[kylebenzle]

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.

[midmagico]

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.