. After dozens of complaints you received a ban but in the meantime you automated the process using a sock puppet account. Hopefully at the end they got you out, the "toxic" and "insane" "gmaxwell". Last but not least, comparing commit number does not highlight the role of each individual. Gavin was a project leader and could see the big picture. It's like saying Linus Torvalds is useless because he barely does non-merge commit. Gavin saw the small block shitshow coming from miles away, he saw the fee rising from miles away. Bitcoin is in a very poor state, blocks are full, the fee market makes no sense ans is quite unstable, sides chains were proven impractical to reach VISA level of transactions, and LN is no more than a take over of banks on Bitcoin. We are talking of fees bigger than a dollar for a classic transaction, already micro transactions are not possible anymore with Bitcoin. No wonders why Ethereum is taking the lead. Anyway I will stop here, it's a pain to write comments on mobile phones. If this interests you, have a look to the sticky post in /r/btc, it contains sourced and well written links about the current Bitcoin situation and how we got there.
- e3b0c 9y ago
  They sought to promote themselves to the managerial/business roles that no longer required to write much code. That makes them less involved with the development, not the other way around. I don't think the reason for them to start a business is because someone else urges them to stop writing code for bitcoin.
zik 9y ago
blockstream has incredible influence on Core no matter which way you split your hairs. Greg Maxwell, Luke Dashjr, Adam Back and Andrew Poelstra act as spokespeople for Core in various forums on a daily basis.
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  If by influence you mean proven ability, sure.
- once_inc 9y ago
  I'm so glad that this discussion is held in literally every forum I frequent that mentions bitcoin. I never tire of it. /s
  - tree_of_item 9y ago
    There's a lot of money at stake, what do you expect?