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They removed the whitepaper about as fast as they removed Gavin Andresen's commit access once they found justification. There are a lot of bad things you can c

They removed the whitepaper about as fast as they removed Gavin Andresen's commit access once they found justification. There are a lot of bad things you can call the BTC core devs but they sure as hell seize every opportunity to grab power.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago
From my experience in the community years ago, Bitcoin Core was a very insidious group of people that seized control of Bitcoin from within, obtained control of the Bitcoin subreddit and started banning anyone with even the most reasonable objections. They started promulgating this absurd notion that Bitcoin was a "store of value" exclusively: that is to say, was not intended to be "peer to peer electronic cash" (as Satoshi obviously intended) and that its value was purely related to "how much the other guy was willing to pay for your Bitcoin". So they turned it into this purely speculative thing. The whole fallacy of the "store of value" thing is two-fold: (1) Bitcoin's success and utility as a currency gives it a stable point to base its value around. For example, the value would be related to the net amount of transactions occurring (on the darknet usually) and the velocity of money, which would create a sort of natural equilibrium price where people are buying bitcoin as they need it, rather than hodling it to speculate. (2) Bitcoin, like any asset, is a store of value, but its ability to store value is the same whether it's worth $.0001 per coin or $40,000 per coin. So they basically turned it into a purely speculative instrument. --- The takeover of Bitcoin from within was a big red-pill moment for me. It was an attack vector I should have seen coming but didn't. I strongly belief that any cryptocurrency community where 99% of users are speculators who view the thing as a stock ticker and nothing more, basically dooms a cryptocurrency to failure. Anyway, Bitcoin Core as a whole and Blockstream as a company are very malicious actors who destroyed the beauty and elegance of Bitcoin so that they could build a company around exploiting the delta between what the tx fees should be and what they were. And beyond the unjustifiable censorship / suppression, they advanced tons of bogus arguments such as the notion that increasing the block size would ruin the decentralization of the bitcoin network. --- Oh, and lastly there will be a great need for public blockchain cryptos like Bitcoin: for example, if I donate to a non-profit I'd want all their transactions to be publicly viewable. But for normal usage-as-a-currency, I am a huge believer in XMR (monero), which masks who you're sending money to, how much money you sent, and how much money you have. It also has a lot of neat tech like adaptive block size limits, etc that avoided the transaction fee debacle of BTC.
- kordlessagain 6y ago
  Lots of "they" in there and very little substantive evidence of who "they" actually are and what actions were connected to other "theys" involved. I'm not saying there isn't a group that is in tighter control of the codebase, but given the code they produce is independent of the actual data (the blockchain) I'm ok with that as long as others audit their work and then talk about it publicly (which they do): https://twitter.com/BitMEXResearch/status/1351855414103715842/photo/1 https://twitter.com/BitMEXResearch/status/135185541410371584.... Keep in mind that some developers who disagreed with other developers ends up creating a fork. Bitcoin's "fiat" value is pretty much a speculative/opinionated/consensus of belief thing, by nature. This is really no different than the fed saying these 100,000 things are worth this much in dollars. It's an opinion based in observation, but still an opinion, albeit a collective one. The value of the Bitcoin network itself to provide a wide range of authentication and payment integrations is quite high and a technology potential for changing markets. That is only valuable if it is found long term to be a secure store of integer values.
  - dylkil 6y ago
    >Lots of "they" in there and very little substantive evidence of who "they" actually are and what actions were connected to other "theys" involved. This [1] is a good recap of what happened [1]https://hackernoon.com/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-debate-a-timeline-6108081dbada https://hackernoon.com/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-debate-a-ti...
- jonny_eh 6y ago
  I wonder if this is because BTC's use as currency has definitively failed, and is now being used as an elaborate ponzi scheme to extract money from investors.
  - dylkil 6y ago
    The failure to raise the block size limit is the very reason bitcoin has failed as a currency. The main people against against raising the block size limit were blockstream and bitcoin core devs. A competing client to Bitcoin core which supported a block size increase was Bitcoin XT. At one stage it had 50% of the market share, until nodes running XT started getting DDoS'd. Then the censorship began, any posts about bitcoin XT and block size limit increase were banned from bitcointalk and r/bitcoin. [1] [1] https://hackernoon.com/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-debate-a-timeline-6108081dbada https://hackernoon.com/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-debate-a-ti...
elliekelly 6y ago
BitCoin’s short history seems to have quite a lot of drama. Every once in a while I pop in to get an idea of what’s happening in the world of BitCoin but it’s not something I really pay much attention to so I’ve definitely missed out on quite a lot of “big” news stories. If anyone knows of good books or podcasts about the history of BitCoin and the various characters/motivations involved I would be most interested in recommendations. Especially from the governance or legal perspective.
- toomim 6y ago
  You'll get a history from the Bitcoin Cash perspective here: https://old.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/js6jft/frequently_asked_questions_and_information_thread/ https://old.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/js6jft/frequently_aske...
- heidar 6y ago
  Not a podcast or a book but the Cryptopia documentary gives a pretty good overview of what has been happening in the cryptocurrency space in the past few years.
whimsicalism 6y ago
> There are a lot of bad things you can call the BTC core devs but they sure as hell seize every opportunity to grab power. This is a non-idiomatic usage of this expression, unless you're saying that power grabbing is good?
grubles 6y ago
Gavin admitted he should have been removed because he stopped contributing. Why has HN comment quality fallen so low...
- ogogmad 6y ago
  Hi Grubles! Question: How do you think people will use BTC in the future? Do you think people will ever be able to buy coffee with it?
  - garmaine 6y ago
    No, because people don’t use highly volatile speculative assets for everyday transactions. But I know you’re referring to the transaction fees, and it would only be fair to point out that the cost of a lightning transaction is a few cents.
    - lawn 6y ago
      And it is only fair to point out that to use lightning you first need an on-chain transaction to enter it, and then you need to have another one in reserve so you don't lose your money. And then you need another one if you want to top it up with more money. And if the node you connect to goes down or you can't find a route you need to open a new channel... Or you use a functional cryptocurrency that don't have these ridiculous limitations.
      - garmaine 6y ago
        “A few cents” was the amortized cost of those transactions, if the lightning channel is indeed used for everyday activities.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- dylkil 6y ago
  Peter Todd said it was because he thought he was hacked [1]. Then two days later he posts a blog about wanting to submit a pull request for bigger blocks[2]. Interesting timing. [1]https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/727078284345917441 https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/727078284345917441 [2]http://gavinandresen.ninja/time-to-roll-out-bigger-blocks http://gavinandresen.ninja/time-to-roll-out-bigger-blocks
midmagico 6y ago
I'm the reason why Core removed Gavin's commit access, as I pointed out that he doesn't use it, he was bamboozled by Craig, and in fact Gavin himself agreed that it should've been done long before just as a security measure. The FUD on here is always surprising voluminous.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago

From my experience in the community years ago, Bitcoin Core was a very insidious group of people that seized control of Bitcoin from within, obtained control of the Bitcoin subreddit and started banning anyone with even the most reasonable objections. They started promulgating this absurd notion that Bitcoin was a "store of value" exclusively: that is to say, was not intended to be "peer to peer electronic cash" (as Satoshi obviously intended) and that its value was purely related to "how much the other guy was willing to pay for your Bitcoin". So they turned it into this purely speculative thing. The whole fallacy of the "store of value" thing is two-fold: (1) Bitcoin's success and utility as a currency gives it a stable point to base its value around. For example, the value would be related to the net amount of transactions occurring (on the darknet usually) and the velocity of money, which would create a sort of natural equilibrium price where people are buying bitcoin as they need it, rather than hodling it to speculate. (2) Bitcoin, like any asset, is a store of value, but its ability to store value is the same whether it's worth $.0001 per coin or $40,000 per coin. So they basically turned it into a purely speculative instrument. --- The takeover of Bitcoin from within was a big red-pill moment for me. It was an attack vector I should have seen coming but didn't. I strongly belief that any cryptocurrency community where 99% of users are speculators who view the thing as a stock ticker and nothing more, basically dooms a cryptocurrency to failure. Anyway, Bitcoin Core as a whole and Blockstream as a company are very malicious actors who destroyed the beauty and elegance of Bitcoin so that they could build a company around exploiting the delta between what the tx fees should be and what they were. And beyond the unjustifiable censorship / suppression, they advanced tons of bogus arguments such as the notion that increasing the block size would ruin the decentralization of the bitcoin network. --- Oh, and lastly there will be a great need for public blockchain cryptos like Bitcoin: for example, if I donate to a non-profit I'd want all their transactions to be publicly viewable. But for normal usage-as-a-currency, I am a huge believer in XMR (monero), which masks who you're sending money to, how much money you sent, and how much money you have. It also has a lot of neat tech like adaptive block size limits, etc that avoided the transaction fee debacle of BTC.

kordlessagain 6y ago
Lots of "they" in there and very little substantive evidence of who "they" actually are and what actions were connected to other "theys" involved. I'm not saying there isn't a group that is in tighter control of the codebase, but given the code they produce is independent of the actual data (the blockchain) I'm ok with that as long as others audit their work and then talk about it publicly (which they do): https://twitter.com/BitMEXResearch/status/1351855414103715842/photo/1 https://twitter.com/BitMEXResearch/status/135185541410371584.... Keep in mind that some developers who disagreed with other developers ends up creating a fork. Bitcoin's "fiat" value is pretty much a speculative/opinionated/consensus of belief thing, by nature. This is really no different than the fed saying these 100,000 things are worth this much in dollars. It's an opinion based in observation, but still an opinion, albeit a collective one. The value of the Bitcoin network itself to provide a wide range of authentication and payment integrations is quite high and a technology potential for changing markets. That is only valuable if it is found long term to be a secure store of integer values.
- dylkil 6y ago
  >Lots of "they" in there and very little substantive evidence of who "they" actually are and what actions were connected to other "theys" involved. This [1] is a good recap of what happened [1]https://hackernoon.com/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-debate-a-timeline-6108081dbada https://hackernoon.com/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-debate-a-ti...
jonny_eh 6y ago
I wonder if this is because BTC's use as currency has definitively failed, and is now being used as an elaborate ponzi scheme to extract money from investors.
- dylkil 6y ago
  The failure to raise the block size limit is the very reason bitcoin has failed as a currency. The main people against against raising the block size limit were blockstream and bitcoin core devs. A competing client to Bitcoin core which supported a block size increase was Bitcoin XT. At one stage it had 50% of the market share, until nodes running XT started getting DDoS'd. Then the censorship began, any posts about bitcoin XT and block size limit increase were banned from bitcointalk and r/bitcoin. [1] [1] https://hackernoon.com/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-debate-a-timeline-6108081dbada https://hackernoon.com/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-debate-a-ti...

elliekelly 6y ago

BitCoin’s short history seems to have quite a lot of drama. Every once in a while I pop in to get an idea of what’s happening in the world of BitCoin but it’s not something I really pay much attention to so I’ve definitely missed out on quite a lot of “big” news stories. If anyone knows of good books or podcasts about the history of BitCoin and the various characters/motivations involved I would be most interested in recommendations. Especially from the governance or legal perspective.

toomim 6y ago
You'll get a history from the Bitcoin Cash perspective here: https://old.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/js6jft/frequently_asked_questions_and_information_thread/ https://old.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/js6jft/frequently_aske...
heidar 6y ago
Not a podcast or a book but the Cryptopia documentary gives a pretty good overview of what has been happening in the cryptocurrency space in the past few years.

whimsicalism 6y ago

> There are a lot of bad things you can call the BTC core devs but they sure as hell seize every opportunity to grab power. This is a non-idiomatic usage of this expression, unless you're saying that power grabbing is good?

grubles 6y ago

Gavin admitted he should have been removed because he stopped contributing. Why has HN comment quality fallen so low...

ogogmad 6y ago
Hi Grubles! Question: How do you think people will use BTC in the future? Do you think people will ever be able to buy coffee with it?
- garmaine 6y ago
  No, because people don’t use highly volatile speculative assets for everyday transactions. But I know you’re referring to the transaction fees, and it would only be fair to point out that the cost of a lightning transaction is a few cents.
  - lawn 6y ago
    And it is only fair to point out that to use lightning you first need an on-chain transaction to enter it, and then you need to have another one in reserve so you don't lose your money. And then you need another one if you want to top it up with more money. And if the node you connect to goes down or you can't find a route you need to open a new channel... Or you use a functional cryptocurrency that don't have these ridiculous limitations.
    - garmaine 6y ago
      “A few cents” was the amortized cost of those transactions, if the lightning channel is indeed used for everyday activities.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dylkil 6y ago
Peter Todd said it was because he thought he was hacked [1]. Then two days later he posts a blog about wanting to submit a pull request for bigger blocks[2]. Interesting timing. [1]https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/727078284345917441 https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/727078284345917441 [2]http://gavinandresen.ninja/time-to-roll-out-bigger-blocks http://gavinandresen.ninja/time-to-roll-out-bigger-blocks

midmagico 6y ago

I'm the reason why Core removed Gavin's commit access, as I pointed out that he doesn't use it, he was bamboozled by Craig, and in fact Gavin himself agreed that it should've been done long before just as a security measure. The FUD on here is always surprising voluminous.