Bitcoin Forum

I don't know if anyone noticed a small twitter war between Andreas Antonopoulos and Adam Back CEO of Blockstream.
Everyone could notice some hostility between this two happening and it is all connected with book about centralized blockchain (probably referring to his book Mastering ethereum).
It looks like that Andreas later deleted his tweet reply about Liquid (centralized sidechain developed by Blockstream) but some people saved it on time :)
I see Adam Back is tweeting a lot about USDT and L-BTC so I really don't know why he need to call out people like this, and it looks like hypocrisy  ::)

https://i.imgur.com/gb5QDZ0.jpg
https://twitter.com/aantonop/status/1420249687899185152

they should all stop talking and work on something


in Adam's case, he has at least produced useful stuff in the past.

Andreas started here on bitcointalk, and was quite determined to become a "bitcoin celebrity" right from the start. he's never done anything useful except regurgitate other people's ideas using an "excited" tone of voice. grrrrrrreat work Andreas, really ::)


but to reiterate, I'd respect them both more if they were talking less and working on something

This is interesting as I think we call all likely admit or rather likely feel that these two are absolute legends in the space.  I don't know Adam Back as well as I know Andreas Antonopoulos and his work ( Mastering Bitcoin was the first bitcoin book I ever read, which was kinda crazy being that I don't know how to code or understand cryptography), but I do know Back is a cypherpunk and a pioneer in this space.  Also a possible candidate for Satoshi or someone on the the "Satoshi team". 

What is Liquid all about?

I somewhat dislike Blockstream people as well. Huge props to Adam Back due to his contributions to Bitcoin, but seriously. Both people have had huge contributions to this space in general, and it's not like Andreas is shilling BSV or something. People may or may not like Ethereum, but it's a decent experiment; and I'm saying this as a person that has a huge allocation to bitcoin.

Whether or not all he did was to regurgitate, being able to explain things simply to noobies is a really important thing. Heck, it worked for me back in the day.

Banks I know you know your shit ( and always very helpful anytime I have a technical question, which is always much appreciated ) but I can't agree with you here.  Andreas has done a lot for the bitcoin community.  Maybe he has wanted to always become a "bitcoin celebrity" but he's also taught likely hundreds of thousands of people about bitcoin and does so in a very clear and understandable way.  Mastering bitcoin was a pretty good book that taught a lot of people as well.  Andreas has spent a lot of his own personal time teaching and helping others to learn without asking for anything in return.  I'm not saying he's on Adams level as I know he's a legit cypherpunk who's been around since day 1, but he's still done quite a lot of good for the bitcoin community as a whole.  I'm curious why you don't agree?

If he contributes and help thousands of people to learn basics and even advanced about Bitcoin, I respect him.

Additionally, I respect Andreas more when he rejected 10 BTC from HEX to shill that project. He also gave a free warning to the community. A good person, indeed.

Source (https://twitter.com/aantonop/status/1293974232377032705)

Joining something since day 1 does not mean anyone is the best or among the best.

Andreas probably doesn't have an in depth knowledge about the liquid sidechain so he decided to back out? I honestly to see a debate between the two but I don't want anyone to lose at the same time hehe. I think Adam has a higher chance of winning the "Ethereum is centralized" argument than Andreas "Liquid is centralized".

But still warrants a large amount of respect for being a pioneer, one of the foundations so to speak. But if it doesn't appeal to someone that Adam has been there since day 1, perhaps it will that he was directly mentioned by Satoshi himself/herself/themselves in the whitepaper. Adam's Hashcash must have played an inspiring and very significant role in Satoshi's development of Bitcoin.

"...we will need to use a proof-of-work system similar to Adam Back's Hashcash..." - Satoshi Nakamoto

Anyway, much respect to both.

Wow, I am of a totally different opinion. Andreas Antonopoulos put an unbelievable amount of effort into bringing Bitcoin closer to the whole world in under stable words and phrases. He has had a major impact on building a global community from literally every country to support Bitcoin. Saying that he was aiming at becoming a celebrity is like accusing a great singer of giving concerts in order to become a celebrity. Antonopoulos is an outstanding thinker and explainer. We owe a lot to him for sure.

I admire both advocates of bitcoin.
Andreas Antonopoulos is a very respected leader in the crypto space and his work has been very valuable in educating people. He is a reference worldwide. By hiding Adam Back's tweet he did so so as not to confuse his audience.

Adam Back is highly respected as well. Some have pointed out that he could be Satoshi but we all know that he is not. Taking a look at his profile on Twitter, I found what OP says. Apparently Adam is testing the Liquid network.
What is the Liquid network about?

#BlockstreamDidNothingWrong

I don't like Ethereum, but I wouldn't go as far as to attack people for supporting it, there are tons of way scammier projects than it. But I don't like the hyping of "blockchain technology", there's very little examples of succesful blockchain applications, and Bitcoin shouldn't be viewed as an application of blockchain, because blockchain is just one part of Bitcoin protocol. Hyping blockchain for no reason is exactly why we have tons of scams and defrauded investors and countless useless altcoins to this day.

most "great singers" are faking it one way or another, and have been for years.

there are far more great singers who will never become well known, because their body/face isn't as beautiful as their voice. They sing backup for the "great" singers (i.e. the celebrity narcissists), so that the good voices make the "lead" singer sound better than they really are

there are a few rare exceptions to what I just said, but it's subjective anyway (who's got a good singing voice/who's good to look at)



nothing is for free

Andreas saw a gaping big space, shaped like a celebrity who talks about Bitcoin all the time, and he channeled himself directly into that void. There's nothing exceptional about him, he was just the first person to do it.

I agree with the perspective he's coming from, but please, quit it with the hero worship. He could just as soon do a full 180 on you, and start telling us we're all "helping murderers and slave traders", unless we start using special wallet software that takes away all that Bitcoin freedom. Personality cults are dangerous, and I've been seeing the warning signs of that with Andreas Antonopoulos for years.

I mean listen to yourself: "hey! don't talk about mmmmyyyy Andreas like that!" ::)

---

I'm not letting Adam Back off the hook incidentally, I'm not aware of him doing anything substantial in Bitcoin at all. He seems to be good at making waves on twitter also, but when neither of them are worth much, why does anyone care?

I think Carlton is right here, because one way or another, bitcoins have gained enough fame to add some shine to the personality of people who either start using or talk about it. Antonopaulos did a lot for bitcoins, but he can't put all those things apart from btc of which names were used by him. However, it's all I see about falling for Elon Musk or following Antonopaulos because netizens never go the same way all the time.

remind me again. how many lines of code adam back contributed to bitcoin.
yes adam back became the purse holder of a company that paid devs. and the whip master of the devs..
but how much code did he actually write
(kinda rhetorical i already checked the github contributor list)

maybe just maybe you dont care about anyone unless they are big names with big pockets that have big whips to actually get devs to do stuff..
EG because say andreas is loud but has no dev whip. you dont respect andreas

Never said Blockstream did something bad; I just heavily dislike their Twitter fiasco. Because let's be honest, there are loudmouths on both the Bitcoin maxi camp and the Ethereum maxi camp. In which both camps are wasting their time attacking each other on Twitter rather than just focusing more energy on better things. I simply just prefer the likes of Aantonop which focuses more on uplifting this industry rather than bringing each other down.

Unlike Andreas, Adam Back is a bit two-faced.

https://i.ibb.co/mX7gtW8/ab1.png

https://i.ibb.co/4tCGP9c/ab2.png

https://i.ibb.co/yspY1Vy/ab3.png

If you don't know what's going on there, Adam sequentially

1. shit on altcoins
2. shilled an altcoin
3. shit on altcoins

and I gotta say, disappointingly few people seemed to have blinked an eye.

Don't care if Andreas was always a fameseeker or whatever, he's made Bitcoin interesting to hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of people. Adam on the other hand... I used to entertain the idea that he might be Satoshi, but now I'd be pretty disappointed if he was.


I dunno. Same question can be asked of the entirety of crypto twitter.

That's a very unfair comparison between these two.
Everything Adam Back has ever done was to benefit himself, from Blockstream to the centralized shitnetwork called liquid.
Andreas Antonopoulos on the other hand has been helpful to many newcomers by teaching them how bitcoin words "correctly" instead of giving them some bad information like many others do because they don't understand how things work.

I don't think that educating a lot of people about Bitcoin with books he wrote, and with his videos on youtube channel, could be called ''doing nothing useful''.
Not everyone can be good coder to be consider helpful for Bitcoin.

I don't personally dislike people who work for Blockstream, or in case of Adam Back man who is CEO of Blockstream, but there are so many things they can be criticized for, including Liquid or his tweets and retweets about USDT Tether like one below, so I wonder is he now supporting Tether because they need it on their Liquid project and centralized ''LiquiDEX'':

https://i.imgur.com/rpaYB8k.jpg
https://twitter.com/Tether_to/status/1419693609075580928

https://i.imgur.com/5okn4K2.jpg
https://twitter.com/Blockstream/status/1409974632619425795

Oh yea that INX fiasco. Pretty much multiple bitcoin maximalists that were totally against Ethereum were suddenly invested in this INX thing lol. Total hypocrisy.

And don't even get me started with Max Keiser's MAXCoin.

I really don't know what much he has done for Bitcoin as well, besides probably Satoshi using Adam's Hashcash as an inspiration or something.

completely agree, we're even pretty hypocritical ourselves here, because we're engaging in... similar behavior right here on bitcointalk



right. it's not nothing, as satoshi used it somewhat, but hashcash itself never went anywhere, and that was a long time ago now. there's almost no reason to remember hashcash except in the context of bitcoin.

Adam also came with the 2-4-8 blocksize proposal, and also extension blocks, both of which caught basically no-one's attention at all.

nah. it was many people in the community literally screaming for some onchain transaction count increases. even compromising to 2 4 8.

adams employees and subsequently the employee's fanboys(which carlton was one of them)  then went on a obstruction campaign to fight against on chain scaling because it didnt fit blockstreams business models.

you cant say adam thought of the idea and the community declined. .. it was the community that thought it up and adams employees, clients and fans declined

even the pretend offering of 2mb in 2017 NYA by one of adams investors didnt flourish because once they got their coerced requirement fulfilled(SW) the backtracked on the 2mb offering that came with the coercion

stop trying to twist history. to make adam look like a good guy

edit to respond to below
doomad has not even mentioned anything about adam back or adam backs financial backing.
making doomad the troll here
adam backs affiliation with the barry silbert NYA which flipped 45%to an unprecedented and naturally impossible 100%in just a couple weeks. shows how coercive that action was
and yes its on topic. because it involved Adam backs whipping hand between his financial backing and the devs

anyone that doesnt want to talk about the NYA actions. is obviously siding with adam backs position
very funny doomad always jumps in to dismiss it every time its mentioned. what does doomad want to hide so much.. the proof that it happened is in the immutable blockchain. cant hide it.
the NYA block flag and the subsequent lack of native blocks the NYA threatened to remove.
can be seen in block data. the lack of the promise of a 2mb native limit (without the cludgy /WSF).
 is available in the blockchain.
doomad will always lose his troll game because the blockchain proves him wrong. maybe he should give up trying to dismiss the truth

Sounds like playful banter to me.  Hardly all-out war.



We'll bow to your remarkable expertise in that department.   ::)

Any opportunity to whine about the size of blocks, though, right?  No matter how far off topic.  Manic-Obsessive little weirdo.

This specific one actually might just be some light jabs from both sides, but Adam firing shots to different people(even the sort of Bitcoin OGs like Erik Voorhees and in this case, Andreas) just because they're interested/involved in other project is really nothing new. Dude sure loves to start unnecessary feuds on Twitter for a guy his age.

Meh... I don't claim to be an "influencer."


Woah... you mean you're not happy with the 1 MB block size cap?? Who would have guessed???


Literally nobody has done that here franky. Almost everybody went the opposite direction actually.

While I do agree that they should just drop this, and stop spending useful energy on debating with each other, and actually go back to contributing to the community. Both of these guys have definitely contributed to Bitcoin in one way or another. Andreas has some excellent books out there, and while they might not be to your taste, they have definitely piqued the interest of the readers enough to increase adoption, and have also taught some fundamentals of Bitcoin to them too.

We need public figures like Andreas, and we need people like Adam Beck who can contribute to the technical side. Whether your a fan of them both or not, they have contributed positively to the community, and while I most definitely don't agree with everything they say or do, I can recognize the importance of both of their jobs.

It is pretty stupid, and doesn't really make sense for them to be bickering with each other though.

I do of course respect your point of view, but I stand by my argument: Antonopoulos does have an exceptional talent to put things together in a comprehensible and convincing way. Could that ability be used for bad as much as it can be used for good? Yes, but who are we to judge what is good and what is bad. I assume you are holding Bitcoin, so I would argue that Antonopoulos did a lot of good for you. If I were a person opposing Bitcoin, I would argue Antonopoulos did a lot of bad stuff to me. The point being, he spread the message extremely effectively in favor of those believing in Bitcoin. Whether you like his style or not does not matter, he definitely got a lot of people involved earlier than they might have been without him traveling around the globe educating people about Bitcoin.
Now you may say whether I can statistically prove his impact: of course not. But from what I perceive and perceived in my personal environment, the vast majority of people involved with Bitcoin watched his videos nonstop from the very beginning, using his words and terms to argue in favor of the technology. I visited several events with him and he filled halls with up to 3,000 people pretty early on. Is it a cult? Is he a celebrity? Who cares, but one thing is for sure: if you are holding Bitcoin, he worked in your favor.

It is called hypocrisy when he takes a jab at others like this (eg. for writing a book on a shitcoin's technology) while he himself is known for advertising a shitcoin that was obviously a scam and he probably got paid to do so.

you're both making them all sound worse

Adam certainly sounds terrible, but lest we forget bitcoin celebrities of yesteryear such as Erik Voorhees, who was absolutely on-board with an attempted corporate-backed takeover (with various other bitcoin celebrities cheerleading, and who all now hope we forgot... )


reiterating my point: celebrities who make a career out of talking about anything have an uncanny tendency to use their entire career as a confidence trick.

1. gain credentials/qualifications somehow (many ways to do this)
2. gain followers
3. repeat steps 1-2 for months or years
4. trick the followers into following you off the edge of a cliff
5. your real boss (some rich asshole) pays you off

this does not happen just in bitcoin, the "media" is full of these characters on a constant loop. someone like Andreas worries me, because if he pulls a trick on you, it will be very smart and very significant simultaneously, precisely because people trust him so much

He already pulled off the trick, which is making Bitcoin sound appealing to a mass audience. Explaining Bitcoin to Joe Rogan so he "gets it" is quite a feat, for example.

Doing what Andreas does as a profession is pretty tricky enough as it is, and he's already done quite well for himself.

He just doesn't strike me as the type to use his powers for bad. But if he does some day I'll remember this thread and give you props.

andreas, although he has some bias to pander to certain ideals, is willing to atleast say things as they are most of the time and even be professional when he goes to explain things to even government senates, parliaments and government commitee's

adam back just tweets his desires for bitcoin direction like a typical manager

Fair enough.
This is also why I recently changed my avatar to say "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!". We've seen two faced people a lot in bitcoin world but they never run a long con, instead they always reveal their true intentions very soon.
In comparison Andreas has been around and positively helping educate newbies for many years now. If he wanted to turn to the "dark side" he would have done it already...

sure. potential long-conners are the most dangerous though.

the more trust supporters have in some celebrity, the less they are willing to believe they're not being conned.


Edit: latest iteration is....

Michael Saylor


this whole "good explainer" label is quite similar to "slick promoter" or "PR master"... which are just euphemisms for "accomplished liar"


and Saylor has already created a "Bitcoin Mining cartel Association", of which he modestly and benevolently acts as the chairman. And there are, of course, a constant stream of threads both here and on social media, hero-worshipping Saylor, which his personal PR reps definitely did not make themselves ::)

Meh, Michael Saylor doing something shady doesn't surprise me one bit. He was pretty much sketchy from the get-go. Not to mention that he spreads really really BAD advice. I mean, telling everyone to sell their possessions and borrow money to buy bitcoin? He's either dumb as hell or just too desperate to pump his BTC buy positions.

As for Andreas, though I like him, I don't like the fact that he has so much trust. I'd like to think that if he ever did some BS in the future that people would just slay him; like what happened to the people that moved to the BCH/BSV camp.

Probably the second one. I don't know any billionaires who're dumb or are considered dumb when they could be considered marketing manipulators instead. The ones who listen to them and believe in a project's success because of those people are dumb (my opinion).

For example, anyone who liked this tweet (https://twitter.com/michael_saylor/status/1415754649848668162) is a fool. You can't really compare Gold mining with Bitcoin mining. While a kilo of Gold requires a standard amount of energy to be extracted from the ground, Bitcoin doesn't require any amounts of energy. Those 6.25 BTC can be included into circulation whether we consume 500 TWh or 1 GWh.

if 6.25btc is worth $250k
then no miner will be dumb enough to put in $500k to win 6.25
and just like gold miners if the land has very little gold dust. they wont waste more then gold value mining such small amounts
there actually is a correlation between mining cost and bitcoin price

if network is at 110exa(110,000,000thash) =1mill asics at 3.25kwh
=3.25million kwh = 3.25 thousand mwh (3250megawatt per hour(3.25gwh))
=86mw per btc (megawatt per btc)

there is very good reason why each bitcoin today uses 86mw

as for the tweet saying that bitcoin uses over 70twh a year
at current gen asics.. would require hashrate to be near 300exa hash every day for a year to get to 70twh a year, even the 2019-20 gen(s19) required a hashrate of 200exahas constant for a full year to even be close to 70twh a year

..
if you think bitcoin would still be worth many thousands of dollars if everyone could mine if for $2 a day.. your deceiving yourself

I don't and from the above post, I only keep this:


And if pigs could fly... (sarcasm). Look, I don't think that you're dumb; you've been here since 2012. Around eight times more than I do(!). But, you may see things differently and maybe falsely. The extraction of Bitcoins is a procedure backed by the people's greed. If the price rises, so does the difficulty. The problem is that this thing doesn't have a “ceiling”. If the whole world got into Bitcoin and the market cap reached ca-trillions of dollars, then the energy required would sky rocket.

The differentiation I did with gold is that no matter the demanding it has, you'll always extract the same amounts given the same energy or more if you use more energy. The mining and the reward increase analogously. With Bitcoin, it may require tons of energy if the demanding rises, but the 6.25 BTC will remain the same.