Sidechains contribute to this inability to reach agreement.

They just change the argument from "we don't need to raise the limit because altcoins" to "we don't need to raise the limit because sidechains."

If I was a tinfoil hat wearing type, I'd link to documents that show accusing people of being "conspiracy theorist" is a common disruption tactic employed by intelligence agents.

I wouldn't care so much about Blockstream if it wasn't composed of so many of the people who can effectively veto changes to the Bitcoin protocol, and who suddenly have a financial incentive to block protocol changes that are good for the network but bad for their revenue.

If the network was implementation-heterogeneous, then it wouldn't be such a potential problem.

...and the Bitcoin Core monopoly itself.

I want to see the network fully heterogenous at the implementation level.

We should be just as concerned about all the mining being done with Bitcoin Core as we are concerned about too much hashing being controlled by ghash.io.

Get btcd, libbitcoin, and a couple more independent implementations in there too.

It's amazing how many people who genuinely believe Bitcoin is dead don't have anything better to do with their time than to post on the forum of a dying, failed idea.

If I wasn't so sure that nobody has a reason to lie on the Internet, I might start to question their motives.

That's probably what Adam Back wants.

However, this isn't just about him.

Blockstream has investors, who presumably want a return on their investment, a return that requires the continuing relevance of sidechains.

If the Bitcoin protocol adopts features that are developed in sidechains, then the need for sidechains diminishes.

What will those investors say about that? What will Blockstream do in response?

I don't think the problem is the fork as much as it's the financial incentive to get their fork in, and then block all other future forks that would render sidechains less necessary.

I like the Conformal model.

They make money from Coinvoice, and btcd is the Bitcoin implementation they use to run their business. They eat their own dogfood, and donate the code into the community, but don't make money from other people using btcd.

I wish more companies would develop alternate implementations using this model.

Most of the attacks (except for the small number of hidden services to connect to) in that paper are fixed by adding "onlynet=tor" to bitcoin.conf, so that you don't use exit nodes at all.

Longer term, it would be good to encourage more nodes to run dual (triple) stacked - listening on ipv4 and tor (and ipv6).

Maybe it would be worth using proof of existence to allow hidden services to demonstrate they've been around for a while, even though this doesn't fully solve Sybil attacks.

Speaking of potential conflicts of interests:

https://twitter.com/petertoddbtc/status/524949510347165696

Good luck with that.

This is actually a great idea.

Local currencies should be given their chance to shine so that their inherent brokenness can be made obvious to everyone.

Kind of like what Freicoin did for the concept of demurrage.

The political standoff has been going on since at least 2012, since the altcoiners insisted that it would be too dangerous for Bitcoin to remove the block size limit, while simultaneous courting investors by claiming that Bitcoin can't scale.

The situation isn't helped in any way by people using terms of art they clearly don't understand, like "scarce."

"Scarce" is a binary term. A resource is either scarce, or non-scarce. Space in a block is scarce regardless of whether or not the size of a block is limited by production quotas.

In economics, "scarce" just means "not infinite".

Until it's possible to transmit an infinite amount of data with zero time delay without consuming any energy or using hardware, space in a Bitcoin block will be scarce, even if the average block size is 1 TB.

No offense, but I've been watching the W3C since the days of HTML 3 and your track record of creating successful web standards has been... mixed.

It's not obviously apparent that a W3C Web Payments standard would be useful or relevant.

It seems like there are a lot of people around with financial incentives to keep Bitcoin from advancing any further, even people who are nominally part of the "Bitcoin community".

Also:

"Centralization risk" is never defined, nor is the mechanism via which it occurs is is explained.

(already know that answer to that one - it's Peter Todd's repackaging the natural monopoly fallacy)

"No safe upgrade path" is a software engineering deficiency, not an inherent feature of the problem space.

Moving transactions off the "main" blockchain deprives it of the tx fee revenue the parent blockchain requires to pay for hashing.

Those aren't what I was talking about.

I mean the ability for a company to raise funds by selling equity as bearer shares is one that only companies in the informal economy will benefit from.

That doesn't mean everybody who invents some kind of token-based financial instrument is doing something worthwhile. Most of the "assets" being traded on those platforms right now are worthless.

Only the informal economy is going to benefit from most of these tools.

Benjamin Fulford is not "a bit" mad...

Sorry about that. My memory must have glitched.