blockstream - wants to tax you and become the new Bitcoin oligarchy

[BitmoreCoin]

Blockstream wants to keep Bitcoin from scaling past 1mb so they can force you to use their proprietary side chain solutions while profiting.  If this is not true, then how will they generate revenue?

discuss.

if blockstream can profit from it, then many other sidechain provider can also profit it. There will be no monopoly.

[onemorexmr]

Blockstream wants to keep Bitcoin from scaling past 1mb so they can force you to use their proprietary side chain solutions while profiting.  If this is not true, then how will they generate revenue?

discuss.

if blockstream can profit from it, then many other sidechain provider can also profit it. There will be no monopoly.

so how do you think did they rais 21mio investor capital then?
last time i checked investors arent altruistic.

[jonald_fyookball]

Blockstream wants to keep Bitcoin from scaling past 1mb so they can force you to use their proprietary side chain solutions while profiting.  If this is not true, then how will they generate revenue?

discuss.

if blockstream can profit from it, then many other sidechain provider can also profit it. There will be no monopoly.

perhaps true. still, they will have first mover advantage... but more importantly, they will be a player in a space that exists only because the blocksize is small.  They (and perhaps also their competitors as you point out) will be making money off everyone using Bitcoins instead of the mining system we have today. 

[hdbuck]

Two known CIA/NSA assets infiltrated in the Bitcoin community - Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn - have joined forces to push a hastily concocted privacy nightmare/scamcoin, which they call Bitcoin-XT.

It is currently completely irrelevant, owing to an absolute lack of financial, economical, technical or social support.

[jonald_fyookball]

must be pretty irrelevant if you felt the need to shout it in red in 8 threads.

ignore.

[dachnik]

Bitcoin, as it currently stands (one currency, one chain), taps into the balance of power that exists on the planet. It means, that big players need to compete for domination in the system, keeping themselves in check and the network robust. If Bitcoin is split into sidechains, then every large geopolitical region will likely get one, which is far easier for local governments to control.

If that manifests, we will have arrived at the monetary configuration similar to that of present day fiat and therefore have achieved nothing. The block size needs to grow for as long as the network remains stable (propagation times considered). This might result in a slight shift of power from regions with a lot of hashing capacity to those with higher bandwidth, but that would only highlight the weaknesses those regions have in the era of technological advancements and help them become more competitive on the global landscape.

[Carlton Banks]

Bitcoin, as it currently stands (one currency, one chain), taps into the balance of power that exists on the planet. It means, that big players need to compete for domination in the system, keeping themselves in check and the network robust. If Bitcoin is split into sidechains, then every large geopolitical region will likely get one, which is far easier for local governments to control.

If that manifests, we will have arrived to the monetary configuration similar to that of present day fiat and therefore have achieved nothing. The block size needs to grow for as long as the network remains stable (propagation times considered). This might result in a slight shift of power from regions with a lot of hashpower to those with higher bandwidth, but that would only highlight the weaknesses those regions have in the era of technological advancements and help them become more competitive on the global landscape.

You have misunderstood the purpose of sidechains, and also Bitcoin's resiliency to control. The sidechains are not strictly to store money on, different types of data will be stored on those chains also.

That's the point of sidechains; using blockchain technology for a purpose that is not money.

[dachnik]

You have misunderstood the purpose of sidechains, and also Bitcoin's resiliency to control. The sidechains are not strictly to store money on, different types of data will be stored on those chains also.

I might have.
I thought Namecoin (and merged mining in general) would be a good example of those other uses,
but unlike sidechains it doesn't have to take bitcoins out of circulation in order to use.

That's the point of sidechains; using blockchain technology for a purpose that is not money.

Something like land tracking via blockchain will be interesting, but money itself should be simple and kept separate.

[becoin]

So basically you are perfectly comfortable with the fact that a private company hires most of the Core devs? Honest question.

Are you jealous you're not hired by Blockstream? Honest question.

Side chains is a brilliant concept for forking bitcoin protocol. It is the only approach to change bitcoin without putting at risk everything achieved so far!

[tvbcof]

So basically you are perfectly comfortable with the fact that a private company hires most of the Core devs? Honest question.

Are you jealous you're not hired by Blockstream? Honest question.

Side chains is a brilliant concept for forking bitcoin protocol. It is the only approach to change bitcoin without putting at risk everything achieved so far!

Actually, the real draw to me is that sidechains are an approach to NOT changing Bitcoin.  One of the whole points is that in Bitcoin's current and fairly simple and well-proven form it can backstop an infinite number of customized sidechains but be isolated from problems or failures of any one of them.  Every new functional addition to Bitcoin introduces new possibilities for attack.  Freezing it as a workable system as soon as possible is, to me, a very good thing to do.  My computation of value of each BTC is a function where security and robustness against attack is the dominant variable.

A side-effect of this isolation is that each side-currency is a black box to Bitcoin.  In order to track users, an attacker would have to maintain visibility into the workings of any sidechains that he/she participated in.  Since the focus of some sidechains would likely be privacy and/or security this would make an impossible approach even more impossible.  I expect significant efforts to thwart the development of sidechains for this reason.  At the end of the day, however, the cat is out of the bag and some sort of subordinate chain ecosystem will develop eventually.  As a BTC hodler, I'd hope it would be sidechains using Bitcoin as it's backing store.

[Delek]

If blockstream is so bad, then it will never be supported. Simple as that.

I think we should add fee per output first, this to avoid attacks to the network.
After that we should wait until a fee market starts rising, and then an analysis from the community will decide the block size issue. All in Bitcoin Core of course.

[dachnik]

I guess we should have both.

A system with larger blocks and a system with sidechains.
If we relax the insistence on only one having to carry the name Bitcoin, then we might end up in a very interesting battle of ideas.

Since both approaches require forking, I suggest we add a suffix to each fork.
Something like Bitcoin XT and Bitcoin SC.

Of course, it would be much cleaner if those two were implemented in separate chains to begin with, but reality is always a bit more complex than we want it to be.

The fact that most of the core devs are now employed by a single entity is somewhat alarming, but they need to eat too and then we might finally have our Bitcoin CEO.

[becoin]

Actually, the real draw to me is that sidechains are an approach to NOT changing Bitcoin.

The beauty of it is that it can be said both ways. To me locking my bitcoins and switching to a side chain means I change/fork my bitcoins.

[dachnik]

Actually, the real draw to me is that sidechains are an approach to NOT changing Bitcoin.

The beauty of it is that it can be said both ways. To me locking my bitcoins and switching to a side chain means I change/fork my bitcoins.

The danger of it, on the other hand, is somewhat akin locking your gold and getting nice pieces of paper in return.
That German gold is still locked there somewhere, maybe...

[tvbcof]

Actually, the real draw to me is that sidechains are an approach to NOT changing Bitcoin.

The beauty of it is that it can be said both ways. To me locking my bitcoins and switching to a side chain means I change/fork my bitcoins.

The danger of it, on the other hand, is somewhat akin locking your gold and getting nice pieces of paper in return.
That German gold is still locked there somewhere, maybe...

I absolutely won't be using sidecoins that offer me only such a thing.  I don't have any paper-gold either.

I want strong and well researched crypto that allows me to be sure that I can exercise at my own digression any of the contract terms I agree to.

[dachnik]

Actually, the real draw to me is that sidechains are an approach to NOT changing Bitcoin.

The beauty of it is that it can be said both ways. To me locking my bitcoins and switching to a side chain means I change/fork my bitcoins.

The danger of it, on the other hand, is somewhat akin locking your gold and getting nice pieces of paper in return.
That German gold is still locked there somewhere, maybe...

I absolutely won't be using sidecoins that offer me only such a thing.  I don't have any paper-gold either.

I want strong and well researched crypto that allows me to be sure that I can exercise at my own digression any of the contract terms I agree to.

That I agree with.

In order for more complex use cases like contracts to be usable, physical security of private keys along with personal awareness and responsibility will be a must. Presently, losing control to a private key will result in the loss of funds associated with it. With contracts, however, it might be used to sign to things which can have more lasting effects. I wonder how digital contracts will be enforced and how to prevent abuse in cases of lost keys. Something like multisig with a third party within a web of trust will be necessary for anything other than monetary transactions.

[jonald_fyookball]

sidechains sound like they could be a great innovation.  the issue that I see is they are being used to justify keeping the blocks small.  Why should we be forced to use sidechains?  Why can't we have sidechains AND bigger blocks?

[Peter R]

sidechains sound like they could be a great innovation.  the issue that I see is they are being used to justify keeping the blocks small.  Why should we be forced to use sidechains?  Why can't we have sidechains AND bigger blocks?

[jonald_fyookball]

You nailed it Peter.

Right now people are still a bit unaware of this.
I see many posts "Everyone wants to raise the
limit, but they are still deciding how to do it".

They haven't woken up to the fact that blockstream
simply refuses to do it.  That's why nodes are adopting
XT.  That's why miners are voting to support bigger
blocks. 

[Carlton Banks]

sidechains sound like they could be a great innovation.  the issue that I see is they are being used to justify keeping the blocks small.  Why should we be forced to use sidechains?  Why can't we have sidechains AND bigger blocks?

But why support such a poor design for increasing the blocksize? The entire class of proposed solutions are presented as permanent solutions, and yet when you walk through the logic, you realise that static limits are too restrictive.

The inevitable colossal fees so derided under the mythical "1 MB 4ever" position can just as easily be reached in January 2016 if the use of the network suddenly jumps higher than the 8 fold blocksize increase. Doesn't sound at all implausible to me, it's what we're trying to encourage with the change in carrying capacity to begin with.

Then what? Emergency doubling? That won't cause another argument at all, will it? Come on.