The trouble is that it does not illustrate the potential conflict of interest almost at all.  As far as I can tell, Blockstream can only make money by acting in a consulting capacity to people who wish to make a sidechain.

A sidechain, since it is pegged to Bitcoin, cannot really make a lot of money unless the operator participates in fraud, and they would not be able to retain and share the loot with Blockstream because if Blockstream participated it would totally and instantaneously ruin their whole business model (as I understand/infer it.)

Sidechains themselves offer a new revenue stream to the Bitcoin ecosystem.  Consider the discounts that vendors will offer for use of their branded gift cards and what-not.  This demonstrates that there is money to be had there, and if the vendor could have their own currency rather than a piss-ant gift card or credit card that is much more powerful.  With a robust two-way peg, Bitcoin value becomes equal to or (and) greater than the sum total of the value of all sidechains backed by it.

Last I heard, Blockstream plans to release at least their basic implementation framework as open-source for anyone to use.  They could only remain competitive in the space if their implementation were better and/or more trusted than others.  This might be one reason that they retained many of the most productive and well respected persons from the Bitcoin development community.

The small blocksize issue is something of a cart vs. horse thing.  Since I became involved I saw the small data-rate and high latency aspects of Bitcoin as being key to it's robustness in the face of attacks (of the type we've not yet seen.)  Were I a developer in the sphere I would have been putting a lot of focus on how to scale Bitcoin without losing this key aspect (and I have even while I've not worked on development.)  I can easily see how the devs who are on 'my side' would be group under Blockstream because the focus is on security which happens to be associated with data rate.  So, the 1MB thing was the 'cause' of Blockstream and not the 'effect' I guess one could say.  I'm sure they find they, like everyone else, finds the limitation to be a regrettable nuisance.  Unlike some others, however, they understand the ramifications.  They probably just feel that the fairly cutting-edge crypto work that they are undertaking is the most productive and interesting way to deal with the reality without killing Bitcoin, and potentially lucrative as well.

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The graphic could also be improved by making a very large spill-way with several giant fish sucking up all the flow.  They would be labeled Google, Facebook, etc.  Also their should be cops riding on top of those fish labeled 'government regulators'.

Here's my contribution culled from the epic (and now defunct) 1500 page 'gold collapsing, bitcoin up' thread:

Some people argue that Szabo is likely to be Satoshi.  I never paid a lot of attention to these kinds of conjectures or cared a lot about them, but this text is the strongest bit of evidence I've seen yet that the it might be true.

By my estimation, there is a higher chance that 2015 accumulation will result in a payday than the late 2011 opportunity when I did my accumulation.  I judge the likelihood of losing all ones money to be pretty high in 2015 just as I did in 2011 though so it's always good advice to never sink money into anything so speculative if one cannot walk away from it with a laugh.

If sidechains come to the fore, the sum total of all sidechains will be reflected in Bitcoin.  Certainly some sidechains will fail and some will be scams and so on, but sitting on the actual value store in the form of Bitcoin will be effectively having a simultaneous bet on all of them and could potentially be a 'dynastic wealth' event.

What could also happen, however, is that a hostile takeover event (such as XT was) could succeed and could ruin Bitcoin as a viable value basis and settlement layer for a system of subordinate chains such as sidechains.  In that case it would be a simple matter for the subordinate chains system to choose something else and something better.  We (hodlers) would have to hope that whatever that something else was, it derived at least some of it's initial its value from the Bitcoin blockchain.  That is actually quite possible.

I'm personally 'out of the game' as someone who took my position in an earlier generation.  I'm mostly just trying to give an honest appraisal of how I would be reading the card deck now.  I could be wrong...I often am.

Gold up.  Bitcoin might be recovering ever so slightly from the Hearn's XT hostile takeover attempt but it's hard to say.  Certainly some significant damage was done to the market depth.  Anyone using that as an indicator over the last month got kicked hard in the balls.

So true.  They embedded themselves at a time when Bitcoin was in need of any development effort it could get and have stuck around like cancers since that time.  Now rapidly metastasizing.  Bitcoin's most impressive achievement would be to survive through the days when these two were still around and still causing problems.

Ultimately Satoshi's most impressive design might have been that of building a social structure which could encapsulate and ultimately expel the likes of Mike and Gavin.  Thankfully the promise of the technology is such that it attracted the right kind of people as well, and many of these folks happen to have very good engineering skills.

I was one of the first people to publicly call out all of Mike, Gavin, and the Bitcoin Foundation here on this forum I think.  Before TBF was formed I suggested that transparency was important to me since I would need to make decisions about what to do upon a hostile fork failure mode which I was anticipating as a likely event at some point in the future.  It was not idle talk.  Concerns like these factored into the position I took in the first place and how I've dealt with that position over the years.  I would not have expected Bitcoin to survive with Mike and Gavin being where they were and doing what they do.  If it does I'll be even more in awe of Satoshi's variety of design skills.

LOL!  You horrible person you.


Actually I did strongly suspect that it was an erroneous assertion and did something I rarely do which was to fail to qualify the statement.  This was pure trolling.  It worked.  Well.

cypherdoc already heavily leveraged theymos's platform in his Hashfast shilling operation and one supposes he didn't give theymos of dime of his 3000 btc haul.

Just like you 'Free Shit Nation' people who think that the world owes you free crypto-currency transactions, you also seem to think that the world owes you a free place to shill for whatever you want.  It is clearly you guys who think of everything as a welfare state and want your entitlements.

When you use 'bitcointalk.org' which was set up for Bitcoin but is kind enough to provide a space for alt discussions won't let you shill (indefinitely) for XT or whatever alt you like anywhere you want, the howls of rage and despair are deafening.  And pretty funny in a lulzy sort of way to say the truth.  I actually don't agree with the mods who locked the predecessor thread, but it is resulting in a barrel of laughs as you guys squeal like stuck pigs.

cypherdoc says:  "HALP!  I'm being oppressed I dropped the soap."

Before cypherdoc locked his thread and tried to blame the mods, I asked justusranvier when they anticipated switching the reference implementation of XT over to being from the 'btcd' codebase (written in 'go' rather than based on Satoshi's initial 'c' language.)  He didnt' respond.

Since Mike couldn't help himself and jumped the gun on inserting the basis for blacklisting into his non-fork of Satoshi/Core codebase and someone busted him, it looks like their populist propaganda campaign is going to fail and XT probably won't get even a plurality let alone a consensus.  They may as well switch to 'btcd' now and try.  I guess Gavin recognizes that.

I'd say that Mike's best strategy now would be to do a clean implementation off 'btcd' then use a combination of corporate backing and government mandates to try to steer people into his web of monitoring and control.

Gold up.  Bitcoin collapsing.

Fixed!

Yikes!  If I'd made a ton shilling for something which is shaping up to be very possibly a fraud in the eyes of the court, and I was the only person who did seem to make any money off it, I might be as cranky as the doc here.  Especially if the only money to be found was sitting in a 3000 BTC wallet under my control.  One suspects that he may have been instructed to not be moving them around to much.

I hope cypherdoc's hands don't quiver to much when he thinks about dropping the soap as he's operating on someone's eyeballs.  Now I understand 'smooth's avatar better...he's must have been one of cypherdoc's patients and it's a warning!

They just always kinda seemed the same to me.  They seemed to come into my vision at about the same time and seemed fairly reasonable then subtly shifted into being increasingly XT pumpers.  The 'suggestion' was actually a bit of a probe to see what reaction I got if any.

I have a lot of difficulty imagining anyone who's reasonably intelligent and informed not seeing XT as probably being anything other than what has seemingly turned out to be.  Certainly there was a high probability of this simply from the guy who was the driving force behind it.  I just cannot square this with anyone who had any interest in Bitcoin based on it's initial virtues.  So I am deeply suspicious of anyone who had ever supported XT, and especially those who became more vocal in this support rather than less as time went by and more information became available.

Seems like well past the time to get rid of Gavin's alert key.  I'll look forward to a release which does this or a patch to use next time I build from source.  I could see it being used to startle the herd at an opportune time and get them to do something which is against their interests.

cypherdoc was arguing the other day that the increased block size could be used to freeze out the Chinese miners who are hamstrung by their government's network policy.  The guy is a technical nobody.  Whether he is formally shilling for and in communication with the XT crowd is unknown but seems quit possible.  He makes a good living by shilling and picked up 3000 BTC from HashFast (which failed) doing it so he must be effective and he has been non-stop XT form many months now.

One way or another, it is funny to argue out of one side of your mouth that the increased blocksize load is perfectly safe and out of the other side that it can thwart people who are operating behind even the mild form of network control exercised in by the Chinese government at this time.

Honestly, I've had a mild feeling for some time that Gavin just wants out, and even has perhaps tried to subtly warn people about this stuff.  I don't get the sense that he is anywhere near the driver's seat.  I'm inclined to wonder if he is more like a guy bound up and stuffed into the trunk.

I'm not denying anything.  I simply don't know and personally have not seen what you are talking about vis-a-vis theymos.  It's unlike him in the 4 years I've been paying attention.  On the other hand cypherdoc locked his thread a few months ago IIRC.  This makes it a reasonable hypothesis that he did it again.

He's always welcome on my thread even if he is the kind of pansy who messed up his own and tried to blame others for it.  Cypherdoc is his own worst enemy when he flaps his gums in the presence of people smart enough and informed enough to matter.

BTW, cypherdoc:  Gold up, Bitcoin collapsing...thanks in no small part to your own efforts.

Sure.  Just wait until it is necessary.  Even staunch small-blockists like me have no real problem with raising the block size as long as it

 - is necessary
 - can contribute to support of a real solution for scaling
 - is safe
 - does not compromise the security and autonomy of the solution which is the most important and valuable thing about Bitcoin to me.

In no way, shape, or form is allowing nearly free purchases of frappacino worth sacrificing any of the above mentioned aspects.  If Bitcoin were going to 'take off' under near-free transaction fees it would have done so within the last decade when the infrastructure was supported by inflation alone and fees were negligible.  That it did not means that there is really no demand for native Bitcoin used in that role and other solutions are simply more competitive.

I have hope that frappacino-coin will be implemented as a sidecoin so in reality Bitcoin will be used for such purposes but in a way which is safe, scalable, flexible, and highly robust.  Best of all worlds with no tangible downsides...except that it will blow up any hopes that TPTB would have of tracking.  The fact that the pre-mature seeming thrust to do the BitcoinXT hostile takeover happened leads me to believe that sidechains will actually work quite well and there was really no choice but to try to do it as a hail Mary and hope for the best.

Nobody I can think of advocated censoring or sterilizing anything.  For all we know cypherdoc himself picked up his ball and went home.