[chemmail]

Blockstream bought out most of the the btc devs who had commit ability. Their end goal is to cripple btc to where it is today. The goal of this is to build an unnecessary product they can charge for on a second level. Think skimming money like charge cards do, but offering no real advantage or service beyond that. So far they have found building a new network neigh impossible. Hence the memes: Lightning only 18 months away, after 3 years of "development." You can find hilarious round table interviews with Adam Back where one asks how they can use btc for transactions like at bars with the fees dwarfing the regular transaction. Adam Back suggested using an IOU network out of paper or maybe build an IOU app for that. Can you believe that? Hilarious!

[ineedasername]

"out of paper"

Sure but it would have to be special paper, hard to duplicate with security measures, probably special ink, weird watermarks, a whole bunch of things. Should probably name it something other than IOU to distinguish it from normal IOUs. I've always liked Johny Cash's music, maybe we could derive a name from him.

[grubles]

This is incredible tinfoil-y nonsense that I find hard to believe is even posted on a website of HN's caliber.

[CyberDildonics]

This is all true and anyone who payed attention to more than the heavily censored propaganda soaked /r/bitcoin saw it happen in real time. Years of saying that a throughput of more than a few kilobytes was impossible while one of the devs repeatedly - and this is not a joke - stated the sun revolved around the earth.

[gruez]

> Years of saying that a throughput of more than a few kilobytes was impossible

I don't think anyone thought that was impossible from a technical standpoint, just from a decentralization standpoint.

>while one of the devs repeatedly - and this is not a joke - stated the sun revolved around the earth.

source?

[CyberDildonics]

> I don't think anyone thought that was impossible from a technical standpoint, just from a decentralization standpoint.

That's the same thing and it makes zero sense. Most people never sync with the chain and those that want to only need bandwidth far less than watching a low res youtube video. Validating blocks is at least 600x faster than real time on a computer from last decade. I would love to hear how you can rationalize a statement like that. I watched people repeat this for years and when asked for explanations never saw anyone come close to something coherent.

> source?

Here he is denying evolution and claiming the sun revolves around the earth:

https://forums3.armagetronad.net/viewtopic.php?p=203752&sid=...

Here he is claiming that slavery is only "discouraged".

https://np.reddit.com/r/DebateAChristian/comments/4q2cej/why...

[gruez]

> Most people never sync with the chain and those that want to only need bandwidth far less than watching a low res youtube video. [...] I would love to hear how you can rationalize a statement like that.

Except you know, the storage costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570915

[CyberDildonics]

Over 11 years, bitcoin's full blockchain has grown to 1/25th of a $150 hard drive.

When people say that you can't have more than a few kilobytes per second of throughput because VISA does 150M transactions per day, it doesn't make them sound like they have thought this through, it makes them sound like they are grasping at straws to try to rationalize nonsense that they want for reasons they won't say.

There are lots of cryptocurrencies now, no chain is going to suddenly have 150 million transactions per day while all the others die off. Even then, it would cost a single person far less in disk space than the electricity to run their refrigerator and again, few people even sync with the chain.

These are the same nonsense recycled bizarre statements that get made over and over. Why do the people in charge of bitcoin push propaganda that has no connection to reality? That's the real question.

[gruez]

> Over 11 years, bitcoin's full blockchain has grown to 1/25th of a $150 hard drive.

No doubt due to the 1MB/block limit that's in place.

>There are lots of cryptocurrencies now, no chain is going to suddenly have 150 million transactions per day while all the others die off

So large transaction volumes aren't going to be an issue because there's also going to be multiple blockchains to spread the transaction volume across? I'm not sure that's any better, because you'd either be heavily dependent on intermediary exchange services and be exposed to exchange rate fluctuations, or having to keep multiple crypto wallets synced and having to juggle disk space between them.

>Even then, it would cost a single person far less in disk space than the electricity to run their refrigerator

The problem is that the cost compounds, so comparing the cost to running a refrigerator isn't exactly fair. A refrigerator costs around $90/year to run today, 5 years ago, and 5 years from now. On the other hand, running a full node might cost $90/year today, but 5 years from now would cost $450 upfront + $90/year.

>and again, few people even sync with the chain.

This goes back to the decentralization debate. Needing a huge upfront investment to fully participate in the network is very much anti-decentralization.

[gruez]

>The goal of this is to build an unnecessary product they can charge for on a second level. [...] Hence the memes: Lightning only 18 months away, after 3 years of "development."

Can you elaborate on this? Isn't lightning free and open source? I'm not sure how that's going to be monetized.

[grubles]

Yes it is FOSS and multiple different implementations from different development groups / companies are available including c-lightning, LND, and eclair (I'm probably missing one or two).

The claim is truly a meme -- one that can only be laughed at when faced with the reality that I mentioned above.

[FreeTrade]

Bitcoin adoption was growing and working well for monetary transfer but its capacity was throttled to encourage use of an unproven technology, the lightning network.

The claim, as far as understand it, is that Blockstream supported this plan, anticipating its failure, while working on its own replacement technology, Liquid.

Ironically, both liquid and lightning appear to be failing. Nb, both grubles and nullc have some close relationship with Blockstream.

[nullc]

> Bitcoin adoption was growing and working well for monetary transfer but its capacity was throttled to encourage use of an unproven technology, the lightning network.

What? Bitcoin's capacity has been limited its entire life, the limits were coded in by Bitcoin's creator. The limits are integral to protecting Bitcoin's decentralization, and have nothing in particular to do with lightning. Alternative blockchains without functional limits such as "BSV" are so bloated that it is practically unreasonable to run nodes, leaving participants blinding trusting third parties.

These trade-offs were well understood long long ago (e.g. https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&action=h... or https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3118.msg44789#msg447... or https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg342...).

Liquid isn't some replacement technology for Bitcoin, it's something it's a distributed-centeralized (federated) system that can do things Bitcoin and other completely decenteralized systems cannot do like offer instantaneous settlement. It trades off decentralization to for latency. When users have funds in exchange they've already substantially lost their decentralization benefits, for for e.g. rapid arb between exchanges this tradeoff is probably a good one.

Bitcoin gives people the freedom to use their money in a bunch of different ways.

> nullc have some close relationship with Blockstream.

I haven't have any relationship at all with blockstream for over three years now.

[FreeTrade]

>Bitcoin's capacity has been limited its entire life, the limits were coded in by Bitcoin's creator.

I researched this and found that Bitcoin had no initial capacity limit and that one was added as a temporary spam measure, not as a design choice.

When I see misrepresentations like that, I'm more suspicious of everything you've written.

[nullc]

> I researched this and found that Bitcoin had no initial capacity limit

That is simply untrue. From the very first version it had two capacity limits, an explicit one (https://github.com/trottier/original-bitcoin/blob/master/src...), and a smaller implicit and unintentional one (of about 500k) owing to the maximum locks that could be grabbed in a single BDB transaction.

Satoshi later reduced the explicit limit further and provided no explanation for doing so ( https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/a30b56ebe76ffff9f9... ). However, there was no issue with spam at the time or previously, nor mention of spam, and the network already had a separate and highly functional spam limiting mechanism. Had he intended to make the limit simply temporary he could have trivially programmed it that way-- e.g. as we did when we discovered the ~500kb limit, we wrote a rule that limited blocks to 500kb and then expired a few months later.

The claim that it was a "temporary anti-spam limit" is a novel construction that I don't believe I saw ever claimed until many years after that change.

At least by the time Satoshi went inactive he was well aware of the trade-offs: "Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices." ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg289... )

Perhaps you should consider conducting "research" by having an open discussion with an actual expert rather than just reading manipulative tracts designed to sucker people into buying alternatives? :)

I'm happy to direct you to primary reference material even though you continue to treat me rudely and disrespectfully.

[FreeTrade]

It looks to me like Satoshi clearly intended for this to be a temporary limit that would be raised over time - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg153...

>It can be phased in, like:

>if (blocknumber > 115000) > maxblocksize = largerlimit

I did try to have an open discussion on r/Bitcoin, but what I found was that answers to my questions were removed, and even my questions were removed. My conclusion was that that forum existed to push a narrative rather than have an open discussion.

I did see that Adam Back was challenged to a public debate on these issues, which I was very interested to see, and might have found very enlightening. Adam Back refused to defend his positions in debate though.

I've read a lot of your responses in various forums too, and while you're obviously very clever, I do find whenever I dig a little deeper into what you're saying, that you've misrepresented facts to support a narrative.

[gruez]

That doesn't answer my initial question, how is blockstream supposed to monetize lightning, or anything for that matter?

>The claim, as far as understand it, is that Blockstream supported this plan, anticipating its failure, while working on its own replacement technology, Liquid.

I took a quick skim of blockstream's materials on liquid, and it sounds like it's something totally different to lightning? They describe it as some sort of ripple-like network for transacting in tokens? eg.

>Liquid uses an approach to consensus called Strong Federations. A Strong Federation removes the need for costly Proof of Work mechanisms and replaces it with the collective actions of a group of mutually distrusting participants called functionaries.

[FreeTrade]

The claim is not that Blockstream intended to profit from Lightning. Rather they used the promise of Lightning to throttle Bitcoin, in order to profit from Liquid.

[kallewoof]

Nonsense. Liquid is directly dependent on Bitcoin's success.

And as has been stated before, Blockstream employees got a chunk of their pay check in bitcoin. Do you really think they'd try to "throttle" their own livelihood?

[gruez]

Okay, how are they profiting from liquid? Moreover, what's liquid's "moat"? What's stopping me from copying liquid's software (seems to be open source) and making a clone that charges 0% fees?

[nullc]

This is just an outright lie and malicious defamation from top to f*king bottom. Hateful nonsense by scam promoters like you turns HN into a toxic enviroment.

[etrabroline]

Could you expand on why you think that? I very much agree with the substantive arguments made by chemmail, and would like to hear yours.

[nullc]

Because it's just pure nonsense, untrue, and totally unsubstantiated (and thoroughly off-topic for the thread). Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.

Rather than any substantive argument, it merely lists a set of wild allegations.

But since you asked nicely I'll break it down sentence by sentence.

> Blockstream bought out most of the the btc devs who had commit ability

Blockstream hired myself and Pieter, two of six people at the time that had commit access to the Bitcoin software project at a time when none of the many "bitcoin companies" of the day were willing to fund developers. Though I was independently wealthy at that point, supporting my own work on Bitcoin meant spending down my Bitcoin or not working on it most of the time, so being able to get funded to work on Bitcoin and well aligned technology was appealing. Two people is not most of by any measure.

The Bitcoin software has no particular control over the Bitcoin system, but none the less we took measures to reduce any potential conflict of interest: We were substantially paid denominated in Bitcoin (pre-purchased when the company was founded), so our compensation was directly tied to Bitcoin's value. The company took no copyright interest in our work on Bitcoin, and released all our patents for public use (both under defensive licensing and the IPA). Pieter and I both had employment agreements that allowed us to quit at and continue to get paid for a year as additional insurance against any unethical conduct by the company. I also dropped my commit access.

Neither of us continue to work for blockstream, I haven't for three years now.

> Their end goal is to cripple btc to where it is today.

Blockstream hasn't done anything to "cripple" bitcoin, nor would it have made any financial sense for its employees (100% of whom were (and I believe still are) substantially compensated in Bitcoin). Quite the opposite: Blockstream's purpose was to build on-ramps to Bitcoin to help the impedance mismatch with traditional finance systems, and to monetize Bitcoin unrelated applications of the same technology (e.g. private systems) and use that to fund development work in the public interest (particularly at a time when no one else was doing so).

> The goal of this is to build an unnecessary product they can charge for on a second level. Think skimming money like charge cards do, but offering no real advantage or service beyond that. So far they have found building a new network neigh impossible.

I can't even figure out what this is attempting to talk about.

> Lightning only 18 months away, after 3 years of "development."

Lightning is a large Bitcoin industry effort involving dozens of independent developers and a half dozen companies. It isn't blockstream specific. It's just the logical progression of the payment channel idea initially described by Satoshi and baked into Bitcoin since day one. (And for a weird on-topic tangent: It's a secure implementation of the "Ripple" concept which Ripple labs bought the name of and stuck on an entirely unrelated system.)

It's not "18 months away" it exists now, it's widely used, and it works pretty well.

However, cryptocurrency for small retail payments remains a pretty uncompelling use case: It is extremely tax disadvantaged in many jurisdiction's, including the US: mandatory per transaction gains tax reporting. And retail transactions are extremely well addressed by existing solutions-- would you prefer to pay with the hardest money available, or would you prefer to pay with a credit card that is already accepted virtually everywhere, provides substantial anti-fraud protection, and extends you 28 days of credit with several percent negative fees for debt in constantly debased fiat? It's important that people have the option-- and they do-- but expecting widespread use in this application over night is fantasy.

(And not a particular problem for Blockstream, which doesn't make any fees off transactions using lightning, contrary to the parent posters allegations)

> You can find hilarious round table interviews with Adam Back where one asks how they can use btc for transactions like at bars with the fees dwarfing the regular transaction. Adam Back suggested using an IOU network out of paper or maybe build an IOU app for that.

I have no idea the context there but I can only imagine that someone asked about buying single drinks with Bitcoin and he mentioned that it's customary for people at a bar to open a tab and settle up at the end of the night. Kind of ironic that Adam, who's a teetotaler, is more aware of how bars commonly work than his critics. :)

In any case, Bitcoin is a global broadcast network whos long term decentralized security is utterly and totally dependant on getting large amounts paid in transaction fees. That has always been part of the trade-off: Centralized systems can offer extremely low fees. The only arguments about avoiding market rate fees in Bitcoin have also been argument to unlimit the supply of coins and pay for security through debasement, which is an obvious non-starter.

To the extent that there was ever even any debate over that, it long pre-dated blockstream's existence (e.g. https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&action=h... ).

[etrabroline]

Great response. Thank you for taking the time to write it. I'm curious why did you get interested in Bitcoin to begin with? If credit cards and fiat currencies are just fine, gold is still a pretty good store of value, why work on crypto at all?

[nullc]

Being just fine for a vast majority of transactions isn't "just fine": Being able to transact privately and without unaccountable private companies randomly censoring your transactions is critical to human rights. The capriciousness of institutional choke points deprives people of due process and makes it impossible or unreasonably complex to make automated systems that transact autonomously without constant human supervision and intervention.

But these are all issues of exceptional cases, where additional complexity, costs, or risks (e.g. from fraud due to irreversibility, key management liability, or loss due to exchange rate volatility) are acceptable costs of doing business. The vast majority of payments -- even by some hypothetical outlaw-freedom-fighter-bandit -- are extremely boring, low risk, and not likely to be subject to censorship. The value of being able to pay in Bitcoin primarily is that it exists if and when you need it. But on a daily basis for most boring non-international payments it isn't a big win.

I don't agree that gold is a good store of value at all. It's most commonly used form is a totally unauditable fractional-reserve (rehypothicated) censorship prone IOU. In physical form it is extremely expensive to secure, transport and transact with. It is easily seized both by state authorities and bandits. It's essentially unusable for international payments due to transport risks, which Bitcoin is extremely useful for international payments. It is easily forged in ways that are difficult and costly to detect (gold coated tungsten requires special instruments and potentially destructive tests to detect). There have been single incidents involving well over 2 billion dollars of fake gold at a time ( https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/Mystery-of-2bn-of-l... ). And if we ever figure out how to mine asteroids Gold will be no more valuable than the cost of dropping rocks from the sky. And as icing on top: Gold has even more disadvantageous tax treatment in the US than Bitcoin does!

Even if you use Bitcoin in a custodial way-- which essentially gives it all the positive properties of a centralized system, along with many of the negative one-- it still retains extremely powerful audit abilities, custodial Bitcoin can cheaply prove it isn't fractional reserve in an unforgable way, and it's still immune to central bank monetary policy whims. [Not that I advocate that-- I think custodial Bitcoin misses the point, but for applications that don't need Bitcoin's other properties it can be a reasonable alternative.]

If you're interested in my history with Bitcoin I did an interview on Bitcointalk a month ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5262967.msg55722022#...

[CyberDildonics]

It isn't defamation if it's true. You can get as upset as you want, but you can't delete what people say here like you can on /r/bitcoin.