| x-post of one of my reddit post. (disclaimer: I am employed by Blockstream) It's helpful to evaluate the contribution of Blockstream developers to Bitcoin Core versus other non-Blockstream developers in the last year. Let's see Greg Maxwell: 46 Jorge Timon: 17 Pieter Wuille: 163 (the only developer at Blockstream dedicated full time to Core development) Mark Friedenbach: 0 Patrick Strateman: 31 Warren Togami: 6 Adam Back: 0 Greg Sanders: 32 Glenn Willen: 0 Total commits for listed Blockstream developers: 295 Wladimir Van Der Laan: 210 Marco Falke: 170 Corey Fields: 152 Jonas Schnelli: 87 Suhas Daftuar: 73 Alex Morcos: 65 fanquake: 56 Pavel Janik: 45 Total commits for listed non-Blockstream developers: 858 So about 35%. 15% if we remove Pieter, but I can confidently say everyone at Blockstream is hugely proud of his contributions and in no way shape or form are we interested in diminishing his accomplishment. From my perspective he has been the single most important contributor to Bitcoin development for many years now. In short, this narrative is a huge disrespect to every other contributors building the software we all depend on. The obsession of certain people to lend power to specific individuals is simply an attempt to shut down their ideas by attacking their character. -- I would add that most of the Core contributors working at Blockstream had been contributing before the company was founded and certainly did not "infiltrate the Bitcoin development team". The previous lead developer had barely contributed anything before he quit out of his own volition after a series of failed attempt to politicize Bitcoin and force through a contentious hard fork. The last straw was of course when he was naively led to believe that notorious scam artist Craig Wright was Satoshi. With regards to the "off-blockchain" solutions you refer to. Here's a couple of facts: Fact 1: The Lightning Network was created by Bitcoin developers not involved with the Core project Fact 2: No Core developer is involved in a business whose revenue model revolves around the success of the Lightning Network Fact 3: There is very little profit to be made from operating the Lightning Network infrastructure/protocol. Fact 4: The Lightning Network will happen regardless of the outcome of the current contention. Fact 5: Bitcoin developers have no control over the consensus code being enforced by independent peers participating in the network. Bitcoin is a voluntary system. |