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> “BTC has been a joke ever since the GitHub repo was hijacked by Blockstream and Adam Back” Could you spell out the implications of this?

est31 6y ago
I don't think there are any major implications. The point of blockchain currencies is to be decentralized so hacking a random github repo shouldn't have major implications. It's not even the only bitcoin node implementation out there at this point.
- etrabroline 6y ago
  Before wall street involvement there was a single fork of Bitcoin that was a viable currency with low transaction fees. After Wall Street involvement there are at least 3 forks, the biggest of which had fees spiking at 60 USD per transaction making it nonviable for anything but speculators, and the others having very low adoption. The protocol was decentralized but enough of the community that controlled it was bought out to bring it down. EDIT: calling something a lie does not make it so. also, what on earth is hateful here
  - nullc 6y ago
    This is a hateful lie.
    - CyberDildonics 6y ago
      Not it isn't, it's just information you don't want people to see.
  - grubles 6y ago
    Unused blockchains have no / low transaction fees. >When people started using Bitcoin, fees went up! That's how it is supposed to work.
    - zhoujianfu 6y ago
      “The threshold should probably be lower than it currently is. I don't think the threshold should ever be 0. We should always allow at least some free transactions.” -Satoshi Nakamoto The p2p electronic cash system I signed up for in June 2010 is not working “how it is supposed to work”. $7.77 average transaction fee? Why not try raising the block size to even 2MB? That would do nothing to hurt decentralization. And do you really think an asset currently worth $500B needs to incentivize people to keep it working?! “I would never spend $100/yr to validate/store transactions and keep my Bitcoin investment working unless I can make a profit on that $100/yr on fees!”
  - kallewoof 6y ago
    Or: Bitcoin has an incentive model based on transaction fees. This is currently being "boot-strapped" by a mechanism called subsidy, where miners get "extra" bitcoin aside from the transaction fees. That subsidy shrinks every 4 years and will eventually be zero. As we move towards that point, the transaction fees need to be high enough that the miners are incentivized to continue protecting bitcoin. For regular coffee-style orders, this becomes infeasible; that's why you can use layer-2 (or higher) tech to pay really low fees for each transaction. As Bitcoin usage increases, we hit new speed bumps -- transaction fees spiking was one of them. While this is the inevitable (for a successful bitcoin) future, there need to be ways to make cheaper payments, but everyone (who's given it some thought, and who doesn't have an agenda of some kind) agrees that permanently storing coffee sales in the blockchain directly is not the way to go, if we can avoid it, and we can.
whoisninja 6y ago
misinformed take Blockstream has almost no say at this point some of the top contributors are either independent or work with Chaincode labs over the last 10 years, Bitcoin is the most resilient to protocol changes and centralization Ethereum, Bitcoin cash and Monero are all either centralized or bad implementations
- arcticbull 6y ago
  It’s also the most resistant to any and all improvements that might mitigate the environmental calamity it actively contributes to.
etrabroline 6y ago
Wall Street doesn't want Bitcoin to serve its intended purpose of removing their control over the money supply. They did this by co-opting the software project with venture capital money and making technical decisions that make Bitcoin ecommerce economically infeasible due to high fees. Initially they intended to replace Bitcoin with an alt-coin whose issuance was controlled by the Blockstream corporate entity. That project failed, and wall street investors pivoted to another alt-coin called Lightning that has failed to produce a reliable payment network after 7 years of investment, all the while the BTC fork remains unusable, which they are just fine with. EDIT: The Lightning network markets itself as an improvement to Bitcoin, but it is a completely alternative settlement network that just happens to denominate in BTC. I don't think debating the use of the term "alt-coin" is material.
- seibelj 6y ago
  Lightning is not an “alt coin”. This whole comment is so absurd I don’t even know what to say other than it’s entirely conspiratorial and misinformed nonsense.
- programmerslave 6y ago
  Preach!
- nullc 6y ago
  Man, your post is just full of malicious disinformation, most of it addressed elsewhere in this off-topic subthread. > EDIT: The Lightning network markets itself as an improvement to Bitcoin, but it is a completely alternative settlement network that just happens to denominate in BTC. I don't think debating the use of the term "alt-coin" is material. That is just entirely untrue. :( Whoever fed you that idea was confused or outright lying to you. Lightning is a technique for using Bitcoin's smart contracting ability to pay bitcoin without bringing each and every transaction to the network. The basic idea is that you take some Bitcoin and set a script on it that says that if there is a disagreement over who owns it, the involved parties will post to the ledger the last record in an external ownership transcript which is signed by the involved parties, and if anyone cheats and posts an outdated record, anyone else can post proof that a later entry existed and all the coins go to the non-cheating party. With this in place, the parties can then transact back and forth securely as fast as they can sign and send Bitcoin transactions to each other without any global broadcast taking place. Taking it a step further, collections of these transactions can be made mutually atomic so that they're all successful or all fail (essentially by making them conditional on a common secret). This is how lightning makes it possible to pay people you've never transacted with before, by routing on a graph of these pairwise payments (that's what the 'network' in lightning network refers to). All the transactions exchanged between participants are Bitcoin transactions-- which could be posted at any time to the network at the participant's whim, they refrain from doing so to save fees--, the system is built from the novel programmatic ability of Bitcoin, and it is completely ununsable without Bitcoin (or some clone that copies the required functionality, of course). This kind of channelized usage of Bitcoin was foreseen by Bitcoin's creator and enabled by the consensus rules of the protocol from day one (particularly: nlocktime and sequence numbers which were explicitly added to support channels).
chemmail 6y ago
Blockstream bought out most of the the btc devs who had commit ability. Their end goal is to cripple btc to where it is today. The goal of this is to build an unnecessary product they can charge for on a second level. Think skimming money like charge cards do, but offering no real advantage or service beyond that. So far they have found building a new network neigh impossible. Hence the memes: Lightning only 18 months away, after 3 years of "development." You can find hilarious round table interviews with Adam Back where one asks how they can use btc for transactions like at bars with the fees dwarfing the regular transaction. Adam Back suggested using an IOU network out of paper or maybe build an IOU app for that. Can you believe that? Hilarious!
- nullc 6y ago
  This is just an outright lie and malicious defamation from top to f*king bottom. Hateful nonsense by scam promoters like you turns HN into a toxic enviroment.
  - CyberDildonics 6y ago
    It isn't defamation if it's true. You can get as upset as you want, but you can't delete what people say here like you can on /r/bitcoin.
  - etrabroline 6y ago
    Could you expand on why you think that? I very much agree with the substantive arguments made by chemmail, and would like to hear yours.
    - nullc 6y ago
      Because it's just pure nonsense, untrue, and totally unsubstantiated (and thoroughly off-topic for the thread). Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it. Rather than any substantive argument, it merely lists a set of wild allegations. But since you asked nicely I'll break it down sentence by sentence. > Blockstream bought out most of the the btc devs who had commit ability Blockstream hired myself and Pieter, two of six people at the time that had commit access to the Bitcoin software project at a time when none of the many "bitcoin companies" of the day were willing to fund developers. Though I was independently wealthy at that point, supporting my own work on Bitcoin meant spending down my Bitcoin or not working on it most of the time, so being able to get funded to work on Bitcoin and well aligned technology was appealing. Two people is not most of by any measure. The Bitcoin software has no particular control over the Bitcoin system, but none the less we took measures to reduce any potential conflict of interest: We were substantially paid denominated in Bitcoin (pre-purchased when the company was founded), so our compensation was directly tied to Bitcoin's value. The company took no copyright interest in our work on Bitcoin, and released all our patents for public use (both under defensive licensing and the IPA). Pieter and I both had employment agreements that allowed us to quit at and continue to get paid for a year as additional insurance against any unethical conduct by the company. I also dropped my commit access. Neither of us continue to work for blockstream, I haven't for three years now. > Their end goal is to cripple btc to where it is today. Blockstream hasn't done anything to "cripple" bitcoin, nor would it have made any financial sense for its employees (100% of whom were (and I believe still are) substantially compensated in Bitcoin). Quite the opposite: Blockstream's purpose was to build on-ramps to Bitcoin to help the impedance mismatch with traditional finance systems, and to monetize Bitcoin unrelated applications of the same technology (e.g. private systems) and use that to fund development work in the public interest (particularly at a time when no one else was doing so). > The goal of this is to build an unnecessary product they can charge for on a second level. Think skimming money like charge cards do, but offering no real advantage or service beyond that. So far they have found building a new network neigh impossible. I can't even figure out what this is attempting to talk about. > Lightning only 18 months away, after 3 years of "development." Lightning is a large Bitcoin industry effort involving dozens of independent developers and a half dozen companies. It isn't blockstream specific. It's just the logical progression of the payment channel idea initially described by Satoshi and baked into Bitcoin since day one. (And for a weird on-topic tangent: It's a secure implementation of the "Ripple" concept which Ripple labs bought the name of and stuck on an entirely unrelated system.) It's not "18 months away" it exists now, it's widely used, and it works pretty well. However, cryptocurrency for small retail payments remains a pretty uncompelling use case: It is extremely tax disadvantaged in many jurisdiction's, including the US: mandatory per transaction gains tax reporting. And retail transactions are extremely well addressed by existing solutions-- would you prefer to pay with the hardest money available, or would you prefer to pay with a credit card that is already accepted virtually everywhere, provides substantial anti-fraud protection, and extends you 28 days of credit with several percent negative fees for debt in constantly debased fiat? It's important that people have the option-- and they do-- but expecting widespread use in this application over night is fantasy. (And not a particular problem for Blockstream, which doesn't make any fees off transactions using lightning, contrary to the parent posters allegations) > You can find hilarious round table interviews with Adam Back where one asks how they can use btc for transactions like at bars with the fees dwarfing the regular transaction. Adam Back suggested using an IOU network out of paper or maybe build an IOU app for that. I have no idea the context there but I can only imagine that someone asked about buying single drinks with Bitcoin and he mentioned that it's customary for people at a bar to open a tab and settle up at the end of the night. Kind of ironic that Adam, who's a teetotaler, is more aware of how bars commonly work than his critics. :) In any case, Bitcoin is a global broadcast network whos long term decentralized security is utterly and totally dependant on getting large amounts paid in transaction fees. That has always been part of the trade-off: Centralized systems can offer extremely low fees. The only arguments about avoiding market rate fees in Bitcoin have also been argument to unlimit the supply of coins and pay for security through debasement, which is an obvious non-starter. To the extent that there was ever even any debate over that, it long pre-dated blockstream's existence (e.g. https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&action=historysubmit&type=revision&diff=14273&oldid=14112 https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&action=h... ).

est31 6y ago

I don't think there are any major implications. The point of blockchain currencies is to be decentralized so hacking a random github repo shouldn't have major implications. It's not even the only bitcoin node implementation out there at this point.

etrabroline 6y ago
Before wall street involvement there was a single fork of Bitcoin that was a viable currency with low transaction fees. After Wall Street involvement there are at least 3 forks, the biggest of which had fees spiking at 60 USD per transaction making it nonviable for anything but speculators, and the others having very low adoption. The protocol was decentralized but enough of the community that controlled it was bought out to bring it down. EDIT: calling something a lie does not make it so. also, what on earth is hateful here
- nullc 6y ago
  This is a hateful lie.
  - CyberDildonics 6y ago
    Not it isn't, it's just information you don't want people to see.
- grubles 6y ago
  Unused blockchains have no / low transaction fees. >When people started using Bitcoin, fees went up! That's how it is supposed to work.
  - zhoujianfu 6y ago
    “The threshold should probably be lower than it currently is. I don't think the threshold should ever be 0. We should always allow at least some free transactions.” -Satoshi Nakamoto The p2p electronic cash system I signed up for in June 2010 is not working “how it is supposed to work”. $7.77 average transaction fee? Why not try raising the block size to even 2MB? That would do nothing to hurt decentralization. And do you really think an asset currently worth $500B needs to incentivize people to keep it working?! “I would never spend $100/yr to validate/store transactions and keep my Bitcoin investment working unless I can make a profit on that $100/yr on fees!”
- kallewoof 6y ago
  Or: Bitcoin has an incentive model based on transaction fees. This is currently being "boot-strapped" by a mechanism called subsidy, where miners get "extra" bitcoin aside from the transaction fees. That subsidy shrinks every 4 years and will eventually be zero. As we move towards that point, the transaction fees need to be high enough that the miners are incentivized to continue protecting bitcoin. For regular coffee-style orders, this becomes infeasible; that's why you can use layer-2 (or higher) tech to pay really low fees for each transaction. As Bitcoin usage increases, we hit new speed bumps -- transaction fees spiking was one of them. While this is the inevitable (for a successful bitcoin) future, there need to be ways to make cheaper payments, but everyone (who's given it some thought, and who doesn't have an agenda of some kind) agrees that permanently storing coffee sales in the blockchain directly is not the way to go, if we can avoid it, and we can.

whoisninja 6y ago

misinformed take Blockstream has almost no say at this point some of the top contributors are either independent or work with Chaincode labs over the last 10 years, Bitcoin is the most resilient to protocol changes and centralization Ethereum, Bitcoin cash and Monero are all either centralized or bad implementations

arcticbull 6y ago
It’s also the most resistant to any and all improvements that might mitigate the environmental calamity it actively contributes to.

etrabroline 6y ago

Wall Street doesn't want Bitcoin to serve its intended purpose of removing their control over the money supply. They did this by co-opting the software project with venture capital money and making technical decisions that make Bitcoin ecommerce economically infeasible due to high fees. Initially they intended to replace Bitcoin with an alt-coin whose issuance was controlled by the Blockstream corporate entity. That project failed, and wall street investors pivoted to another alt-coin called Lightning that has failed to produce a reliable payment network after 7 years of investment, all the while the BTC fork remains unusable, which they are just fine with. EDIT: The Lightning network markets itself as an improvement to Bitcoin, but it is a completely alternative settlement network that just happens to denominate in BTC. I don't think debating the use of the term "alt-coin" is material.

seibelj 6y ago
Lightning is not an “alt coin”. This whole comment is so absurd I don’t even know what to say other than it’s entirely conspiratorial and misinformed nonsense.
programmerslave 6y ago
Preach!
nullc 6y ago
Man, your post is just full of malicious disinformation, most of it addressed elsewhere in this off-topic subthread. > EDIT: The Lightning network markets itself as an improvement to Bitcoin, but it is a completely alternative settlement network that just happens to denominate in BTC. I don't think debating the use of the term "alt-coin" is material. That is just entirely untrue. :( Whoever fed you that idea was confused or outright lying to you. Lightning is a technique for using Bitcoin's smart contracting ability to pay bitcoin without bringing each and every transaction to the network. The basic idea is that you take some Bitcoin and set a script on it that says that if there is a disagreement over who owns it, the involved parties will post to the ledger the last record in an external ownership transcript which is signed by the involved parties, and if anyone cheats and posts an outdated record, anyone else can post proof that a later entry existed and all the coins go to the non-cheating party. With this in place, the parties can then transact back and forth securely as fast as they can sign and send Bitcoin transactions to each other without any global broadcast taking place. Taking it a step further, collections of these transactions can be made mutually atomic so that they're all successful or all fail (essentially by making them conditional on a common secret). This is how lightning makes it possible to pay people you've never transacted with before, by routing on a graph of these pairwise payments (that's what the 'network' in lightning network refers to). All the transactions exchanged between participants are Bitcoin transactions-- which could be posted at any time to the network at the participant's whim, they refrain from doing so to save fees--, the system is built from the novel programmatic ability of Bitcoin, and it is completely ununsable without Bitcoin (or some clone that copies the required functionality, of course). This kind of channelized usage of Bitcoin was foreseen by Bitcoin's creator and enabled by the consensus rules of the protocol from day one (particularly: nlocktime and sequence numbers which were explicitly added to support channels).

chemmail 6y ago

Blockstream bought out most of the the btc devs who had commit ability. Their end goal is to cripple btc to where it is today. The goal of this is to build an unnecessary product they can charge for on a second level. Think skimming money like charge cards do, but offering no real advantage or service beyond that. So far they have found building a new network neigh impossible. Hence the memes: Lightning only 18 months away, after 3 years of "development." You can find hilarious round table interviews with Adam Back where one asks how they can use btc for transactions like at bars with the fees dwarfing the regular transaction. Adam Back suggested using an IOU network out of paper or maybe build an IOU app for that. Can you believe that? Hilarious!

nullc 6y ago
This is just an outright lie and malicious defamation from top to f*king bottom. Hateful nonsense by scam promoters like you turns HN into a toxic enviroment.
- CyberDildonics 6y ago
  It isn't defamation if it's true. You can get as upset as you want, but you can't delete what people say here like you can on /r/bitcoin.
- etrabroline 6y ago
  Could you expand on why you think that? I very much agree with the substantive arguments made by chemmail, and would like to hear yours.
  - nullc 6y ago
    Because it's just pure nonsense, untrue, and totally unsubstantiated (and thoroughly off-topic for the thread). Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it. Rather than any substantive argument, it merely lists a set of wild allegations. But since you asked nicely I'll break it down sentence by sentence. > Blockstream bought out most of the the btc devs who had commit ability Blockstream hired myself and Pieter, two of six people at the time that had commit access to the Bitcoin software project at a time when none of the many "bitcoin companies" of the day were willing to fund developers. Though I was independently wealthy at that point, supporting my own work on Bitcoin meant spending down my Bitcoin or not working on it most of the time, so being able to get funded to work on Bitcoin and well aligned technology was appealing. Two people is not most of by any measure. The Bitcoin software has no particular control over the Bitcoin system, but none the less we took measures to reduce any potential conflict of interest: We were substantially paid denominated in Bitcoin (pre-purchased when the company was founded), so our compensation was directly tied to Bitcoin's value. The company took no copyright interest in our work on Bitcoin, and released all our patents for public use (both under defensive licensing and the IPA). Pieter and I both had employment agreements that allowed us to quit at and continue to get paid for a year as additional insurance against any unethical conduct by the company. I also dropped my commit access. Neither of us continue to work for blockstream, I haven't for three years now. > Their end goal is to cripple btc to where it is today. Blockstream hasn't done anything to "cripple" bitcoin, nor would it have made any financial sense for its employees (100% of whom were (and I believe still are) substantially compensated in Bitcoin). Quite the opposite: Blockstream's purpose was to build on-ramps to Bitcoin to help the impedance mismatch with traditional finance systems, and to monetize Bitcoin unrelated applications of the same technology (e.g. private systems) and use that to fund development work in the public interest (particularly at a time when no one else was doing so). > The goal of this is to build an unnecessary product they can charge for on a second level. Think skimming money like charge cards do, but offering no real advantage or service beyond that. So far they have found building a new network neigh impossible. I can't even figure out what this is attempting to talk about. > Lightning only 18 months away, after 3 years of "development." Lightning is a large Bitcoin industry effort involving dozens of independent developers and a half dozen companies. It isn't blockstream specific. It's just the logical progression of the payment channel idea initially described by Satoshi and baked into Bitcoin since day one. (And for a weird on-topic tangent: It's a secure implementation of the "Ripple" concept which Ripple labs bought the name of and stuck on an entirely unrelated system.) It's not "18 months away" it exists now, it's widely used, and it works pretty well. However, cryptocurrency for small retail payments remains a pretty uncompelling use case: It is extremely tax disadvantaged in many jurisdiction's, including the US: mandatory per transaction gains tax reporting. And retail transactions are extremely well addressed by existing solutions-- would you prefer to pay with the hardest money available, or would you prefer to pay with a credit card that is already accepted virtually everywhere, provides substantial anti-fraud protection, and extends you 28 days of credit with several percent negative fees for debt in constantly debased fiat? It's important that people have the option-- and they do-- but expecting widespread use in this application over night is fantasy. (And not a particular problem for Blockstream, which doesn't make any fees off transactions using lightning, contrary to the parent posters allegations) > You can find hilarious round table interviews with Adam Back where one asks how they can use btc for transactions like at bars with the fees dwarfing the regular transaction. Adam Back suggested using an IOU network out of paper or maybe build an IOU app for that. I have no idea the context there but I can only imagine that someone asked about buying single drinks with Bitcoin and he mentioned that it's customary for people at a bar to open a tab and settle up at the end of the night. Kind of ironic that Adam, who's a teetotaler, is more aware of how bars commonly work than his critics. :) In any case, Bitcoin is a global broadcast network whos long term decentralized security is utterly and totally dependant on getting large amounts paid in transaction fees. That has always been part of the trade-off: Centralized systems can offer extremely low fees. The only arguments about avoiding market rate fees in Bitcoin have also been argument to unlimit the supply of coins and pay for security through debasement, which is an obvious non-starter. To the extent that there was ever even any debate over that, it long pre-dated blockstream's existence (e.g. https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&action=historysubmit&type=revision&diff=14273&oldid=14112 https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&action=h... ).