Domain name update

[teeGUMES]

Right now Cøbra is sitting back laughing because with this split he has absolutely zero obligations to the very people that think they're bitcoin bigshots in this thread. Sorry theymos.. 100% your baby now that you've nurtured and let fester.

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[Lauda]

Right now Cøbra is sitting back laughing because with this split he has absolutely zero obligations to the very people that think they're bitcoin bigshots in this thread. Sorry theymos.. 100% your baby now that you've nurtured and let fester.

AmericaThe US and brains often don't correlate.

[Vod]

America and brains often don't correlate.

I hope you mean the US.  THe northern people in North America are very intelligent - we manage to outperform the US in per capita production despite the hardships of living in a frozen wasteland. 

[Lauda]

I hope you mean the US.  THe northern people in North America are very intelligent - we manage to outperform the US in per capita production despite the hardships of living in a frozen wasteland. 

Sorry, I have corrected it. You are very right about this!

[DooMAD]

I had kind of noticed the parts about some questionable deviance into being sympathetic into shitcoins and nonsense BIG blocker theories, but sometimes it is NOT clear about the various connections and maybe they do not matter too much in the whole scheme of things and if I feel that I am able to engage within the forum and share ideas, mostly about bitcoin, then I am good...

Jay, I think that it would be a real eye-opener (and ultimately beneficial to Bitcoin) if you were to do a market analysis to estimate approximately where Bitcoin should be today, were it not for the fork-attacks.  Bitcoin’s “honey badger” power in resisting those attacks has been phenomenal; but where would we be without those attacks?

I am now arguing from a business perspective.  Any reasonable prospectus on Bitcoin must disclose that Bitcoin’s biggest vulnerability is fork-attacks, also known as the trust attack.  Any reasonable investor should recognize it as in his own self-interest to fight those attacks.  The forked shitcoins falsely advertised as “Bitcoin” will, in and of themselves, never amount to anything in the long term; they are purely a negative, which harms the market as a whole by intentionally, fraudulently diluting the “Bitcoin” brand and financially diluting Bitcoin’s market capitalization. and reducing overall investor confidence in Bitcoin’s uniqueness.  To invest exclusively in the one and only genuine Bitcoin, and to defend your investment by defending Bitcoin against dilution attacks, is a strategy perfectly matched in both principle and practicality.

Would I be right in assuming it's not the existence of forkcoins you oppose, but rather just the false advertising part to sucker in new users?  Because I'd argue that being opposed to forks unconditionally simply isn't practical.  If people vehemently want to incorporate ideas into Bitcoin that are fundamentally incompatible with its underlying principles, do we really want them to stick around forever, still desperately trying to inflict their delusions on the Bitcoin protocol?  Surely it's better to excrete such toxins?  It's never "dilution" to release waste.  Let them build their faulty clones and pretend it's the real thing.  I'd argue it's still preferable to an alternative outcome where no forks had taken place and the toxic "blocksize debate", instead of being a footnote in the annals of history like it is now, had still raged on to this day because those people never got what they believed they wanted.

The fact they still market their shitcoins as "Bitcoin" is inexcusable, but they're off doing their own thing now, leaving us to get on unopposed with our thing.  

[Lauda]

Would I be right in assuming it's not the existence of forkcoins you oppose, but rather just the false advertising part to sucker in new users?  Because I'd argue that being opposed to forks unconditionally simply isn't practical.  If people vehemently want to incorporate ideas into Bitcoin that are fundamentally incompatible with its underlying principles, do we really want them to stick around forever, still desperately trying to inflict their delusions on the Bitcoin protocol?  Surely it's better to excrete such toxins?  It's never "dilution" to release waste.  Let them build their faulty clones and pretend it's the real thing.  I'd argue it's still preferable to an alternative outcome where no forks had taken place and the toxic "blocksize debate", instead of being a footnote in the annals of history like it is now, had still raged on to this day because those people never got what they believed they wanted.

The fact they still market their shitcoins as "Bitcoin" is inexcusable, but they're off doing their own thing now, leaving us to get on unopposed with our thing.  

Forks are good, forks claiming that they are Bitcoin or have Bitcoin in their name are evil (even if they were 100x technologically superior) and anyone making pro-such-fork-statements is evil too.

[bonesjonesreturns]

Anyone reading the actually comment would not agree. Very likely you are a pedo? Is that neutral enough for you?
How would you view that under the guise of a neutral tag?
Not that i believe you are, but I hope you get the point

As long as it's not negative and puts a -1 in my account to new members - people can write whatever they want in feedback - it's not moderated.  

That statement does not refute my assertion that if a person wrote vod is very likely a pedo under the guise of a neutral feedback that you would believe that was a neutral comment or was intended to give a neutral impression to the reader.

So yes that is a negative comment but placed under a neutral rating.

Anyway, I don't think approaching the new sole owner of bitcoin.org in this manner that lauda the scammer is trying to pull this thread is the optimal path to take.

Character attacks are best reserved for those where there is strong or irrefutable evidence of wrong doing like in Laura's history here.
Lauda is actually throwing dirt on theymos judgement here also. So I hope that is clear.
You believe theymos has not considered all of this plus a lot of other information that we are not privy to?
Ask questions...don't leave known scammers to attempt character assassination based on weak sauce evidence

" very likely for malicious intent" 

Too strong and too viscous based on the evidence presented.  "Possible danger"  or " less secure"  okay fine. Very likely Malicious  intent NO.

The immediate support from nullius was predictable  

[Cøbra]

Ultimately, what has actively stopped BCH from winning the public-relations mindshare war is that an unorganized, decentralized cadre of Bitcoiners who have pushed back unequivocally.  This set very visibly includes Greg Maxwell, and also his former colleagues at Blockstream—Dr. Back, et al.  It very visibly includes laanwj and harding, whom Lauda mentioned.  It very visibly does not include you, the exclusive controller of bitcoin-dot-org.

Bitcoin Cash had no chance of ever getting called "Bitcoin" on major consumer services like Coinbase and wallets and payment rails. The attempts I fought against would have been presented as "Bitcoin" had they succeeded. At best, Bitcoin Cash might have confused and tricked a few people, but it wasn't as bad as the three wave of attacks that I was against. Adam Back supported something called the "Hong Kong agreement", a precursor to the "New York agreement" which Segwit2x was based off. Unfortunately, Adam for a brief moment also bought into the idea that Bitcoin could be changed by deals made between businesses.

There was no need for me to fight against Bitcoin Cash, because it clearly posed no risk to Bitcoin. It helped Bitcoin since big blockers left Bitcoin and focused their efforts on Bitcoin Cash. Some people just believe in scaling on-chain, others with solutions like Lighting, there was always going to be a split. The question was just whether it would happen by Bitcoin tearing itself apart, or by the big blockers just forking off into an altcoin.

To anyone with technical expertise, their self-evident agenda is, “Don’t trust us:  Keep Bitcoin trustless.”  I like that:  Keep down the blocksize so that ordinary people can keep running nodes (I say this with real-world experience needing to run Bitcoin on inexpensive hardware), and promote Lightning as the future of scaling and privacy.  For as long as that remains the agenda demonstrated by their actions and their code (not merely their words), I will continue to defend Blockstream’s reputation in public discussions.

For a company's who's motto is "don't trust, verify", all their products require quite a bit of trust. Let's go through and evaluate:

• Blockstream Satellite: A service that broadcasts the Bitcoin blockchain to the entire world with the aim of reducing Bitcoin's dependency on internet access. It isn't hard to see where things fall apart here. First, you can't obviously do an initial sync from a satellite, it just broadcasts the latest blocks. Secondly, if you run the satellite receiver, you are putting all your faith in Blockstream's uplink to give you the right blocks. Should you find yourself in a situation with no internet, and only a satellite, you are blindly putting faith in Blockstream's version of the Bitcoin blockchain. It's even worse than running an SPV node, Blockstream is basically sybil attacking you. At any time they can just choose to stop sending you new blocks and you're shit out of luck.
• Blockstream Green: Claims to be a simple and secure Bitcoin wallet. It isn't simple, nor secure. It uses 2-of-2 multi-sig, between you and Blockstreams' server. All transactions you do require Blockstream's signature. If their server goes down, you can't do any transactions, since they can't sign off on it. All your amounts are co-owned by Blockstream. It's even worse than running an SPV wallet. Because they sign all your transactions, they can also see all your transactions, and your IP addresses, destroying your privacy.
• Blockstream's Liquid sidechain: A federated sidechain that lets you do faster transactions and apparently gives you privacy. Here, users are asked to hand over their BTC to a federation, so that it can become L-BTC, the federation can literally steal all your bitcoins and block any transactions you make. They tried to market it as "trustless", until one of their own co-founders called them out on it: https://twitter.com/TheBlueMatt/status/1060101587584991233.

They present themselves as in support of trustless solutions, but everything they put out there is inevitably worse than the very stuff they used to criticize so much. These were the guys rallying hard against SPV wallets, and now they push a wallet in which you can't even transact without their permission. These were the guys criticizing other projects because their networks were too centralized, now they run a network that will gladly gobble up your BTC, give you some L-BTC, to let you transact faster, all while giving them the power to steal every last satoshi from you, but "Bitcoin Cash is a scam!" right?

Let's assume for a moment that Adam Back owned bitcoin.org, would you character assassinate him for supporting the Hong Kong agreements? Or what about Luke-jr, would you smear him because he pushed UASF very hard which could have split the network? What about Peter Todd, for pushing that shady coin Viacoin? Maybe you would claim Jameson Lopp is a scammer because he once supported Bitcoin XT? Andreas is obviously a scammer too, he says good things about Ethereum and wrote a book about it, ETH is pre-mined garbage, fuck him too right? Can't trust him. theymos must be a scammer too, he said too many good things about Grin, screw him too right?

Some of you really need to chill out. The Blockstream propaganda of "Cobra is evil!" really has you totally duped.

[Lauda]

The Blockstream propaganda of "Cobra is evil!" really has you totally duped.

Amusing that I am seeing this many years after I had first seen it used for "X is evil" (unrelated to you). 

[FIFA worldcup]

You're all wasting your time asking theymos. As owner he can do what he wants with the forum. As I've found out before, you can ask a question in one of these missives and he just won't answer. He's made a decision and you may as well respect it as he doesn't usually clarify. (Look at his activity over the last.year or so)

But Satoshi needs to be aligned on this ?  Was he aligned with the changes  
(P.S Its Just a joke)

Satoshi created both bitcoin.org and this forum, which was originally at bitcoin.org/smf.

[JayJuanGee]

bitcoincore.org (onion)

verify the integrity of your download using strong cryptography

On Principled Practicality

oh and say fuck you to the shitcoiners once in a while, that tends to be a bonus.

Whereupon:

Essentially nobody trusts Cøbra except theymos and maybe a couple of bamboozled individuals. There is a reason for this, and there is a reason why many here have praised Cøbra when he has appeared here before: It is called ignorance.

I had kind of noticed the parts about some questionable deviance into being sympathetic into shitcoins and nonsense BIG blocker theories, but sometimes it is NOT clear about the various connections and maybe they do not matter too much in the whole scheme of things and if I feel that I am able to engage within the forum and share ideas, mostly about bitcoin, then I am good...

Jay, I think that it would be a real eye-opener (and ultimately beneficial to Bitcoin) if you were to do a market analysis to estimate approximately where Bitcoin should be today, were it not for the fork-attacks.  Bitcoin’s “honey badger” power in resisting those attacks has been phenomenal; but where would we be without those attacks?

I believe that we cannot really have a world without attacks on bitcoin.

Even satoshi anticipated a lot of scams, attacks and snake oil salesmen.

I am NOT saying that those attacks should not be denigrated or called out for what they are, but I do not consider myself even willing to go down a road of hypothesizing a world without such attacks, because that seems to be nearly pure fantasy thinking and the world does not work like that.  Human greed does not work like that.  Even honest people will try to find ways around bitcoin, and they truly believe some of the bad analogies regarding the first generation does not work.  They put bitcoin in a first generation and try to act like nothing preceded it and then they try to create bitcoin 2.0, and they may even purposefully be in those false histories.

I also don't proclaim to be any kind of bitcoin expert, and so I appreciate that there might be symbiosis between bitcoin and the various shitcoins and even some learning that bitcoin does from those various attacks and experiments, so in some sense, bitcoin might not really be able to go up, until it has been attacked a number of times and proven itself worthy of continuing to go up.

I am now arguing from a business perspective.  Any reasonable prospectus on Bitcoin must disclose that Bitcoin’s biggest vulnerability is fork-attacks, also known as the trust attack.  

I am not either familiar with all of the various attack vectors to figure out which ones are more pernicious.  Of course the forks were to some degree attempts to attack bitcoin from the inside, so yeah in 2017, it is possible that the BIG blocker nutjobs could have won that battle and gotten bitcoin into a place that is no better than paypal.. or just easy to change at the whim of any group that could muster up the most kind of whining.... but probably some of the cyperpunks would have gone off and started working on a new bitcoin that was really censorship resistant... but instead, we are in a history in which, so far, that has not need to be done, and bitcoin continues to exist in a kind of bullish variation of a cyperpunks wet dream, with second layer systems that are built on bitcoin, but a lot of optionality too.  Sure, not everything is perfect in bitcoin in terms of any of the cyperpunks principles, but it seems quite difficult to imagine any other more better scenarios of where bitcoin is at as compared to where it could be.  

Yeah, we are likely to have a lot more attacks in terms of fungibility and privacy, but there still continue to be a lot of options in bitcoin that help us to consider that we are in a much better position by having bitcoin (those of us who know about it and invest into it) than we would be in our current precarious money printing situation and a kind of world calamity of various  ongoing productivity uncertainties.  I say fuck gold to some extent, but we are in a world that even gold is likely to perform quite well even though it does not seem to have as much flexibility as bitcoin in terms of a lot of things, including portability, divisibility and ease of access and self-storage.  So, yeah, even though a lot of BIGGER players seem to know about gold and trying to get some security in gold's likelihood to retain its value, bitcoin is still quite likely to outperform gold in magnitudes in the coming couple of years... so even with uncertainties, including likely ongoing snakeoil deceptions in various shitcoins, including stable coins, I am still quite confident that bitcoiner could not really imagine too much of a better place to be, because I still believe it is a bit unrealistic to just wish that the talented shitcoiners would work on bitcoin rather than wanting to get away with printing their own money... cannot really stop those behaviors and get those people to "work" on bitcoin.

Any reasonable investor should recognize it as in his own self-interest to fight those attacks.  

Sure.  Hate to quote Roger Ver.. but there is a tragedy of the commons problem, too... so some people can get away without fighting.. or at least not battling as much.. so the amount of outward fighting might not always be clear, and maybe in the end, we just have to have various tests of bitcoin that motivates others to figure out ways to make bitcoin more resilient or to speak out about bitcoin being superior or just superficially and unambiguously calling all the shitcoins, shitcoins, even though there might be one or two that has a tiny bit of value (am I being too generous?   ).

The forked shitcoins falsely advertised as “Bitcoin” will, in and of themselves, never amount to anything in the long term; they are purely a negative, which harms the market as a whole by intentionally, fraudulently diluting the “Bitcoin” brand and financially diluting Bitcoin’s market capitalization. and reducing overall investor confidence in Bitcoin’s uniqueness.  To invest exclusively in the one and only genuine Bitcoin, and to defend your investment by defending Bitcoin against dilution attacks, is a strategy perfectly matched in both principle and practicality.

Yeah, maybe we will get lucky and some of them will disappear more quickly, but I don't see them going away very quickly and even if the scammer craig wright gets thrown in jail, BcashSV probably will not die, and it might even pump.  So what I am saying is that it could take 50 years or more for the value to gravitate into bitcoin, including periods of time that some of us could make way more money by supporting various shitcoins that are printing money and we happen to be in the right (or should I say Wright) circles at the right time.  

I am not sacrificing my own psychology to get involved in a bunch of shitcoins, but it is difficult to really stop people from doing it, and maybe we might even meet people who end up getting involved in "superduper the best coin" for the next 20 years and making a killing, while bitcoin is merely just plodding along with only averaging 50% price appreciation per year rather than some higher performing shitcoins.. that end up crashing down 20 years later, but in the meantime the shitcoin pumpeners were buying multiple lambos, hookers and blow... while we were suffering in our Rav4 and other lesser and more practical luxuries because we are "only" averaging 50% per year returns.. but yeah, in the long run, the value would still likely still be gravitating into bitcoin until there is some kind of meaningful other sound money asset that even comes close to bitcoin... and can you name any that come even close?  I thought not..  

Whereas Cøbra is perfectly positioned to stab Bitcoin in the back.  He is a trusted party for a vital public relations channel—one to which such well-intended people as LoyceV (and unfortunately, I myself) have been referring newbies.  If Cøbra were just some guy posting his opinions on the Internet, it would be a different matter.  Whereas the trusted party exclusively controlling a website with major public mindshare is known to be at best equivocal—at best.  If he were deadly principled, it may arguably be a different matter; but he is obviously not, wherefore:

Next step: Cøbra to give up access to Bitcoin.org.

O.k.  Fair enough.  I don't see any problem calling out Cøbra, and to the extent that he wants to defend himself, then that is fine, too.  Probably in the end, there are going to be a lot of decent people who are deceived into promoting shitcoins, or bitcoin imitations, so yeah, it could take a long ass time to work a lot of this out.. and sure it is possible also that bitcoin could fail in the process or get on a lower trajectory than what the stock to flow model would proposition.

Even something like stock to flow could still be correct, but have to be jiggered in order to deal with reality, such as moving the curve down or even tweaking some of the parameters in order to deal with the real impacts of some of the fuckery and trickery in the space and including some of the frequently subtle aspects that can deceive good people into supporting the wrong project.

Each of us merely has the choice about how we are going to proceed forward based on our own circumstances, so we have to consider our own particulars including cashflow, other investments, view of bitcoin as compared with other assets, our timeline, risk tolerance and our time and skills to research, manage and tweak our allocations which can include ongoing learning and figuring out how to spend our time, too.  

Maybe even if we are feeling less confident in bitcoin we might take some higher stakes in some of the shitcoins, and yeah, if we are in our early 20s we are going to be more willing to take higher risks and be a bit more adventurous and maybe even engage in a bit more of an active battle against shitcoins or even invest a bit higher allocation in shitcoins because we are not even sure about the direction of matters and what coin to support with our limited financial resources, but our more plentiful resources of energy and a longer time horizon, but sometimes our own personal circumstances are going to limit us more in terms of how we can participate, so even if some older people might be presumed to have gotten their shit together financially and even more worldly smarter, but there are even some older people who have been engaging in a long life of ongoing gambling, and they cannot stop themselves from continuing to gamble and wondering why they had never built up a strong base of wealth.. so they get lured (again) into shitcoins.  

There is only so much that any of us can do to help others, and I am NOT saying not to help others, but still one of the most important things is to make sure that each of us has our own shit together and to put our own oxygen mask on before helping others with their mask....   So, yes, we can also do both, and I don't subscribe to all or nothing, but we have to also think about matters in terms of ourselves and getting our own allocation to a comfortable level and tweaking our own situation from time to time while we venture out and call bullshit on other projects or even figuring out how much time, energy or finances to put into either fighting shitcoin projects or investing in them... None of us has perfect information, either, so the best that we can do, most of the time, is to attempt to tailor as well as we can to what we can figure out about our own circumstances.

[Fragbait]

How about you take yourself away from the position rather than boasting how you could but didn't do evil?

How about you go and create your own site and make it as successful, and then give it away if you like communism so much.

It's his site, he can do whatever the f he pleases with it. You don't get a say. Sorry.

[nullius]

Bottom line up front:

Some of you really need to chill out. The Blockstream propaganda of "Cobra is evil!" really has you totally duped.

In my experience, the moment that I hear the phrase “Blockstream propaganda”, I know that I am speaking to an idiot.  It’s a kind of shibboleth for those who believe everything that they read on /r/btc.

Ultimately, what has actively stopped BCH from winning the public-relations mindshare war is that an unorganized, decentralized cadre of Bitcoiners who have pushed back unequivocally.  This set very visibly includes Greg Maxwell, and also his former colleagues at Blockstream—Dr. Back, et al.  It very visibly includes laanwj and harding, whom Lauda mentioned.  It very visibly does not include you, the exclusive controller of bitcoin-dot-org.

Bitcoin Cash had no chance of ever getting called "Bitcoin" on major consumer services like Coinbase and wallets and payment rails. [...] At best, Bitcoin Cash might have confused and tricked a few people [...] There was no need for me to fight against Bitcoin Cash, because it clearly posed no risk to Bitcoin.

WTF, were you now around in September–November 2017?  All that talk about “the flippening” may seem like a sick joke now; but at the time, it did not seem so.

I myself will never forget the day of 12 November 2017.  I was fucking glued to the computer screen all day as our hashrate plummeted—I think that at some point, Slushpool alone was something like 70% of our hashrate, which is really bad.  Block generation slowed to a crawl, mempools backed up to hell, and meanwhile, all the Btrashers were on social media prematurely gloating about their victory as BCH prices spiked something like 300% in about 12 hours on FOMO rush—for before the dump, first comes the pump...

(Details thereby are recounted off the top of my head, subject to the lability of human memory.)

Of course, what ultimately happened is that even the worst bad actors in mining had to come crawling back to Bitcoin if they wanted to pay their electric bills, the BCH price crashed as quickly as it had spiked, FOMO sheep got fleeced, and Bitcoin moved on.  But that would not have happened if fewer Bitcoiners had my attitude, and more Bitcoiners had your attitude.  If the economic majority had your way of thinking, Bitcoin would have been “flippened” out of existence; and its replacement would have been pwned by Jihan & Co. as a centrally managed shitcoin, with no alternatives remaining.

The attempts I fought against would have been presented as "Bitcoin" had they succeeded.

What part of “X and Y would both have been very bad” is difficult to understand?

To anyone with technical expertise, their self-evident agenda is, “Don’t trust us:  Keep Bitcoin trustless.”  I like that:  Keep down the blocksize so that ordinary people can keep running nodes (I say this with real-world experience needing to run Bitcoin on inexpensive hardware), and promote Lightning as the future of scaling and privacy.  For as long as that remains the agenda demonstrated by their actions and their code (not merely their words), I will continue to defend Blockstream’s reputation in public discussions.

For a company's who's motto is "don't trust, verify", all their products require quite a bit of trust. Let's go through and evaluate:

• [— A selection of three items, suspiciously excluding how Dr. Back, et al. have apparently bet the future of the company on the Lightning Network. —]

Interesting, the part that you ignored there.  Well, let us take the three that you did list one by one:

• Blockstream Satellite: A service that broadcasts the Bitcoin blockchain to the entire world with the aim of reducing Bitcoin's dependency on internet access. It isn't hard to see where things fall apart here. First, you can't obviously do an initial sync from a satellite, it just broadcasts the latest blocks. Secondly, if you run the satellite receiver, you are putting all your faith in Blockstream's uplink to give you the right blocks. Should you find yourself in a situation with no internet, and only a satellite, you are blindly putting faith in Blockstream's version of the Bitcoin blockchain. It's even worse than running an SPV node, [color=yellow,2,100]Blockstream is basically sybil attacking you.[/glow] At any time they can just choose to stop sending you new blocks and you're shit out of luck.

As a security expert, I can attest that you have no idea what a Sybil attack is.  How does Blockstream Satellite generate unbounded numbers of sockpuppet identities using cheap identifiers to overwhelm your view of the network?

I myself love the concept of Blockstream Satellite because, if used properly, it can give a 100% anonymous (receipt of broadcast radio waves with <$100 in commonly-available hardware) view of the blockchain that is immune to targeted attacks, and is probably more reliable on average than an anonymous peer randomly selected from a network currently infested with actual Sybil nodes.  When combined with the P2P network, I think that Blockstream Satellite adds a safety check against eclipse attacks.  Although that is not their primary advertised use case, I myself think it is a good use case.

For those with very limited Internet connections, receiving blocks through Blockstream Satellite and then checking the block hashes against those observed on the P2P network would give all the security of the P2P network, and would not in any way be comparable to SPV.  I have not configured it this way, and I admit I don’t know off the top of my head exactly the magic to make Core do this; but if I were consulting for someone with limited Internet access, it is the first thing that I would look into.  The first thing that I would check is if Blockstream has already done the hard work here...

Core independently validates the blocks that you would be receiving through Blockstream; and if the chain you’re being fed by them does not match the hashes of whatever your P2P peers are advertising as their best chain tips, Blockstream  has no way of stopping you from downloading the other blocks from the Internet, and immediately figuring out that Blockstream is trying to mislead you.

If Blockstream were to broadcast bad blocks worldwide through a system that by its nature cannot target users, it would be an excellent means for them to out themselves as totally corrupt and worthy of universal hatred.

• Blockstream Green: Claims to be a simple and secure Bitcoin wallet. It isn't simple, nor secure. It uses 2-of-2 multi-sig, between you and Blockstreams' server. All transactions you do require Blockstream's signature. If their server goes down, you can't do any transactions, since they can't sign off on it. All your amounts are co-owned by Blockstream. It's even worse than running an SPV wallet. Because they sign all your transactions, they can also see all your transactions, and your IP addresses, destroying your privacy.

I have not evaluated Blockstream Green, nor was I familiar with its predecessor GreenAddress; so I can’t speak to this.

• Blockstream's Liquid sidechain: A federated sidechain that lets you do faster transactions and apparently gives you privacy. Here, users are asked to hand over their BTC to a federation, so that it can become L-BTC, the federation can literally steal all your bitcoins and block any transactions you make. They tried to market it as "trustless", until one of their own co-founders called them out on it: https://twitter.com/TheBlueMatt/status/1060101587584991233.

So, bluematt flamed them for an advertisement that damn well deserved it.  His twitter bio still proudly lists him as Blockstream co-founder.  Call me when he starts tweeting about “Blockstream propaganda”.

I don’t (and can’t) transact on Liquid.  Insofar as I have looked into it, it seems to be primarily a way for non-Bitcoin assets to be managed.  Call me if Blockstream starts to position it as a replacement for Bitcoin, or otherwise as a competitor to Bitcoin.

They present themselves as in support of trustless solutions, but everything they put out there is inevitably worse than the very stuff they used to criticize so much.

Such as Lightning Network?  Most of what I know directly about Blockstream’s current market position comes from my following (in various degrees) c-lightning and related Elements Project work on Lightning integration with everything from shopping carts to tipjars to pay-per-call Web APIs.

https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md
Merited by nullius (100)

0.7.3 - 2019-10-18: "Bitcoin's Proof of Stake"

This release was named by @trueptolemy.

Insofar as I can see as an outsider with no relation to Blockstream, it looks to me like if Lightning fails, Dr. Back will probably be a poor man.

I also admire some of their ongoing R&D, such as Simplicity for advanced smart contracts with mathematically provable security properties—unlike Ethereum’s foreseeable security nightmare of a Turing-complete VM bolted onto a blockchain, covered over in a fashionable Javascript-like language.  It is not the first time that I have raised this point:

Human beings know how to build correct, reliable computing machines.  I’ve read of fully redundant systems which could lose a CPU any time without blinking, capability-based research systems, etc., etc....  But all that is too expensive, plus too slow to bring to market.  People want their Dancing Pigs and their Cryptokitties.  Thus, we get everywhere the computing equivalent of Ethereum.  Who wants to wait for research like Simplicity before running a hot new ICO?

If you are interested in smart contracts, you may appreciate a peek at current R&D which may potentially someday become the future of Bitcoin smart contracts:  Simplicity (PDF).  Powerfully expressive smart contracts written with in a formally verifiable DSL, running on a formally verified VM, would have none of the exploding clown car disasters inevitably resulting from the stupidity of bolting a Turing-complete VM onto a blockchain.

...if we want to discuss yet another object lesson on why Bitcoin should never, ever have a Turing-complete script.  For that reason, Bitcoin has something better in the pipeline.  It will have properties which can be proved against DAO-style “oopsies” and mass-loss “hacker deleted the library” bugs; and it will never let the network be DOSed by prolifically fecund, evilly cute kittens.  It will be pure, powerful Simplicity (PDF).

Well, either that—or if we want to make fun of Ethereum and its latest woes.  Hahaha!  That is on-topic anywhere, in my engineering opinion.

(Oh, and libwally is little bundle of joy.  I say that based on having read the code, not based on the name of the company who published it.  I have been planning that if/when I dust off some of my little Bitcoin utilities on Github, I should probably use libwally to replace my own address-wrangling and BIP32-derivation code.  It’s a small thing in the big picture, but nevertheless worth mention in small text.)

Of the Blockstream goodies that I just described, all of which you somehow forgot to mention, what doesn’t push trustlessness and decentralization?

~

Would I be right in assuming it's not the existence of forkcoins you oppose, but rather just the false advertising part to sucker in new users?  Because I'd argue that being opposed to forks unconditionally simply isn't practical.

I actually do oppose forks almost categorically.  I began to write a long essay on that, which perhaps I may finish later and post somewhere...  The nutshell version is that:

If people vehemently want to incorporate ideas into Bitcoin that are fundamentally incompatible with its underlying principles, do we really want them to stick around forever, still desperately trying to inflict their delusions on the Bitcoin protocol?  Surely it's better to excrete such toxins?  It's never "dilution" to release waste.

Indeed, you are right.  But without fallacious overextension, the same analogy works perfectly well for observing that excreted toxins are just that:  Shit (or shitcoins) which are dead weight to be flushed down the sewer.

It is not exactly a ringing endorsement of forks. :-)


Long post by Jay came in while I was writing my long post.  Will catch up soon.

[theymos]

If you don't like Cøbra: Cøbra had ultimate technical authority over both domains; I only had management access. There was never a point in history where I had ultimate authority over either domain. Now Cøbra only has one domain. Furthermore, I have not been very active in influencing anything related to bitcoin.org for a couple of years, so nothing is likely to change as a result of me being removed from the list of domain administrators.

If you don't like me: Cøbra never had any access to the bitcointalk.org server, and had essentially no influence over its operation, so things have not gotten "worse" in any way.
Cøbra has been erratic at times, and has made some statements/decisions which I disagreed with, but I really don't think that he will suddenly "turn evil". He could've done that at any time over the past several years, and nobody would've been able to stop him. Lately, bitcoin.org has been developing especially well.

The ideal solution would be to somehow stop people from considering centralized sites like bitcoin.org/bitcoin.com/etc. as "important", but that's not going to happen. Even if you got everyone to switch to btcinformation.org or whatever, then you'd be creating a new important centralized site which would eventually be corrupted. (Not to say that such an effort is pointless, though, if you don't like bitcoin.org.) All we can do about this situation is to just individually try our best:
 - If you see something about bitcoin.org (or another site) that you don't like, try to get it changed.
 - If you don't like bitcoin.org (or another site) or you don't like the way that it's managed, point people to a different site instead, or create your own.
 - If you end up controlling an "important site", try to keep it operating in the most correct way that you can, for as long as possible.

[nullius]

The ideal solution would be to somehow stop people from considering centralized sites like bitcoin.org/bitcoin.com/etc. as "important", but that's not going to happen. Even if you got everyone to switch to btcinformation.org or whatever, then you'd be creating a new important centralized site which would eventually be corrupted.

That is an excellent point.  From here, the discussion inevitably devolves into big talk about some plan to redesign the Web to have at least the decentralization that Usenet had 40 years ago.  To avoid that discussion, all I’ll say is that “cypherpunks write code”. :-)

(Not to say that such an effort is pointless, though, if you don't like bitcoin.org.) All we can do about this situation is to just individually try our best:
 - If you see something about bitcoin.org (or another site) that you don't like, try to get it changed.
 - If you don't like bitcoin.org (or another site) or you don't like the way that it's managed, point people to a different site instead, or create your own.
 - If you end up controlling an "important site", try to keep it operating in the most correct way that you can, for as long as possible.

Sound advice.  With a centrally controlled resource, it is all a matter of trust.  There are some individuals whom I myself would trust with such responsibility.  (And what happens when they die—is there trustworthy clear succession of responsibility?  And what if others do not likewise trust them?  And...)

That said, I must point out that this:

Next step: Cøbra to give up access to Bitcoin.org.

~

How about you give up singular control to shared control by known and honest individuals such as Wladimir, harding and others? Oh right, we have tried this before and you refused.

...is exactly an instance of this:

- If you see something about bitcoin.org (or another site) that you don't like, try to get it changed.

[JayJuanGee]

The Blockstream propaganda of "Cobra is evil!" really has you totally duped.

Amusing that I am seeing this many years after I had first seen it used for "X is evil" (unrelated to you). 

Surely, I am missing something here.



Like an insider joke, or something... 

[TECSHARE]

I am not too fond of this change. I feel like Cøbra was a counterbalancing force as well as a means to protect the forum by division of ownership, IE if say some legal action happens to the forum server itself it can be re-opened again or vice versa. I understand doing it for simplicity sake, but I believe there were distinct benefits to keeping it the way it was.

...It's funny to hint I'm malicious or untrustworthy, despite managing these domains for years without any wrongdoing. I remember when these same people were hinting at me eventually turning bitcoin.org into a Bitcoin Cash site, yet it never happened, but it didn't stop them scaremongering and screaming about it like it was inevitable. Now here people are, hinting at some vague notion of me being untrustworthy, despite me safely and without incident handing the domain over to theymos. I think this is a problem with some people on this forum in general, they just assume everyone is malicious and some scammer, unless said user is in their clique.

The truth is, while you are spinning up nonsense and trying to spook people and smearing bitcoin.org's reputation, we are educating tens of thousands of new users each day. Millions of users learn about Bitcoin with us yearly, we send so much traffic to exchanges and wallets it's ridiculous, all of which translates into expanding the Bitcoin community...

That is the primary function of The Clown Pope and his Clown Cardinals.

[bonesjonesreturns]

If you don't like Cøbra: Cøbra had ultimate technical authority over both domains; I only had management access. There was never a point in history where I had ultimate authority over either domain. Now Cøbra only has one domain. Furthermore, I have not been very active in influencing anything related to bitcoin.org for a couple of years, so nothing is likely to change as a result of me being removed from the list of domain administrators.

If you don't like me: Cøbra never had any access to the bitcointalk.org server, and had essentially no influence over its operation, so things have not gotten "worse" in any way.
Cøbra has been erratic at times, and has made some statements/decisions which I disagreed with, but I really don't think that he will suddenly "turn evil". He could've done that at any time over the past several years, and nobody would've been able to stop him. Lately, bitcoin.org has been developing especially well.

The ideal solution would be to somehow stop people from considering centralized sites like bitcoin.org/bitcoin.com/etc. as "important", but that's not going to happen. Even if you got everyone to switch to btcinformation.org or whatever, then you'd be creating a new important centralized site which would eventually be corrupted. (Not to say that such an effort is pointless, though, if you don't like bitcoin.org.) All we can do about this situation is to just individually try our best:
 - If you see something about bitcoin.org (or another site) that you don't like, try to get it changed.
 - If you don't like bitcoin.org (or another site) or you don't like the way that it's managed, point people to a different site instead, or create your own.
 - If you end up controlling an "important site", try to keep it operating in the most correct way that you can, for as long as possible.

This post is quite clear.

Cobra had ultimate control of both domains.
Cobra gives 1 domain to theymos

I'm not sure how lauda " now " decides this inspires = " very likely malicious intent" from cobra.
To me this appears relinquishing power not gaining power over the direction / perception of bitcoin.

I can guarantee if these " critics" had owned both domains they wouldn't consider giving or sharing either.
They would be personally milking them for every cent like they do here with their gambling sigs, escrowing, lending, scamming.
Be grateful cobra had the domains not lauda. Wallets emptied, cpu maxed out mining shitcoins, your granny getting threatening phone calls in the middle of the night by "under cover agents".

Unless either theymos or cobra want to set up some co ownership scenario which I guess they don't. Then it will be as it has pretty much been before. We just keep trusting the same people have had to trust previously.
So far. So good, overall. Secretly I was hoping cobra would remove the merit tumour one night when theymos was sleeping.
More shattered dreams.

Personally I think this forum is the one I would choose if I had a pick. You can't replace the history here.

At first it sounded a move in the wrong direction because I had assumed they were co owners of both with joint influence.
Now it seems if anything a little more decentralized/ distributed.
Could it be more so.....yes

I always look at ultimate control.  The rest is pretty much a facade. Now you have 2 separate owners.

[harding]

Both domains were last updated on November 24 last year:

Code:

Domain Name: BITCOINTALK.ORG
Registry Domain ID: D162601474-LROR
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.namecheap.com
Registrar URL: http://www.namecheap.com
Updated Date: 2019-11-24T14:01:10Z
Creation Date: 2011-06-24T05:19:00Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2029-06-24T05:19:00Z

Code:

Domain Name: BITCOIN.ORG
Registry Domain ID: D153621148-LROR
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.namecheap.com
Registrar URL: http://www.namecheap.com
Updated Date: 2019-11-24T13:58:35Z
Creation Date: 2008-08-18T13:19:55Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2029-08-18T13:19:55Z

That update was likely the result of my prompting.  On 23 November (my local time), I emailed several people I knew who owned .org domains encouraging them to renew as far in the future as possible because the .org registry was being sold.  Here's a copy of the email I sent Cøbra:

Hey,

FYI, the .org TLD was just sold to a private company.[1]  I noticed
Bitcoin.org is due to expire in two years; you may want to renew now to
the maximum of 10 years before the new .org TLD owners raise
prices (some TLDs charge many thousands of dollars per year for the
"bitcoin" name in their TLD).

-Dave

[1] https://savedotorg.org/

Cøbra replied thanking me for the tip and saying that he'd update both domains, although he wasn't sure it was strictly necessary (indeed, so far, I don't think renewal fees have increased much).

[NotATether]

I was around at the time; and I do recall that it was specifically the “denounce-segwit2x” page linked above that gave bitcoin.org sufficient ongoing credibility for me to continue recommending it to newbies.

Should you doubt how hard I myself was against S2X particularly, back in 2017:

It doesn't matter which of you were the hardest against Segwit2X, one person cannot change something by himself. It takes several people to oppose change.

Would I be right in assuming it's not the existence of forkcoins you oppose, but rather just the false advertising part to sucker in new users?

Replying to nullius:

Speaking from a new user's perspective here. I found bitcoin from a LinusTechTips video where he was attempting to mine bitcoin and talking about getting crazy rich from it. This is how the vast majority of newbies are exposed to bitcoin these days. You either tell them that there's this thing called "bitcoin" which you can mine and get free coins out of it (even though that isn't technically true), or show them that people are getting crazy rich off of it, either way the person in question dips their toes into bitcoin. But:

• Have you ever seen a popular youtube channel talking about BCH or BSV? Crypto channels do not count because their audience is people who already know about bitcoin.
• Have you seen a popular news outlet talking about BCH or BSV? Same disqualification above applies here too.

That's it. Those are the only avenues that reach large swaths of diverse users. Even the NYT article I linked did not once mention the words Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin SV, despite containing much other terminology verbage. And a social media post will only be read by a few hundred or thousand people, which is the consequence of having a Follow button, most of whom are either not newbies or have other, busy things to do with their time. Meaning BCH and BSV shills' sphere of influence on social media is limited to the people who want to believe it i.e. not the average joes, and they are a large majority, who are trying to use bitcoin to become rich.

I mean, if someone clicked the Follow button on one of those people, then they are clearly not a bitcoin newbie.

Whether you like Cobra or not is irrelevant. This discussion is happening on the back page of an internet forum far away from the bitcoin.org landing page. It is worth noting though that discussions like these are necessary to prevent mainstream channels from hosting these arguments in their own medium, exposing this to clueless people on Youtube and news. That is something I would worry about more than whether you trust Cobra with the bitcoin domain, and judging by the length of this thread you guys are doing a good job at keeping this discussion out of mainstream news, as I haven't seen a single article about this as of today.

Wake me up when LinusTechTips, which is sometimes listed here, or some other youtuber starts talking about BCH/BSV.

In fine, I'm sharply more worried about (the highly unlikely scenario given the point above) a large trending youtube channel with millions of subscribers merely talking about forkcoins than posts that morons like this one make here.