[nullc]

The allegation of "take over" is both dishonest misinformation and a really abusive attack. The people you're accusing of taking Bitcoin over have been there essentially all along, -- long before you ever heard of it. The concerns about the trade-offs with block size have also been with Bitcoin all along: as a look into the history shows, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21977347

[nighthawk24]

Sorry, the real attack was by the group led by Adam Back who himself dismissed Bitcoin initially before having a VC fund him to cater to his plan http://cashbleed.com/

Following which scare tactics ensued which broke the block size increase agreements of 8MB Hong Kong Agreement when Adam himself flew to the meeting overnight(as an individual) to attack the agreement, then when a 2MB NYA agreement was finalized and signed by the groups of miners, again the small blockers attacked it in favor of SegWit, that Bitcoin wouldn't survive a hardfork upgrade even though it had upgraded several times in the past.

The really abusive attack was when those same people removed Gavin Andresen's commit access when he had been leading Bitcoin development alongside Satoshi and testing large block clients on the side. On-going abusive attacks when discussing about pros/cons of small blocks in r/Bitcoin and DDoS on large block nodes since Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin ABC..

The concerns about the trade-offs with block size have been there for a long time indeed, and we've come a long way with optimizing transactions and still keeping fees low while accessing the ledger via Bitcoin Cash VS forcing transactions to layer 2 side-chains via Bitcoin Core.

[xorcist]

> when those same people removed Gavin Andresen's commit access

It's important to tell the whole story here. Gavin stepped back as lead maintainer and appointed Wladimir. No one else.

Maintainership is the sole reason to have commit acccess. All changes to the software are made as pull requests. And commit access is only needed to merge these pull requests. Nobody commits directly on master without going through a pull request, not even maintainers.

Being the maintainer of an open source project is hard work and can be quite thankless at times. The role is one of a glorified janitor while still requiring the highest both technical and people skills.

It is not surprising people only do this for a few years, and as far as I can tell Gavin did a great job. I don't think that is in dispute. But he should not have commit access when he is no longer maintaining the software.

(It may also be of interest that Gavin stepped back from maintaining the software in order to focus on his role as "chief scientist" for something called the "Bitcoin Foundation". This foundation was comprised of a number of noteworthy people whose names keeps appearing and re-appearing in MLM schemes, "hacked" exchanges, and/or premined coins. Gavin may be the sole exception.)

[nighthawk24]

Gavin being silenced is just a tip of the iceberg out of the continual banning and censorship of people discussing ideas around scaling Bitcoin Core chain since 2016. Most of the folks have left for other projects since then and all BTC is left is as a tether propped exchange pair while merchants give up on accepting BTC (thanks RBF too).

Bitcoin Cash on the other hand has been gaining merchant acceptance and I've enjoyed using BCH same like I did enjoy using BTC since 2012. The honeybadger of P2P electronic cash is truly unstoppable.

[xorcist]

That's stretching the truth far too thin. Gavin was never being "silenced" by anyone. Ask himself yourself, he replies to email. It was very much his decision, and while he may have held some controversial opinions in the community, he never let this interfere with maintaining the software which he did in the best professional manner.

He makes no secret about his disappointment with some of the decisions (or, rather, non-decisions) around the project as of late, but this was several years after he stepped down maintaining the software in favor of his chief scientist role for the foundation.

[nullc]

> led by Adam Back

Adam, the only person who's name is mentioned in the body of the bitcoin whitepaper, was happily using Bitcoin long before creating a company to support it. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=225463.msg2371674#ms... though Adam has never been actively involved with the bitcoin software project itself-- beyond some mailing list discussions and such.

Aside, the numbers on the website you linked are randomly generated nonsense. Embarrassingly for its author, their made up numbers which are trying to claim to be astronomical fail to make their point because they're not that high when compared to other highly paying tech companies ( https://drive.google.com/file/d/19ne7ccUdOWewD4rFDQjjnQEJDgs... ).

That whole allegation is odd. Blockstream has (had?) a program where a significant part of employee pay was in the form of pre-purchased Bitcoin which vested over time. This was intended to create a significant incentive for employees to see bitcoin's value grow-- specifically to address concerns that somehow Blockstream could create incentives against that when it employed a couple long time contributors. ... it turns out that buying Bitcoin at $450/each was a really good deal, and it panned out well for employees. It worked exactly as advertised, and some anonymous troll is spinning it as some kind of fraud?! Weird.

> 8MB Hong Kong Agreement when Adam himself flew to the meeting overnight(as an individual) to attack the agreement, then when a 2MB NYA agreement was finalized and signed by the groups of miners, again the small blockers attacked it in favor of SegWit,

Not going along with a proposal you think is bad is not an "attack"-- it's the actualization of your own personal freedom.

> The really abusive attack was when those same people removed Gavin Andresen's commit access

Gavin's commit access was removed by Wladimir, -- not one of the people associated with Adam or our company. When it was removed it had been completely unused for a year and barely used for several years. Its ultimate removal was triggered by Gavin loudly endorsing an obvious scammer as being Satoshi which was especially concerning given his comments about "handing the repository over" to 'Satoshi'.

https://laanwj.github.io/2016/05/06/hostility-scams-and-movi...

Good security practices should have had the access dropped long before then, and he'd been asked by Wladimir to resign them but kept responding that he'd sleep on it. Wladimir had wanted to avoid the drama of revoking them, but once Gavin was loudly endorsing a scammer the threat of poorly maintained access seemed a lot more serious.

> he had been leading Bitcoin development alongside Satoshi

Wladimir (and the other people you are insulting) were also there back when Satoshi was still active. Even back in 2011 Wladimir was the most active contributor, with two commits for every one by Gavin (348:152). In 2010, Satoshi made 215 commits and Gavin made 35.

Leading in a open source collaboration is a complicated question. Gavin was an extremely valued contributor, including valued for his public speaking at a time when many of us were keeping a low profile because we were really concerned that our involvement in Bitcoin might result in legal prosecution. That, however, doesn't mean he was leading in strong sense like you'd apply to the leader of a business. If you look at actual decision making in the project it, once Satoshi was gone it was always an extensive collaboration.

This fact is why e.g. some people have falsely accused me of controlling it when I didn't have any particular authority at all, just a history of reasonable insight and persuasive arguments.

> and DDoS

Bitcoin nodes got DOS attacked with some regularity in the past by people trying to interfere with block propagation to cause competing blocks to get orphaned (and still do, though less often now-- because we implemented countermeasures to make those attacks much less effective). There is no evidence that anyone saw any DOS attacks other than those. None of the people I know would have bothered not expected a DOS attack to do anything: the system is designed to be designed to resist DOS attacks.

The falsity of those "nodes" was also demonstrated by their near overnight disappearance once the pumping of competing altcoins stopped...

> we've come a long way with optimizing transactions

I don't believe that bitcoin abc has deployed any scalablity improvement not previously existing in Bitcoin. The primary one in it over the original p2p protocol, compact blocks, was designed by myself...

[nighthawk24]

> was happily using Bitcoin long before creating a company to support it.

His public comments would say otherwise and many doubt that his company is supporting Bitcoin vs handicapping it for private interests.

> Gavin loudly endorsing an obvious scammer

Classic nullc way of putting it.. Gavin simply said that CSW was able to sign a message from one of the keys he had interacted with Satoshi's account. The signing itself has be debunked many a times, Gavin did not endorse CSW as Satoshi himself, like giving bitcoin repo access to CSW..

The entire drama created a path for new folks like Adam who showed up in 2013(from your bitcointalk article) to see opportunity to gain control of the core client.

Bitcoin Cash handles this by making sure to have multiple implementations.

CompatBlocks is just one of the developments that BCH has completed and released https://cash.coin.dance/development#completed

Overall, only time will tell how the Bitcoin story will play out. For a fact though, we have 2 chains developed centrally planned (BTC & BSV) while BCH keeps the checks & balances of power with distributed teams.

If you are feeling like going on a debunking spree, I'd like to see you refute the sources here https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/ekykl9/bitcoin_cash_th...

[nullc]

> CompatBlocks is just one of the developments that BCH has completed and released

wtf. man, stop taking credit for other people's work. Compact blocks were completed and released by Matt Corallo, myself, and the other Bitcoin developers at the time long before BCH existed. It had absolutely no involvement from any BCH developer.

> many doubt that his company is supporting Bitcoin vs handicapping it

When your link in the earlier post is an article ranting about how much money blockstream employees are making because it pays its employees partially denominated in Bitcoin and Bitcoin has increased a lot in value.

> Gavin did not endorse CSW as Satoshi himself

In fact Gavin stated that he was convinced Wright was Satoshi long before he ever met him or witnessed any signing.

> folks like Adam [...] to gain control of the core client.

Adam doesn't have any control over Bitcoin Core and never has. I don't think anything he's ever proposed has ended up in in it, in fact.

> Cash handles this by making sure to have multiple implementations

Actually, BCH's constant hardforks have killed many of those multiple implementations. "Bitcoin XT", "Bitcoin Classic", "Bcoin" to name some of those. Ironically the old BitcoinXT from back when it was Bitcoin software ... happily still works on Bitcoin. So you have it backwards: it's bitcoin that preserves people's freedom to use different implementations.

[phillipsjk]

Compact block were heavily inspired by Bitcoin Unlimited's "Thin Blocks".

[nullc]

It is another untruthful claim.

The original design document for compact blocks is was published (and last modified) on Dec 25, 2015. https://people.xiph.org/~greg/efficient.block.xfer.txt

The earliest work for Bitcoin Unlimited's "Thin Blocks" was on Jan 10th 2016: https://bitco.in/forum/threads/buip010-passed-xtreme-thinblo...

Both were motivated by an earlier effort by Bitcoin developers Matt Corallo and Pieter Wuille, https://buildingbitcoin.org/bitcoin-dev/log-2013-12-27.html#... (which Pieter had implemented, but was found to not work so well, https://buildingbitcoin.org/bitcoin-dev/log-2013-12-28.html#...).

The fact that in Bitcoin we took the time to fully think through, write a clear and complete specification https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0152.mediawi... , and thoroughly test and review the implementation before deploying it while BU has been occasionally abused by the BU organization and their supporters to dishonestly claim that compact blocks came later (or were somehow derived) from their work.

Users on the sidelines were easily deceived by this marketing because BU rushed their implementation into production while Bitcoin took a more deliberative process.

BU's "thinblocks" implementation was, in fact, severely flawed both due to an implementation vulnerability that resulted in almost every BU node on the network being crashed near simultaniously, and due to a design error introduced because BU's "chief scientist" strongly believed that it was computationally intractable to produce a collision in the first 64-bit of transaction IDs (a sha2 hash), even though one can be computed on a fast desktop computer in seconds.

In fact, Bitcoin Cash developers went so far as to attempt to block the deployment of compact blocks by falsely claiming that it would somehow "disrupt the network": https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4xkqbk/core_intends_to... (It didn't.)

So the history is that: Bitcoin developers proposed and tested an idea for faster block propagation using filters and found it lacking. Later, it came up again as a possible way to mitigate segwit's bandwidth increase, so I wrote a design to address the known issues and we started working on implementing it. A few weeks later BU developers picked up the old work and started improving it. Within a couple months they had it deployed it in public and announced 'mission accomplished', but their deployment was unspecified and ultimately faulty. As a result of those issues and the superior relay latency of compact blocks thinblocks was replaced in the Bitcoin Cash network with the protocol from Bitcoin.

There is no common protocol feature in BU's xthinblocks that wasn't also in Bitcoin's original work that inspired both efforts. There could have been no influence on compact blocks' design by xthinblocks because it would have been physically impossible for there to be due to causality. That hasn't seemed to stop BU developers and people like you from repeating this lie.

Cheers.

[nighthawk24]

> wtf. man, stop taking credit for other people's work. Compact blocks were completed and released by Matt Corallo, myself, and the other Bitcoin developers at the time. It had absolutely no involvement from any BCH developer.

Sorry, I did not say or mean to take any credit, all I'm pointing out is that BCH was able to get that tech out in prod.

> BCH's constant hardforks have killed many of those multiple implementations. "Bitcoin XT", "Bitcoin Classic", "Bcoin" to name some of those. Ironically the old BitcoinXT from back when it was Bitcoin software ... happily still works on Bitcoin. So you have it backwards: it's bitcoin that preserves people's freedom to use different implementations.

This is flat out wrong, the BCH developers meet monthly to review roadmap and sync up on development in a decentralized fashion. The clients that were not maintained were deprecated as expected, nothing out of the ordinary here. The Bitcoin XT client was compatible with BCH chain when Core activated the SegWit.

The bi-annual BCH client upgrade actually helps keeping users empowered as to which ruleset they accept, a choice which is not available for Bitcoin Core users as they are held hostage to the code that governs their money.