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SegWit is controversial because it is a key part of Core's off-chain scaling roadmap, as opposed to alternative, on chain scaling. It's pure politics: If SegWit "wins", we go down a certain route of scaling and cement Core as being the only group that has control over Bitcoin's future. There are some technical arguments against SegWit but they are largely unrelated to what makes it so controversial.

> Blockstream employed 5(?) Core devs, some of them part-time.

If you omit the arguable "blockstream have paid", the rest of the sentence is correct: almost every developer of bitcoin core pushes Segwit without clear consensus from the community.

They define "consensus" as a consensus between those who reside in (and who have not been ejected from) their tightly controlled forums.

> Censorship is horrible, but do you have proof that Blockstream supports it?

Adam Back and Greg Maxwell (CEO and CTO) regularly participate in the forums that support the censorship, i.e. /r/bitcoin, and rarely post on /r/btc (for a starting overview of the censorship, see here: https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-histor... )

Is the CEO and CTO choosing to participate often and primarily in a heavily censored community not "support"?

Yep, it basically looks like core devs have this plan to:

-Keep bitcoin broken so fees go sky-high

-Push people towards their sketchy off-chain transactions

Bitcoin then becomes "bank coin", where large providers handle all the micro transactions and "settle up" with huge 1000+ btc chunks.

It's a scam and while I have my own reservations about bitcoin unlimited and making miners "too powerful" at least their plan is 100% on-chain.

Core dev's plan is suicide for bitcoin, major investors have been jumping ship to etherium driven by their insanity.

It is nothing sinister though. It is just when Mr. Maxwell and Dr. Back started Blockstream they expected the 1 mb blocksize to stay 1 mb. On this assumption they built their company and sold their services as "Core" maintainers.

The Fork to a chain that does scale on its own seems inevitable and was fully expected by the original developer. It seems like an uphill battle for Core to convince people to NOT upgrade the network.

The "sketchy" off chain stuff is not sketchy either, it is just off chain. If you mean that they may be able to profit from it, I don't see why that is evil or even wrong, it is just their business plan.

That is incorrect. Literally nobody expects blocksize to stay at 1MB permanently. If they did, SW wouldn't exist, since that is a blocksize increase to about 2MB.

You realize a lot of people pushing the supposedly nefarious agenda you're saying here own a lot of bitcoins, and even belong to companies where timelocked bitcoins act as an incentive program, right? The conspiracy theories surrounding Core's agenda never have sensical incentive structures. This is why nobody listens to the conspiracy theorists when it comes to designing a protocol that relies entirely on incentives adding up.

Obviously, you don't understand off-chain transactions.

If you do a tad bit of investigation, you will find that your fears are entirely unfounded.

Actually by the numbers, gmax posts almost more than anyone else in r\btc. So that's just incorrect.

Neither does Blockstream "employ" the developers in a bitcoin-development capacity. The number of people it employs to develop Bitcoin is something like. 1.5. That's out of hundreds of people.

The apparent consensus amongst the literally hundreds of individuals who have contributed to core should be demonstrative of the fact that a majority of technically-aware developers think SW is the safest and best way to increase on-chain capacity—this is a developer majority just by the numbers themselves.

> Censorship is horrible, but do you have proof that Blockstream supports it?

Here is some very strong evidence for it: http://telegra.ph/Inside-the-Dragons-Den-Bitcoin-Cores-Troll...

Obviously, people could always say that there is no proof, because "supporting" is such a vague term. It is hard to come up with a mathematical proof. But I would say, it is already a proof that they participate mostly in /r/bitcoin and not in /r/btc. Reddit depends on participation. Therefore with their participation in censored forums in contrast to uncensored forums they at least indirectly support the censorship.

^^^ Summary of /r/bitcoin, for those wondering.

Sigh

> Bitcoin has had soft forks before. This one will do great many great things for transaction throughput and privacy.

It's an inefficient hack. For example:

https://medium.com/the-publius-letters/segregated-witness-a-...

> Censorship is horrible, but do you have proof that Blockstream supports it?

All signs points towards it. Do the Blockstream people even speak out against the censorship on /r/bitcoin? No. Do they prefer to use channels censoring opposing opinions? Yes.

> If you're spouting FUD, then go back to /r/btc.

Exactly the narrative Core supporters push.

> It's an inefficient hack

Sure. The creator of SegWit (Sipa) said in one of his first talks on the subject that if you could re-architect Bitcoin from scratch, then you would segregate the witness data. Nodes could potentially throw it away after witnesses were verified, to save disk space. The problem is that it would require a hard fork, which Core wants to avoid if at all possible.

SegWit hacks the coinbase and transaction structure in order to be implemented as a soft fork.

I'm not sure if it's inefficient or not, but it is a hack.

Does the fact that it's a hack mean that it's bad for Bitcoin?

That article talks about all sorts of developer troubles and losing coins without ever mentioning the testnet, which exists to allow you to lose worthless coins. If a company is pushing major updates to wallet software without conducting proper testing, then bad on them. Plenty of bitcoin has been lost to the current complexities of the transaction format. Remember those 100 BTC fee transactions?

The article's conclusion bemoans the plight of the miners without mentioning the actual users of Bitcoin, other than a hand-wave at "community consensus." I'm not convinced.

> Do the Blockstream people even speak out against the censorship on /r/bitcoin? No. Do they prefer to use channels censoring opposing opinions? Yes.

Ok, so let's assume the whole lot is rotten and loves censorship. Does that change the nature of the code that exists in the Bitcoin codebase? Censorship sucks, but Bitcoin is what really matters.

>> If you're spouting FUD, then go back to /r/btc.

>Exactly the narrative Core supporters push.

Anyone who tries the path of moderation and reason within /r/btc is downvoted into oblivion, resulting in de facto censorship of that sub.

Edit:

> Summary of /r/bitcoin, for those wondering.

You forgot the roller coaster price gifs :-)

> Do the Blockstream people even speak out against the censorship on /r/bitcoin?

Yes, gmax has, literally every time he is asked about it. His complaint is that r\btc as an organizational/policy difference is a worse place. That's by comparison. -- Which it is, since e.g. users like /u/pagex still haven't been banned after direct physical threats.