A conspiracy against Bitcoin?

[Wind_FURY]

Or should I say, a "conspiracy theory?". Hahaha. Tinfoil hats on.

This topic should be fun to discuss, especially for some of us that came here to learn about Bitcoin during the small blocks, big blocks "scalability debate". I used to believe that Core should compromise, and hard fork to 2mb block sizes! What did I know, I was a newbie. Haha!

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1091099725925888000.html

Did you know: Between 2010 and 2013 former Mike Hearn, then a tech lead at Google’s offices in Zurich, Switzerland, designed a security system that was later tapped by the NSA and GCHQ. The Snowden leaks revealed the existence of the surveillance taps in late 2013.

Did you know: Craig S Wright a.k.a. Faketoshi works with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on tracking users etc?

Did you know: Gavin Andresen worked with the CIA, explaining details on bitcoin etc?

Now what was the one thing Mike Hearn, Craig Wright and Gavin Andresen were pushing in bitcoin ... and why?

Big Blocks .. because that undermines Bitcoin's P2P / decentralized nature, and forces Bitcoin back onto a central server that can be easily controlled and/or taken down (as indeed happened with some Bitcoin predecessors, and many altcoins like Ethereum/Infura, Ripple etc).

Opinions?

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[franky1]

funny thing

those against scaling BITCOIN
are the ones that want users to not use the bitcoin network, and instead lock funds up to custodians and pay fee's for payments on a different network that are not immutable and not guaranteed to be immutable
and where the fee's for actual bitcoin transactions are going to be high enough to sway people to not want to settle bitcoin transactions, but instead convert to altcoins..

seems the OP of this topic is pushing too hard to try making it sound like scaling bitcoin should be avoided
pretty sad the depths that those who dont want bitcoin to scale will go to

but here is the subtle point th OP just admitted to. thinking that "core should compromise".. which is his mindset saying to himself that he knows and justifies that core CONTROL the changes

what he next will admit is how the main devs of core are actually partners with the names mentioned in his conspiracy
follow the money

DCG -> bloq -> gavinA
DCG -> blockstream -> main core devs
DCG -> bitcoinj -> hearne
DCG -> blockchain -> BCH - > craig
DCG -> blockstream -> hyperledger (governments crypto project)
hyperledger -> hearne

[OmegaStarScream]

funny thing

those against scaling BITCOIN
are the ones that want users to not use the bitcoin network, and instead lock funds up to custodians and pay fee's for payments on a different network that are not immutable and not guaranteed to be immutable
and where the fee's for actual bitcoin transactions are going to be high enough to sway people to not want to settle bitcoin transactions, but instead convert to altcoins..

seems the OP of this topic is pushing too hard to try making it sound like scaling bitcoin should be avoided
pretty sad the depths that those who dont want bitcoin to scale will go to

but here is the subtle point th OP just admitted to. thinking that "core should compromise".. which is his mindset saying to himself that he knows and justifies that core CONTROL the changes

what he next will admit is how the main devs of core are actually partners with the names mentioned in his conspiracy
follow the money

DCG -> bloq -> gavinA
DCG -> blockstream -> main core devs
DCG -> bitcoinj -> hearne
DCG -> blockchain -> BCH - > craig
DCG -> blockstream -> hyperledger (governments crypto project)
hyperledger -> hearne

The core developers seem to be motivated by passion and not by money, just from looking at their presentations, proposals and the effort they put.

DCG is? Digital Currency Group? I just googled and apparently, they were founded in 2015. So before that, what was happening in your opinion?

I'm really interested in knowing your thoughts because you seem to have something against them or a lot of stuff they do, and lightning network etc.

[NeuroticFish]

Well, if we go in this direction, Bitcoin is already the Facebook of finances(*) because of its pseudo-anonymous nature and because the exchanges now use KYC and because most people are not careful with the addresses they use..
And LN will clearly make it worse.

And sorry Franky1, but I don't think that bigger blocks would help much in this matter. The damage is already done.
People don't use mixers much (maybe they fear they may get linked with criminals?), anon coins are still considered "low rank" even between altcoins, so.. not a great image.

What would be the solution?
One direction would be pushing wallets that already mix the coins.
Another (better imho) direction would be to implement inside Bitcoin something to increase the levels of privacy / anonymity.


The fact that these directions are not too much pushed could be seen very bad in a conspiracy theory. (But I hope the not so far future will give us nice surprises in this direction.)
On the other hand, Bitcoin was never fast in taking "next" development steps, so the non-conspirationists can have good reasons too.
Most probably the truth is somewhere in the middle



(*) you know that many call FB the greatest surveillance tool ever invented and people post their things by themselves!!

[Wind_FURY]

funny thing

those against scaling BITCOIN
are the ones that want users to not use the bitcoin network, and instead lock funds up to custodians and pay fee's for payments on a different network that are not immutable and not guaranteed to be immutable
and where the fee's for actual bitcoin transactions are going to be high enough to sway people to not want to settle bitcoin transactions, but instead convert to altcoins..

seems the OP of this topic is pushing too hard to try making it sound like scaling bitcoin should be avoided
pretty sad the depths that those who dont want bitcoin to scale will go to

"Scaling Bitcoin". You mean to say "hard fork to big blocks"? I already told you that there are trade-offs. Bigger blocks are inherently centralizing.

but here is the subtle point th OP just admitted to. thinking that "core should compromise".. which is his mindset saying to himself that he knows and justifies that core CONTROL the changes

Did I say that ? Haha. No, I said I was stupid enough to believe that Core should have compromised to 2mb blocks. I listened to the wrong people.

what he next will admit is how the main devs of core are actually partners with the names mentioned in his conspiracy
follow the money

Partners? No, let me show you.

DCG -> bloq -> gavinA

For big blocks. Centralizing.

DCG -> blockstream -> main core devs

For small blocks. Maintain decentralization.

DCG -> bitcoinj -> hearne

For big blocks. Centralizing.

DCG -> blockchain -> BCH - > craig

For big blocks. Centralizing.

DCG -> blockstream -> hyperledger (governments crypto project)
hyperledger -> hearne

Centralized ledger.

For big blocks. Centralizing.

Plus DCG has invested in many things despite some companies being in competition with one another.



Let's go back to the topic of conspiracy which you might be derailing.

To quote, "Now what was the one thing Mike Hearn, Craig Wright and Gavin Andresen were pushing in bitcoin, and why?

Big Blocks .. because that undermines Bitcoin's P2P / decentralized nature, and forces Bitcoin back onto a central server that can be easily controlled and/or taken down"

[davis196]

Awesome "infographics" including all those crypto companies.Very informative stuff.
I really didn't knew that Wright,Andersen and Hearn have worked for the CIA/DHS.I'm not really into their biographies.Perhaps the original Satoshi Nakamoto was a CIA agent too,but he refused to follow orders and created bitcoin,which leads to his death(maybe?).

[franky1]

"Scaling Bitcoin". You mean to say "hard fork to big blocks"? I already told you that there are trade-offs. Bigger blocks are inherently centralizing.

Big Blocks .. because that undermines Bitcoin's P2P / decentralized nature, and forces Bitcoin back onto a central server that can be easily controlled and/or taken down"[/b]

1a. scaling bitcoin is about bitcoin not other networks(LN)
1b. scaling bitcoin is NOT about jumping to "gigabytes by midnight" to cause "central server".. its about scaling. meaning progressive step by step growth. such as the 0.25mb, 0.5mb, 0.75mb, 1mb SCALING that occured before core decidd 1mb was enough and halted SCALING
(and dont pretend scaling continued because with witness scale factor=4 means we still have legacy at 1mb and transaction counts have not surpassed the 600k level known about since 2010 of what a 1mb limit implies)

2a. here is your mindset "gaslighting" scaling with FUD of "bigblocks". firstly many many many of the community compromised down to a scale of 2mb. but CORE's actions with their centralised control of the code pushed off any opposers to segwit1x because core only wanted legacy at 1mb. core only had 35% vote for segwit1x. but instead of core compromising to 2x or something else. they instead done controversial tactics to push opposers off the network to fake approval vote of segwit1x

2b. the whole social drama around hearne, gavin, and the others was just that, social drama. all in an affort to sway people away from wanting diversity and to blindly accept a central control of the code. by trying to convince people diversity on the network was bad.

2c. the NYA agreement of 2017's version of segwit2x (not the 2015 segwit2mb).. the 2x was just social drama to again try to attain more people to atleast accept segwit. and then slam down the 2x part as soon as they got enough 'vote' to get segwit active

i find it truly funny how you and your buddies keep thinking that scaling bitcoin is a "gigabytes by midnight" concept. when the reality of such is all just a ploy to centralise the code to a group that DCG can manage so that the DCG portfolio can get their commercial network(LN) so that businesses can get income from a crypto payment system

i also find it funny how the roadmap of core had been laid out to cause a fee war and make it appear that blockchains are not successful and only LN is the solution.

seriously do your research
gavin and all the rest are all in it together and paid by the same group. it was all just one big 3 sea-shell game of distractions

but if you really think that scaling bitcoin (progressively) is bad and you think it will lead to a central server. then you are definetly stuck with the wrong information being echo'd into your ear.

if you really think the internet cannot cope with a few mb every 10minutes. then go tell that to the hundreds of internet businesses that billions of people use alot to upload. such as twitch, online gaming, skype facetime, facebook. where users can happily upload and download more than you think.

statistics show that the internet average for the world is not dial-up and hard drive capacities are not floppy disks. so if you want to exaggerate to pretend your "gigabyte by midnight central server" mindset has a point. atleast back it up with stats that show that scaling (to atleast move passed the 600k tx a day legacy limit) has actually some legitimacy in staying at 600k a day.
if your only rebuttal is about the linear sigops issue.. guess what. solution is to not let transactions have thousands of sigops
yep thats right core actually allow a block to be filled with just 5tx of bloated sigops.. reduce the limit to being around a limit to allow atleast 1000tx instead of 5 means that less sigops per tx can be performed = no sigops problem


but to get to the topic
it was jsut social drama distraction to sway people into accepting a centralised controller of the protocol so that commercial networks can be implemented and push people off bitcoins network that dont want commercial networks.

P.S if your admiration and defense of this group is purely in spirit of hopes that one day you will get to have some income stream from running a LN hub... sorry. but you might want to look at the infographic you provided to see who will be the ones actually running the factories, hubs and watchtowers and getting the income to repay DCG
remember blockstream are inDEBT to DCG to a tune of many millions. they really needed to push for making bitcoin compatible with LN so that they can start giving DCG returns on investment. this is why the devs paid by investors have been so loud to say that blockchains cant scale/dont work and how non blockchains are are future... (so that goes against your pretense that devs love bitcoin, when devs have been pushing against bitcoin and for alternative networks)

[Wind_FURY]

words

Ok franky1, you have the right to your own opinion, I respect them. But we have already debated about everything in that post, you can believe in whatever you like. I will not engage to derail this topic. Next time maybe.

[pooya87]

I used to believe that Core should compromise, and hard fork to 2mb block sizes! What did I know, I was a newbie. Haha!

i honestly don't understand how you made that conclusion based on the things you mentioned here!
basically you are saying that because the people who support a proposal might have been dishonest that makes the proposal bad! so technically if someday Roger Ver publicly announces that Segregated Witness is one of the best proposals of all time, you must dump bitcoin and get out because a dishonest person supported a certain proposal!
well that mentality doesn't make any sense to me.

with that said i still support the 2 MB hard fork aka the SegWit2x proposal and don't give a shit who started it. and am still against the exaggerated hard forks to much bigger blocks that BCH hard fork was proposing and similarly don't give a shit who started it.
and i do believe that eventually we have to also increase the block size if we want things such as LN to work. but before that we hopefully get other things such as Schnorr and signature aggregation to squeeze as much scaling as possible out of the current 4 MB block weight.

p.s. remember that you are only a newbie if you blindly follow a herd just because the social media tells you to. the code is law, the rest like reddit is just noise.

[Kakmakr]

Mike Hearn is definitely connected to some government agency, because we saw the code that they wanted to sneak in as part of the Bitcoin XT fork. <The Core team highlighted it and it was quickly removed>

Gavin was not working for these government agencies, but he was ordered to come to their offices to explain the technology. I cannot guarantee that they might have recruited him during that session or that he was forced to help them. <Getting some promise that he would not be prosecuted for his involvement in Bitcoin, when they found out who Satoshi was.>

Do you have a source for the statement that Craig S Wright worked for the Department of Homeland Security?

 

[Wind_FURY]

I used to believe that Core should compromise, and hard fork to 2mb block sizes! What did I know, I was a newbie. Haha!

i honestly don't understand how you made that conclusion based on the things you mentioned here!
basically you are saying that because the people who support a proposal might have been dishonest that makes the proposal bad! so technically if someday Roger Ver publicly announces that Segregated Witness is one of the best proposals of all time, you must dump bitcoin and get out because a dishonest person supported a certain proposal!
well that mentality doesn't make any sense to me.

I told you, I listened to the wrong people in the forum, and I was a newbie. Segwit is the compromise.

If someday Roger Ver publicly announces he supports Segwit? Then I would say he saw the light. Welcome back Mr. Ver.

with that said i still support the 2 MB hard fork aka the SegWit2x proposal and don't give a shit who started it. and am still against the exaggerated hard forks to much bigger blocks that BCH hard fork was proposing and similarly don't give a shit who started it.
and i do believe that eventually we have to also increase the block size if we want things such as LN to work. but before that we hopefully get other things such as Schnorr and signature aggregation to squeeze as much scaling as possible out of the current 4 MB block weight.

p.s. remember that you are only a newbie if you blindly follow a herd just because the social media tells you to. the code is law, the rest like reddit is just noise.

You support the group behind the NYA which tried to undermine the community? Ok, that's no problem for me, it failed at any rate.

But let's get back on the conspiracy theory of Gavin, Faketosi, and Mike Hearn's push for big blocks. Is there a probability that their objective was to undermine Bitcoin's decentralization?

P.S. Yes, I was a newbie. I know better now. A hard fork to bigger blocks will amputate the network of nodes, it will split it because it would never have consensus, plus big blocks are inherently centralizing. Segwit is the compromise.

[franky1]

seeing as how the OP is just interested in social drama distractions.

hearn worked for google.. and it was google that sold certain apps to 3lettr agencies
guess who else worked for google.. pieter wuille (Mr. segwit)

[Wind_FURY]

seeing as how the OP is just interested in social drama distractions.

hearn worked for google.. and it was google that sold certain apps to 3lettr agencies

Wants big blocks.

Conspiracy theory. He might want it to undermine Bitcoin's decentralized, and make easier to control, take down.

guess who else worked for google.. pieter wuille (Mr. segwit)

For maintaining small blocks.

Wants to preserve Bitcoin's decentralized nature, and make it hard to control, take down.

[franky1]

You support the group behind the NYA which tried to undermine the community?

not to confuse the 2015 segwit2mb... with the 2017 segwit2x

the 2017 segwit2x which was promoted by DCG (NYA as you call it) was just a false flag. false choice. purely done to make people believe that there was an option to increase legacy on bitcoins mainnet.. but only if they allow segwit(1x) acceptance first

the reality was that 2x would never actually have got adopted as core designed and implemented code to REKT it as soon as segwit(x1) got its threshold
(go ask your buddy doomad for the link to the code. he is dead proud of cores(blockstram devs) efforts and was happy to advocate and promote his adoration for that agenda)

[franky1]

hearn. wanted to offer different brands of full nodes
bitcoinj, bitcoin XT = diversity and decentralisation

hearn. wanted to offer blocks that would allow more transactions on the bitcoin network bitcoin growth/scaling

....
Pieter wuille wanted a new TX format that would:
allow people to lock funds up with a counterparty, thus reduce self control(more centralisation of funds)
push people off the network and into other networks

but hey. you will ignore that as you just want to talk about social drama, not reality of WHO wants centralisation

[squatter]

Did you know: Craig S Wright a.k.a. Faketoshi works with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on tracking users etc?

The Hearn connection is understandable -- probably more so related to his work at Google than his work on Bitcoin stuff. The Gavin Andresen / CIA conspiracies have been around for years; we know he talked to the CIA.

The Faketoshi thing came out of left field, though. Is there a real source for this? Any details on what he actually did for DHS?

guess who else worked for google.. pieter wuille (Mr. segwit)

Source?

[pooya87]

If someday Roger Ver publicly announces he supports Segwit? Then I would say he saw the light. Welcome back Mr. Ver.

then you would be changing your whole ideology!

You support the group behind the NYA which tried to undermine the community? Ok, that's no problem for me, it failed at any rate.

i don't support any groups, i support proposals. if we start supporting "groups" then we are effectively centralizing bitcoin to that group. it doesn't matter who they are and what they have done so far.  you have to check the code itself.
i don't claim to be an expert though. but with little knowledge that i have i checked out different proposals regardless of who started them. to my understanding the hard fork to 8 MB (BCH) was the worst and SegWit fork was the best although it has its own downsides too.
additionally i do believe that a hard fork to increase the block size itself is requires. we may not need it now, as i said hopefully we get other things such as Schnorr before that but eventually it needs to happen.

But let's get back on the conspiracy theory of Gavin, Faketosi, and Mike Hearn's push for big blocks. Is there a probability that their objective was to undermine Bitcoin's decentralization?

i agree the possibility exists but my whole point is that you should not reject or accept any proposal based on who proposed it. if you start doing it then YOU are centralizing bitcoin to that group. in other words you should do:
- accept SegWit if you understand the implications of it, not because core team proposed it
- reject hard fork to X MB blocks if you understand the implications of it not because people you named here were pushing for it.

[bitbunnny]

seeing as how the OP is just interested in social drama distractions.

hearn worked for google.. and it was google that sold certain apps to 3lettr agencies
guess who else worked for google.. pieter wuille (Mr. segwit)

This might look to have some connection and deeper cause but honesty I don't believe in conspiracy theories. It's true that such theories are something that follow Bitcoin from the very beginning but to my opinion they are only excuse for some things that can't be explained or justified on any other way, especialy those bad ones.

[Wind_FURY]

Did you know: Craig S Wright a.k.a. Faketoshi works with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on tracking users etc?

The Hearn connection is understandable -- probably more so related to his work at Google than his work on Bitcoin stuff. The Gavin Andresen / CIA conspiracies have been around for years; we know he talked to the CIA.

The Faketoshi thing came out of left field, though. Is there a real source for this? Any details on what he actually did for DHS?

He tweeted about it,



Go to the link posted in the OP. The complete version is there.

[poptok1]

-snip- but honesty I don't believe in conspiracy theories.

You can't be serious about that statement. So you are claiming that never, nowhere, under any circumstances no group of influential and powerful people met secretly, to plot a scheme designed to strengthen their position of power? C'mon it would be naive to think that way. As long as some form of power centres exist, there will be people who plot how to influence it for their own benefit. History is full of plots, pop-culture even "higher" types of entertainment, heavily depend on conspiracy cliches.

As to this particular thesis... kinda lacking under evidence department. Definitely justified to keep an wary eye though.