User beautifully lays out the reason for the Bitcoin stalemate

[25hashcoin]

Any experienced engineer, in any field, would deem SegWit as too complex for the problem it is trying to solve, put it on the shelf for the future, and opt to find other solutions. An experienced engineer knows that when a proven production system hits a bottleneck, this bottleneck needs to be tackled locally with a minimal change, which will then expose the next bottleneck elsewhere in the system (we can seldom predict where) and the process repeats. Sometimes a family of bottlenecks is discovered which require a more systematic change, and then a larger-scale fix is justified.

The engineers of Blockstream, and their CEO, know that very well, but are deliberately pushing for a different agenda, a capitalist agenda.

The thing is, I see a lot of rage here, calling them “evil”, “malicious”, all sorts of f-words. And I think we need to change that. Bitcoin is a precious asset with a huge real-world value, and at the same time is vulnerable. Can you blame a commercial entity for trying to take over it? They are not evil and not malicious, they identified a weakness and are following a well devised plan to gain control over something of value using all means possible. This is capitalism 101.

Normally, a fundamental change to the currency in the scale of SegWit would result in a different currency, with a different name. Blockstream is simply trying to gain control over Bitcoin, while keeping the trademark “Bitcoin”. That is why we have this stalemate. Their “threats” of doing a UASF, BIP 148 and all that, will never materialize, because they are aware that if they make the first move and split themselves out, then they need to also pick a new name for their currency. And they want the Bitcoin name, totally understandable.

I think that if we stop calling them names, and instead start calmly calling it as it is, it will help bringing the truth to more people. Adam Back is leading a company which adheres to all free market and capitalist laws, and understandably is trying to gain control over a precious asset and trademark. The community sees that, and is defending against it. As part of this war, Blockstream and their engineers will try to make it look like they are following engineering principles; that is only a game, any engineer sees that including them. They talk about technical matters knowing that only 1% of their audience can call their bluff, but the rest 99% unaware people will appeal to their authority and accept their arguments at face value. Hence there is no point in having real technical debates with them, they are aware that from engineering perspective they are wrong, it’s all a show for them.

https://reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6eyxfw/adam_back_uadam3us_is_in_full_damage_control_mode/diefxkx/

[1715145872]

1715145872

[1715145872]

1715145872

[Qartada]

1.  Most Core developers don't support UASF, so the "threats" you talk about don't actually exist unless users end up supporting it and pushing the hashrate over to the new chain.

2.  When some people believed that BU was imminent and they were discussing it, they claimed that it would be an "altcoin", and that it should not be called Bitcoin but something else (sometimes with annoying buzzwords like BU-coin and Chinacoin, but let's ignore that).  Claiming that SegWit should be called something different is pretty much exactly the same and is illogical - both the old and new chain would be Bitcoin, but the one which we would typically consider Bitcoin is whichever one ends up being the majority chain.  If the old chain is still significant, it would be called "Bitcoin Classic" or something, just like ETC.

[Scorpion]

1.  Most Core developers don't support UASF, so the "threats" you talk about don't actually exist unless users end up supporting it and pushing the hashrate over to the new chain.

2.  When some people believed that BU was imminent and they were discussing it, they claimed that it would be an "altcoin", and that it should not be called Bitcoin but something else (sometimes with annoying buzzwords like BU-coin and Chinacoin, but let's ignore that).  Claiming that SegWit should be called something different is pretty much exactly the same and is illogical - both the old and new chain would be Bitcoin, but the one which we would typically consider Bitcoin is whichever one ends up being the majority chain.  If the old chain is still significant, it would be called "Bitcoin Classic" or something, just like ETC.

This.

Also I find /r/btc very agenda driven and propaganda-like. I believe they're all Wu's and Ver's minions who have been blocking progress for a very long time. Many have suggested that there is evidence these guys profit largely from ASICBOOST. And the UASF-SegWit deployment will squash it.

[jonald_fyookball]

Also I find /r/btc very agenda driven and propaganda-like.

The agenda has always simply been onchain scaling.  When did that become bad?  Oh yeah, right around the time Blockstream came on the scene.

[dinofelis]

While the opening post contains some interesting statements, I find the "accusation" of "capitalism" in bitcoin strange: bitcoin is pure anarcho-capitalism, and it is one of its value propositions, to be "pure capitalism".

I agree that Core has an agenda: the lightning network, and that they want bitcoin's brand ; and I also agree that it is *prefectly normal* for any entity to try to do so, after all, bitcoin is trustless and permissionless, so everything that can be done, is permitted to be done.  Trying to put one's hand on bitcoin is such a thing, so this is not only "part of the game", it is the "essence of the game".

Core is the de facto central authority of bitcoin because they are the software monopolist.  As visibly (even though totally incomprehensible), only one single crew of people "can write bitcoin code" or so they propagated their reputation, they can of course do anything they like with bitcoin, including giving themselves a huge stash, because they write the only code that visibly people run.  They are hence total masters of the protocol - unless a few other people start writing their own code and people "trust" them (in a trustless system, that's a funny statement).
Even though the real consensus power in bitcoin is hash rate, they've taken the providers of hash rate as dumb sheeple that just install their code ; when these dumb sheeple found out they were taken for dumb sheeple, things turned sour.

Indeed, Core wants to change fundamentally bitcoin, and its basic principles, because they have invested heavily in the development of an entirely different technology of doing transactions, the lightning network.  For that, they need to force people off the chain, because otherwise, their LN has no value.  For that, they have been inventing a lot of silly excuses of which the two most important are:
- the decentralization of the network depends on how many poor Joe's run a full node in their African basement with a 56K modem, to keep the Chinese sheeple in check
- only soft forks are acceptable.

These two stupid arguments which have no foundation at all lets them profit from a blunder Satoshi made, which was the introduction of the 1 MB block size limit.  These two false statements are the straw to which they hold themselves to be able to push people off the block chain.

After all changing the block size parameter, trivial as it is, is technically a hard fork (boooh !), and Joe cannot afford to download big blocks on his pentium 3 in his basement, so we need Joe to keep the vile Chinese in check.

Two entirely false statements that should keep bitcoin's on-chain transaction rate totally crippled, with the sole outlet the LN.

The irony is that the LN is actually only safe on an unlimited block chain, because the safety of the LN comes from the possiblity to settle: a huge LN that can only settle on a crippled block chain is entirely unsafe.  The LN makes sense only on chains where you have a guarantee that you can settle.  For instance, a chain with masternodes.

That said, they are entirely right to try to do this.  After all, bitcoin being a trustless, permissionless rip-one-another-off system, it is their good right to play the game too.

[Qartada]

Also I find /r/btc very agenda driven and propaganda-like.

The agenda has always simply been onchain scaling.  When did that become bad?  Oh yeah, right around the time Blockstream came on the scene.

It's not bad until it starts becoming a meaningless echo chamber.  R/btc and r/bitcoin are much the same in that sense - the difference is that on r/bitcoin, I've seen things like Bitcoin related news and price discussion as well, while on r/btc it's the same relentless stream of ideology over and over again.

People on r/btc like to mention r/bitcoin censorship (which is probably true considering that r/bitcoin is basically 100% SegWit), but the last time I was on r/btc I saw a thread with a giant list of "trolls", suggesting that they should all be banned.  When people have this kind of victim mentality, it always ends up with hostility and a lack of real discussion.

You could compare it to terrorism.  Someone blows up several people, but then what happens is that the terrorists get exactly what they want when people start being paranoid about Muslims because then the opposing "side" look like idiots, and then they can use that for recruitment.  It becomes a cycle of hate crime and terrorism, which only gets worse the more people perpetuate that same victim mentality.