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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

> Soon after Blockstream's Greg Maxwell and Adam Back hijacked the Bitcoin Core GitHub repo they locked down the block size to 1mb, something Satoshi and the original devs never imagined anyone being dumb enough to do let alone intended.

Doesn't this point to Bitcoin's decentralized nature being largely smoke and mirrors?

You're claiming that just two individuals have had a significant negative impact on a project that was intended to be free from central control. That in itself seems like a failure of the project's goals.

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Yes and no.

They didn't just control the repo, but they somehow managed to convince the miners to support them. Exchanges and users simply defaulted to "the longest chain is Bitcoin", ensuring their victory. So they weren't alone.

But Bitcoin's truly decentralized nature allows for forks, where if you disagree with the development direction you can always go your own way. So the spirit of Bitcoin lives on in other projects (both via forks and via projects with no shared history with Bitcoin).

> You're claiming that just two individuals have had a significant negative impact on a project that was intended to be free from central control. That in itself seems like a failure of the project's goals.

Yes, it was (and is) still a major failure of the project's goals.

That’s like saying democracy allows voters in the US to elect anyone. Sure, on paper, but here in the real world that’s just not happening. With a few minor tweaks like ranked choice, it could, but the powers that be will never get onboard.

Similarly bitcoin is decentralized in that “anyone can fork it” but reality is without backing from major players, that will never gain any traction at all.

So no, functionally it is nothing approaching decentralized.

The miners didn't support them at all. The majority supported the hard fork, and initiatives like Gavin Andresen's BitcoinXT to implement it. But the main Bitcoin forum on Reddit started censoring any advocacy for a block size limit increase, which made a clean hard fork impossible.

Initially you're right.

At the crucial point they did however convince the miners to support a Segwit + blocksize increase, which pulled away the support.

Of course, it's obvious that it was just a bait-and-switch and the blocksize increase is nowhere to be seen, and will probably never happen.

They were able to execute the SegWit2x bait and switch, and shenanigans before it, only after the forums had already been censored and they could promote UASF as a threat against the miners.

Ultimately, miners would only support a hard fork if a super majority went along with it and with the major forums being censored that was going to be impossible.

Without the censorship there would have been a super majority supporting the hard work given the sentiment on the forums at that time.

Increasing block size decreases decentralization. (Or rather, increases centralization.) Satoshi's true vision was that decentralization was a prerequisite for everything else. Block size increases presuppose infinite scaling of bandwidth, processing speed, and storage, but we do not have that. Because those things are scarce, block size must be as well, if the goal is to maintain decentralization.

Also in the end it doesn't matter what is in the Bitcoin Core github. It's a network and you can run any variant you want. Bitcoin Cash tried and failed, because in the end it is not what the users, the node operators, chose to adopt.

There was a big fight over the future of bitcoin. There are 6-7 core developers in that era, and multiple clients, but bitcoind was dominant.

Blockstream was able to create the perception of an economic majority — thanks to forums like Bitcointalk and Reddit (moderated by one guy: Theymos / Michael Marquant).

In reality, a lot of people didn’t support blockstream, but through censorship and permanent bans, a few people were able to create the perception of economic majority.

More info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14240267

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