Comment by doctorfoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doctorfoo | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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