Comment by pash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pash | Hacker News Reader

Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, wrote a blog post [0] today that gives a very different take on things. He criticized Bitcoin Core's development team for their poor communication with the community, for their inhospitality to new contributors, and for their repeated rejection of practical and simple solutions to Bitcoin's immediate scaling problem. He advocated adopting Bitcoin Classic's short-term fix for full transaction blocks and wrote that it is vital in the long term to foster an environment in which multiple development teams can compete to introduce new features and improvements to the protocol.

There are many people in the Bitcoin ecosystem who, like Brian, feel strongly that if Bitcoin is to survive and thrive, then not only must the blocksize-limit be increased, but the exclusive power to decide the future of Bitcoin must be taken out of the hands of the Bitcoin Core team.

0. https://medium.com/@barmstrong/what-happened-at-the-satoshi-...

> Inhospitality to new contributors

Got a citation for that? I submitted my first PR (albeit a tiny change) to Bitcoin Core last week, and it was merged in a few days. No questions asked, no pushback.

I guess it all depends on what the change is in the end... if you're forking the blockchain, I'd damn well hope some pushback.

Yes, but there are also people - like Bram Cohen - who view Coinbase, Bitcoin Classic and others as a hostile agents attempting to take over control. Also see: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-community-on-brink-o... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11228807

Bram Cohen has always hated Bitcoin.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/41exno/bram_cohen_hate...

Which makes it strange how in 2015 he suddenly took an interest in Bitcoin and (1) supports everything Blockstream is doing (2) writes blog posts attacking long-time Bitcoin contributors like Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen.

Perhaps Bram Cohen is "consulting" for Blockstream? They admit they spent over $10m+ in their first 12 months of operations in 2015 which is a high burn rate considering how few full-time employees ("founders") they had during that time.

Bram Cohen doesn't hate Bitcoin. He's fascinated by it and someone skeptical of its future; when you attack people for having moderate views that acknowledge real risks and limitations you increase the perception of Bitcoin as a ponzi scheme.

Bram, like almost all other technical experts holds a collection of views that you disagree with. He's never been paid by Blockstream.

Your claim with respect to blockstream's finances are incorrect, and you know they are incorrect since you were previously corrected on them; I can only assume that you're continuing to repeat them in an effort to intentionally defame Blockstream. You should stop.

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