| A few red flags came up for me with this post. I feel I have an obligation to post a response to this to clarify some things, lest people less involved in the community come away with a misinformed view. A few facts on the core developers: -- There are hundreds of developers who contribute to Bitcoin Core. Over 50 of them have 10+ commits to Bitcoin Core. -- Blockstream employs 7 of these developers, including Pieter Wuille, Luke Dashjr, Greg Maxwell, Jorge Timon, Patrick Strateman, Warren Togami and Mark Friedenbach. -- By number of commits, the developers Blockstream employs are ranked #2, #8, #13, #14, #19, #35, and #50, respectively. -- Another company called ChainCode Labs employs 3 of the top 50 developers, including Alex Morcos, Suhas Daftuar, and Matt Corallo (formerly employed by Blockstream). -- By number of commits, the developers ChainCode employs are ranked #5, #11 and #12, respectively. As for SegWit, it is a multi-faceted gold-mine of an update with many, many benefits to scaling, security and efficiency: 1. It fixes the substantial transaction malleability problem once and for all. 2. It improves the efficiency of signature-hashing so it scales linearly rather than quadratically. 3. It 1.7x's the # of single-signature transactions per block and 4x's the # of multi-signature transactions per block. 4. It enables second-layer scaling solutions like Lightning. 5. It upgrades pay-to-script-hash transactions from 160-bit hashes to 256-bit hashes. 6. It makes it safer for hardware wallets to sign transactions by explicitly hashing input values. 7. It reduces the growth of the system's most burdensome resource: unspent transaction outputs, which are ideally kept in memory. 8. It introduces versioning for the scripting language to allow for more easy upgradeability. Here are some facts on the developer consensus: -- Out of the top 100 committers to Bitcoin Core, almost all of them believe that SegWit is the best way forward. There is near unanimous consensus on that front. Former project lead Gavin Andresen (no longer associated with the project) is perhaps the most notable opponent. -- Out of all of the wallet providers, almost all of them are supportive of or at least OK with modest block increases. Almost all of the major wallet providers have prepared themselves to be ready for SegWit. |
For full transparency, I [OP, author of the PDF] am currently contracting with (but am not employed by) Chaincode and am currently #39 by commits (#26 by additions though! ;)). I also think that SegWit is the best way forward; no one pays me to say that.
If Blockstream sent money to developers to endorse SegWit, they must have skipped me!