[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.

[nullc]

I feel like you're not engaging in a good faith discussion here. Above you falsely accused me of dishonestly misrepresenting the initial capacity limit. I believe I demonstrated in an objective and indisputably way that you were mistaken. Rather than acknowledging your error about Bitcoin and the inappropriate insult, you've simply changed the subject.

What purpose is there to continuing the discussion if you're going to do that?

> clearly intended for this to be a temporary limit

This is in a thread with him loudly urging people to NOT change it, in a message responding to someone saying that it could never be changed. Saying that it isn't impossible to change something does not mean that it is merely temporary. A concrete retaining wall is permanent yet can still be torn down if people choose to do so.

What do you think of his much later statement that "Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices."?

> 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.

Where? If you demonstrated the kind of apparent bad faith approach you've done so here-- perhaps you should consider that you might have earned it?

If not, you might have just been made roadkill by an overactive immune system-- that subreddit was utterly mobbed by an endless stream of shill sockpuppet accounts arguing a particular agenda. :(

> I did see that Adam Back was challenged to a public debate on these issues

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning But also... who cares what he thinks?

If you wanted to see debate there are literally hundreds of kilobytes on the subject written by people who have been actually involved with developing the Bitcoin system.

[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?