[askmike]

Pretty biased story, sounds like it was Blockstream against everyone else (it wasn't). Most people on the mailinglist thought it was dangerous to increase the blocksize, not just people who worked for Blockstream.

> Some of the employees of Blockstream also put forth some proposals, but all were so conservative, it would take bitcoin many decades before it could reach a scale of VISA.

I hate to bring it to you, but no big decentralized network where everything happens on a single chain will ever reach VISA scale. I'm not sure why people think Bitcoin can do this. I do not work for blockstream and I think just scaling this up is a terrible idea. I only know a handful of technical people who disagree.

> After this free and open source software was released, Theymos, the person who controls all the main communication channels for the bitcoin community implemented a new moderation policy that disallowed any discussion of this new software. Specifically, if people were to discuss this software, their comments would be deleted and ultimately they would be banned temporarily or permanently. This caused chaos within the community as there was very clear support for this software at the time and it seemed our best hope for finally solving the problem and moving on.

IMO the chaos did not come from content moderation but from different groups of people who all claimed their software (bitcoin XT, bitcoin core) was the real bitcoin. And not many people understood what was going on. There was definitely some support for bitcoin XT, but it was always minuscule compared to bitcoin's IMO. This has nothing to do with either Theymos nor Blockstream.

[shiado]

I definitely agree about Bitcoin and scaling, as anybody who can do napkin math would realize that increases in block size to scale to a level of transactions/second competitive with a credit card network would cause the blockchain to grow at a catastrophically unsustainable rate. Bitcoin Cash imho offers absolutely nothing of value because it runs up against the exact same technical problems. Think of it like slightly reducing a constant factor to an O(n^3) algorithm, you haven't made things more efficient in the required way.

I think the main takeaway about /r/bitcoin is that bitcoin claims to be this decentralized democratic technical project where anybody can contribute but in reality many of the places where discussion takes place are completely censored and controlled by entities who aren't transparent about their intentions like Blockstream and Theymos. This also applies to /r/btc for Bitcoin Cash shills.

[askmike]

> bitcoin claims to be this decentralized democratic technical project where anybody can contribute

Where is this claimed? The technical project is just another open source project, not very decentralized. The idea of bitcoin is that you (the user) can decide what software you want to run, if you don't agree with rules imposed by a certain software project you not run it or run an older version. This (as well as how the network works) is decentralized. Ofcourse Reddit and other social media channels are not decentralized, and neither is development of the different node implementations.

I don't think there exists a way to collaborate on any technical open source project in a truly decentralized way. I love to be proven wrong, do you know any project that is? So no BDFL (Linus, Guido), no foundation and actual decentralized contribution?