So it looks like Cobra is planning on passing on the Bitcoin.org domain

[Mehedi72]

Don't know much about Roger Ver but there is no doubt, if he owns bitcoin.org domain, the he will start cheating with innocent people badly. Cobra should sell Bitcoin.org to other, although my opinion is valuess but Roger Ver doesn't deserve bitcoin.org  

[RapTarX]

Don't know much about Roger Ver but there is no doubt, if he owns bitcoin.org domain, the he will start cheating with innocent people badly. Cobra should sell Bitcoin.org to other, although my opinion is valuess but Roger Ver doesn't deserve bitcoin.org  

That's unlikely to happen & I doubt Cobra would accept the most sweetest deal for selling it to Roger. Cobra would never be a guy to support BCH. Nevertheless, as Cobra expressed his opinion & willingness on this matter, it's unlikely that he will sell it even. He will look for someone who can care for the domain and hand over to them for nothing.

[DooMAD]

may be theymos?

That seems unlikely given recent developments.  Further clarified here. 

[Leonardo7]

Why should Roger Val says he has cash at home? That is too degrading of his personality this is why he won't be handed the domain. I don't trust someone who advertises BCH and BTC to noobs.

[slaman29]

It would be interesting to hear from someone who was drawn in by Bitcoin.com and didn't realise what it was until they had parted with some money. I guess they'd be too embarrassed to admit it but I presume the main reason he puts so much money into it is for that to happen.

Actually, there have been several cases already on Reddit and even on bitcointalk I've seen before. Newbies who thought they bought Bitcoin and then came looking for help when they couldn't find anything.

I think they changed the website shortly after all the complaints but they got what they wanted.

[JayJuanGee]

get ready for bitcoin.org website to be more commercial centric in near future. no matter who takes it over. expect it to change left or right. the network itself has already swayed more to the 'reserve currency of industrialised commerce and has moved away from the 'digital cash' of everyday users.. so expect whoever takes it over to sway the website to favour industry instead of user

Not only more commercial-centric. POLITICAL MANIPULATION and FRAUD! Did you see which name offered cash?

I believe theymos should be the "guardian" of the domain, temporary or not, to ensure that nothing will change.

I did not believe theymos to even be in the mix of anyone who would be potentially involved in bitcoin.org.

I mean, theymos and cøbra just recently separated their interest by dividing the pie (separating the two domains), which seemed to have made it easier for cøbra to thereafter be able to unilaterally decide what he wants to do, with bitcoin.org within his complete discretion...

may be theymos?

That seems unlikely given recent developments.  Further clarified here. 

As pointed out by DooMAD above.

[pooya87]

I do think in the future one should actually get some kind of voting system , like choose bunch of people who are interested in buying it and we can vote for it .
Plus the significant people should also get a veto power plus explain their disregard to everyone so that the decision is made efficiently . 

although this may not be what you say here but it is pretty close, bitcoin.org is open source and you can see and edit the contents here: https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org
for example you can participate in reviewing services like exchanges that are listed there, review wallets, suggest add or removal of parts that need changing.

[Wind_FURY]

get ready for bitcoin.org website to be more commercial centric in near future. no matter who takes it over. expect it to change left or right. the network itself has already swayed more to the 'reserve currency of industrialised commerce and has moved away from the 'digital cash' of everyday users.. so expect whoever takes it over to sway the website to favour industry instead of user

Not only more commercial-centric. POLITICAL MANIPULATION and FRAUD! Did you see which name offered cash?

I believe theymos should be the "guardian" of the domain, temporary or not, to ensure that nothing will change.

I did not believe theymos to even be in the mix of anyone who would be potentially involved in bitcoin.org.

I mean, theymos and cøbra just recently separated their interest by dividing the pie (separating the two domains), which seemed to have made it easier for cøbra to thereafter be able to unilaterally decide what he wants to do, with bitcoin.org within his complete discretion...

may be theymos?

That seems unlikely given recent developments.  Further clarified here. 

As pointed out by DooMAD above.

Then who? Whoever it's going to be, it shouldn't be someone like Roger Ver, or Gavin Andresen, or Jeff Garzik in my opinion. It would start another political debate/war from within the Bitcoin community.

"Bitcoin" has always referred to "Bitcoin Core". It should be someone who doesn't have an agenda vs. the Bitcoin Core Project.

[gmaxwell]

What shouldn't be done is pretty apparent to most.

Maybe it would be more helpful to make recommendations about what should be done?

[Wind_FURY]

What shouldn't be done is pretty apparent to most.

Maybe it would be more helpful to make recommendations about what should be done?

I believe "what should be done" is to give control of the domain to theymos, or someone neutral/impartial to the politics of Bitcoin, and yet an advocate of the technology and its ethos.

Or a community purchase of the domain, entrusted to theymos.

[gmaxwell]

Maybe Posers that are not willing to offer to buy the domain, should just butt the fuck out.  

Anyone who is trying to buy it should under no condition be allowed to have it.

Buying it would create a need to recoup the investment which would be at odds with the public interest.

Moreover, it's not simply anyone's to simply sell.  The domain was created by satoshi, the content (and traffic) by the broader community... control handed to the current operators for good stewardship, not private profit. I don't think they have any interest in doing so, either.  The bigger concern is just having confidence that the recipient will be equally committed.

[franky1]

a certain group of devs have been the biggest paid corporation in bitcoin in relation to controlling the coding decisions.
and you have to ask how are their investors/sponsors going to get their returns.

even 3 years after the biggest debate on the direction of bitcoin, certain devs/forum mods still sway in favour of the corporate business mode. even if they pretend to no longer be affiliated with the company they were part of creating.

id want to see bitcoin in neutral hands where it stays open to decentralised processes of trying to scale up bitcoin.(not other networks) and concentrating on bitcoin(not other networks).
i can easily see it will very much turn into a promotion tool to get people off the bitcoin network and become very much a advert for things like LN and liquid and other offchain stuff for corporate profit.

certain people have too much power. with having priority decision approvals in the github, owning dns seeds, and even having certain privileges on what can and cant be said in certain forums. it already has become more centralised to one brand of a certain group

ofcourse they dont like people opposing their corporate strategy. but bitcoin should not be about corporate plans/agenda's it should have always remained the digital cash for the unbanked. and not try becoming the reserve currency only for the elite custodians to use

promoting schemes that do not give extra REAL transaction throughput, while allowing bloating is not for the good of bitcoin. nor is causing tx fee increases with false promotions that its discounts
the byte/tx efficiency has gone down due to certain dev decision

so however the next owner of the website is. i sure hope they dont turn it more into the corporate arm of advertising bitcoin as an elitist reserve currency just for the custodian vault utility of other networks

[gentlemand]

I knew this subject would cause the usual characters to reach into their Snoopy shorts, pull out their filthy, unwashed member and start yanking on it in public before their carers can bundle them away.

[alani123]

Welp, that's interesting. I see that Cobra has spent the last few months at the very least criticizing blockstream, sidechains and the lightning network very heavily.
I'm sure he won't be leaving bitcoin but as he says that he will be retiring the application, I suspect that he was sick and tired of being coerced to pick sides all the time. I'm sure many old timers in the bitcoin space would have an equally hard time in his place.

I'm not sure however if he'll be able to pass down his anti-blockstream sentiment down the line if he leaves. To be honest, I'm not even sure if Cobra's existing influence was enough to keep block stream from getting a firmer grasp over bitcoin. You can see more of Cobra's thoughts on the matter in an earlier comment he had made. Just food for thought...

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/gb7z17/psa_lightning_network_vulnerability_allowing_to/fp5frnq/?context=3

[gentlemand]

I'm sure he won't be leaving bitcoin but as he says that he will be retiring the application, I suspect that he was sick and tired of being coerced to pick sides all the time. I'm sure many old timers in the bitcoin space would have an equally hard time in his place.

If it were me I'd link to the white paper, the blockchain download and not a great deal else.

I wouldn't list any third party services. I would regard layers as someone else's problem to educate people on. I'd want to keep it as a place beyond whining and politics. I think they're doing a very nice job with it considering the potential it has for mess. I'd still want to strip it back further.

[BitcoinFX]

What shouldn't be done is pretty apparent to most.

Maybe it would be more helpful to make recommendations about what should be done?

Pick me Cøbra, pick me!

I, BitcoinFX would solemnly swear to guard the bitcoin.org domain until the end of time or at least until my replacement arrives ...

*NSFW*
- https://youtu.be/c3RN9zz77Cs

D .  O . U . O . S . V . A . V . V  M .

[DooMAD]

I knew this subject would cause the usual characters to reach into their Snoopy shorts, pull out their filthy, unwashed member and start yanking on it in public before their carers can bundle them away.

It's okay, though.  These troubled individuals might have convinced themselves they're right, but anyone with an ounce of sense will look at them the same way they look at other conspiracy theorist screwballs like Flat-Earthers, Anti-Vaxxers and people who believe 5G somehow causes plagues.  If they had just one idea about the Bitcoin protocol which held even a modicum of technical merit, someone would be coding it, but no one is.  So they continue to scream for attention for the rest of their sad little lives because they'll never get what they want.

I see that Cobra has spent the last few months at the very least criticizing blockstream, sidechains and the lightning network very heavily.
I'm sure he won't be leaving bitcoin but as he says that he will be retiring the application, I suspect that he was sick and tired of being coerced to pick sides all the time. I'm sure many old timers in the bitcoin space would have an equally hard time in his place.

I'm not sure however if he'll be able to pass down his anti-blockstream sentiment down the line if he leaves. To be honest, I'm not even sure if Cobra's existing influence was enough to keep block stream from getting a firmer grasp over bitcoin.

I can see why corporate interests are a concern in a decentralised and open-source platform, but I honestly think people take it too far sometimes.  If developers are only coding something because a company is paying them to, that would indeed present a conflict of interests.  However, if developers are producing code that they personally believe will be beneficial to Bitcoin and also happen to be receiving an income from a company to continue their work, that's an entirely different matter.  I'm not convinced that any one company has a "grasp" on Bitcoin.

The difference should be obvious in practice.  When Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja published their ideas in the Lightning whitepaper, people took notice regardless of where their income was sourced.  Those who understood it recognised the potential and it sparked enough interest to result in multiple implementations, each with numerous team members, all producing code.  There wouldn't be several teams of people working on it if no one thought it was a good idea, no matter how much money someone might be willing to throw at it. 

In stark comparison, when some of the more vocal anti-blockstream evangelists (some of whom are here in this topic) present their ideas for how to "improve" Bitcoin, those who understand development take absolutely no notice because the ideas are often terrible, would likely centralise the Bitcoin network and generally have no technical merit whatsoever.  No implementations, no teams, no code.  Just incessant, whiny noise and half-baked concepts that go nowhere.  So these people, with their wounded pride, bitter and resentful over the fact that no one is paying attention to their "vision", rather than accepting the reality that their ideas are terrible, seemingly have no alternative but to engage in the fantasy that it's all a big conspiracy and that a shady company is pulling all the strings and manipulating the protocol to suit their evil corporate greed.

It would almost be amusing if it weren't so sad.  It also doesn't help that these self-righteous, ego-maniacal zealots are openly hostile.  They can't present a coherent argument without there being some boogeyman to attack and blame for all the things they can't understand or rationalise.  And then they wonder why they receive hostility in return.

At the end of the day, developers in a project like this are ideally not beholden to anyone.  Not the corporate entities and certainly not the conspiracy-theorist crazies who seem to believe they're owed a client that reflects their own unique interpretation on how this should all work.   

[hv_]

Why not ask Gavin ? Jon Matonis? Who created it?

[franky1]

I can see why corporate interests are a concern in a decentralised and open-source platform, but I honestly think people take it too far sometimes.  If developers are only coding something because a company is paying them to, that would indeed present a conflict of interests.  However, if developers are producing code that they personally believe will be beneficial to Bitcoin and also happen to be receiving an income from a company to continue their work, that's an entirely different matter.  I'm not convinced that any one company has a "grasp" on Bitcoin.

gmax, sipa, and rustyrussels involvement in bitcoin was for the corporate benefit of fitting in code purely for the utility of other networks like liquid and LN for financial gain of custodial transfer services of their corporation.

as for your out dated idiotic rhetoric about 2mb base block centralising the network.. sorry but core implemented 4mb weight. so your foolish rants that 'data is bad' got abolished and debunked as soon as your celebrities you idolise actually implemented 4mb instead of 2mb

cant you atleast come up with something factual and relevant rather than your stuff thats 4 years out of date and not backed up by code/bips/data/fact. you seem stuck in the 2016 excuses and falsities.
but continue with the insults. but it was fun teaching you how wrong you are. sorry but taking people off the network and making them custodian vault up with 'watchtower's, will centralise more than what 2mb base block would ever have done

to prove you are a centralist:
it was your own rhetoric that said you dont want users to buy things on bitcoin(no coffees).
it was your own rhetoric of you wanting it as a reserve currency, not a digital cash for the unbanked
it was your own rhetoric where you want people who dont like the centralist idea to fork off..
yep you yourself have been promoting people should use other networks more than most
in short. you want bitcoin centralised


now grow up. you been called out many times over the years.
everyone knows now that you dont care about bitcoin as a digital cash for the unbanked

show just man up admit your a centralist/other network lover and stop pretending to care about the bitcoin network/decentralisation

[Cøbra]

Though I doubt Cobra will just sell the domain to someone like Roger, holy fuck if Roger actually gets to own two high-authority Bitcoin domains.

I don't think Cobra will just hand over the domain to Roger, as we can see the reply on twitter. He will definitely hand over to someone trusted and of course a supporter of BTC.
It would be better if some trusted from the bitcointalk forum could have the access of it, may be theymos?

theymos controls too many resources, it's better to pick somebody else, even though he's obviously very trustworthy.

The difference should be obvious in practice.  When Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja published their ideas in the Lightning whitepaper, people took notice regardless of where their income was sourced.  Those who understood it recognised the potential and it sparked enough interest to result in multiple implementations, each with numerous team members, all producing code.  There wouldn't be several teams of people working on it if no one thought it was a good idea, no matter how much money someone might be willing to throw at it.  

Smart people can waste decades on things that don't turn out to lead to anything. Academia is filled with scientists and mathematicians who spent a good portion of their life creating new systems and concepts that, with respect to them, can be described as a waste of time and a net negative for the world, because that person could have been pursuing better ideas with their time. I personally know a physicist who regrets spending years involved in string theory research. You would be surprised at how common it is for smart and highly technical people to fall into toiling away at flawed projects.

Lightning has a lot of flaws. How do you train users that to spend money, they need to put it in a channel first? OK. Maybe the wallet can automatically open channels. How do you explain that some of the users money is gone because transaction fees spiked on Bitcoin, and more satoshis had to be reserved for when the channel needs to be closed? OK. I guess you can put a disclaimer, or alert. How do you explain watchtowers? How about backups? The user probably expects to receive arbitrary amounts of value, but you're going to need to tell them to get some inbound capacity if they want to receive anything substantial. At some point, Lightning Labs will choose to abstract all this away, but that's going to pressure them to centralize (a centralized directory of liquidity providers, watchtowers, well connected nodes, etc).

Blockstream is a hostile actor in the space. They don't want Bitcoin to succeed. There are some good people working there, but those few good apples mostly collect their salary and focus their time on Bitcoin Core and cryptographic research, they tend to distance themselves from Blockstream's damaging products. Have you ever seen Pieter Wuille shilling Liquid? Nope. It's unclear to me how they ever plan on making money, but they will no doubt abuse their position of influence in the community for their own business interests at some point. They already attempted to market Liquid as "trustless", which lead to founder Matt Corallo publicly shaming them on Twitter.

The worst thing Blockstream has done: they made a block size increase on Bitcoin absolutely impossible. They whipped up a mob to such an extent that, for the foreseeable decade, we're not going to get any increase because a mass of uneducated morons will oppose it. I don't ever see a hard fork in general as a possibility, which sucks because some nice things could have been fixed with a hard fork, and the "no hard fork" mentality hurts Bitcoin as more and more technical debt will accumulate because of ever messier soft forks. I suspect this is what they want: an ugly system, that is slow and congested, so they can market their sidechains as better alternatives.

Before Blockstream, the general consensus was that hard forks could be done in the future, carefully and far ahead in advance. They ripped that consensus out of the community. Any Bitcoiner who doesn't view Blockstream with some level of suspicion has no intellect; you don't need to call them a fucking conspiracy, but you better raise a bloody eyebrow when there exists a company that benefits from Bitcoin not working.