This is just not true. Please stop spreading FUD.
Blockstream does not control Bitcoin Core; out of the five people who have commit access, only one person is a Blockstream employee (and founder). The others either work for their own companies that they founded or are part of the MIT DCI. In all contributions this year (since Jan 1 2017), there have been 41 contributors. Of those, I count 8 Blockstream employees or contractors related to Blockstream (of which at least 3 are founders of the company, and 2 don't really seem to work for Blockstream but are listed on their website), 2 that work for the MIT DCI, 6 Chaincode Labs employees (one person overlaps with Blockstream) and 22 people who work for other companies (only one or two per company), work for their own companies that they created, or are independent contributors contributing whenever they feel like. Many of the Blockstream contributors contribute rarely and also do so when they feel like; they are not paid to work exclusively on Bitcoin Core.
Blockstream does not need to influence or change Bitcoin in order to have products. They already have the Liquid sidechain which is a product for exchanges and it does not need Segwit or other changes to Bitcoin's consensus rules. This sidechain was already in use before Segwit activated.
Some days after hurricane Irma there was a fundraiser for one of the Core developers, whose house had been damaged by hurricane. The goal of the fundraiser was to raise 5 Bitcoins for the Luke Dash jr(Bitcoin Core developer) in order to fix his house and property.
Luke Dash has developed first Bitcoin mining pool in 2011. At that time Bitcoin was worth around 0.3$.
Someone who knew about Bitcoin in 2011 and devoted it's time to work on the project, did not invest anything?!?! That tells us, that Luke Dash is not a speculator, he does not know anything about economics, all he is - is a programmer and that's all he knows to do.
Do you not think that maybe he has spent those coins? Maybe he speculated in the early days and lost money in the number of scams and exchange collapses (e.g. MtGox) which leaves him with little to no Bitcoin today. Luke has a family (a rather large one too) which he has to support; do you not think that perhaps he has used many or all of his Bitcoin to help support his family and do other things which require money?
So Luke Dash obviously doesn't own (m)any Bitcoins considering he needed to raise funds for the repairs of his house and property, so he can only make money by getting paid from Blockstream for the development.
Luke is not a full time employee of Blockstream; he is an independent contractor. I don't think he is paid much for doing that considering that he has not done much for Blockstream and is not being paid by Blockstream to work on Core (according to some conversations I have had with Blockstream employees).
And i would guess most other core members are like this. They are programmers. They enjoy coding and improving Bitcoin as they did from the start. They did not buy Bitcoins hoping they would get rich, but they probably looked at it from a programming perspective.
Their salary now depends on Blockstream and they have to follow the rules.
As I said earlier, that is not true at all. Blockstream is not the only company paying people to work on Bitcoin Core and they do not control Bitcoin Core.
Core members have said it in the past that increase of the block size would be okay, even up to 8MB!!
Source? IIRC the only "okay" increase was up to 4 MB, which is what Segwit does.
So what is wrong with the segwit2x now that it is considered an attack?
The fact that it is being done by an agreement made by a bunch of corporate executives and miners in a backroom deal without consulting the community or the technical community (which includes much more than just Bitcoin Core developers).
Is there any good argument against Blocksize increase? And don't mention the blockchain getting too big. In one year the blockchain has grown from 85GB to 135GB, increasing by 50GB. With 2x block size increase, this would be 100GB per year. The cost for storage is rapidly decreasing as technology is progressing, and in 10 years the estimate block size(with segwit2x) would be 1,135TB. At current prices this would cost around 50$, and we all know in 10 years 1TB of storage could cost a few dollars.
And how many people actually run a full node? It seems all nonsense to me.
It is not the storage requirement that is the problem, it is the bandwidth and computing requirements. Clearly you do not understand the nuance and other consequences of a block size increase. It not only requires more disk space (which is trivial) but it also requires full nodes to consume even more bandwidth and data and may not be able to support larger blocks. So we would see a decrease in full nodes from a number that is already pretty low, less than 10000 full nodes. A full node consumes somewhere around 300-500 GB of data per month, and that is with 1 MB blocks. With segwit, that size will be even larger, and with 2X, potentially more than double. In the worst case, it would be 8 times that amount. In the US, some ISPs (like Comcast) are instituting data caps at ~1 TB of data per month. Bitcoin nodes are likely to be consuming nearly all of that data (thus restricting the amount of data that home node operators can use for other things) or even exceed the data cap if Segwit2x were to pass. This will cause the entire network to lose nodes as users turn them off so that they have enough data to do other things that consume a lot of data, but not as much (e.g. watch 4K Netflix).
Furthermore, larger blocks can require more computation to validate and thus a malicious block that takes several seconds (which is ages in computer time) to validate now would be even worse if the block size were to be increased even more.
Lastly, there are many other considerations that you need to look at when increasing the block size. Things like UTXO set growth, initial sync time, hardware requirements, etc.
