I posted the following onto reddit.com/r/bitcoin . They removed it and banned me. Unbelievable. They are like the North Korea media.
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BCH, Ethereum and many coins came into existence because of Core/Blockstream.
Vitalik was looking at creating Ethereum on top of Bitcoin. The core developers were generally hostile to his idea, so they made a change to Bitcoin to reduce the allowed size of a particular part of a Bitcoin transaction to make it harder to do what Vitalik wanted to do. He saw the writing on the wall that he wasn't welcome and left. If Core/Blockstream did the right thing, Ethereum would be built on top of Bitcoin.
Satoshi believed that Bitcoin can scale and never had a block size limit. It was put in as a temporary measure. Miners and businesses asked for it to be increased. Core/Blockstream refused for 4 years. Out of frustration, miners created BCH.
Why won’t Core/Blockstream increase block size?
Investors gave $76 million to Blockstream. How will this be returned?
They have the Liquid sidechain product and are working on Lightning.
Liquid is used by exchanges to move bitcoins quickly, since bitcoins no longer move quickly on the blockchain. According to its website, its first release supports bitcoin only.
Lightning will provide fees to liquidity providers, i.e., exchanges. If exchanges make more money from Lightning, they can buy more Liquid.
How can the demand for Liquid and Lightning be increased? With small blocks, slow confirmations and high fees. (Blockstream’s Adam Back has said that users will be willing to pay $100 fees.)
Note that Lightning is a boon to many developers, not just Blockstream. Lightning is extremely complicated and convoluted, which will provide years of work for developers.
It is safe to assume that future releases of Liquid will support other coins. With small blocks, slow confirmations and high fees, Bitcoin-competing coins multiply and flourish. This makes exchanges multiply and flourish, which makes Liquid multiply and flourish.
If it wasn’t for Blockstream, there wouldn’t be so many altcoins and BTC’s market share would not have dropped from 95% to 60%. Everyone would still be in the same camp, singing kumbaya and BTC’s market cap would be $200B, not $120B.
It is unclear exactly who is bitcoin mining in North Korea; however, computer-intensive activities are less likely to occur outside of state control given the country's limited number of computers and limited IP space.
In addition, access to the Internet is almost impossible for ordinary North Koreans. The government does not provide the public with the right to access the world network, and only a handful of senior military or government officials have the right to use the internet.
