Gawd dammit, Ice, I agree with you for once.
Only. The. Code. Matters.
So true.
Crikey, isn't that a sign of the Bitpocalypse?
But ya, only the code matters.
All of this anti-Blockstream FUD fixating on
who wrote the code,
why they wrote it,
where they wrote it,
what they were wearing when they wrote it, what they ate for breakfast, what club they went to last night, and where their pets' vet went to elementary school is an irrelevant distraction.
The Monero Trolls and other Altcoiners of course welcome all addition capital invested to cripple Bitcoin.
They have leveraged the work of countless people over 7 years to build out a ledgering system that has proved itself to be largely unbreakable.( all the scams/thefts from bitcoin have been a result of human failings rather than anything in the protocol, but i'm open to correction). The last few holes in such things as 0-conf and tx malleability are being patched up as we speak.
But what some of the flag wavers fail to realise is that it is just about the code - not the bitcoins themselves. Banks obviously want to make money, but their main business is simply the accurate accounting of transactions. And that is what the blockchain provides. The idea that a 2-way peg with bitcoins implies that a $1m transaction on a sidechain will require $1m worth of bitcoin is naive. The peg will simply act in the same manner that a government stamp has when conveying title on a land deed. It gives the underlying transaction legitimacy by virtue of its existence. The stamp itself is of nominal value. This is why a strict limit is important - its the fee paid that signifies the value, not the transaction amount.
I think this announcement signifies a clear line in the sand as we move from seeing bitcoin as a peer to peer electronic cash system to it simply being an accounting backbone for multi-billion dollar financial institutions. Make of that what you will, and what impact it will have for the value of bitcoin.
When is the last time you heard much discussion of rolling out payment solutions for the public or multi million dollar investments in the firms working on them?
