Topic: blockstream - wants to tax you and become the new Bitcoin oligarchy - page 8. (Read 8953 times)

every day Gavin break more and more his reputation not only to bitcoin community but to all crypto community. Is better to leave now. This road that he choose is a dead end. I dont know who and what they promise to him but is the best time to step back.

The reason Blockstream doesn't want bigger blocks is because if they're bigger , they won't make a shit load of money. It's as simple as that.

I would love to believe that is true, and I wish they would clarify their position.  I still do not understand
why they wouldn't agree to a modest increase like Jeff Garzik proposed.

The situation is even worse, many clients have as default value 750kB as limit, despite the fact that the max is 1MB!! Mike always fought against this different default value, but some others wanted to be it that way. Many of the miners will not be aware of this. So we really not far from disaster.

I just learned about from this VERY interesting interview with Mike Hearn:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JmvkyQyD8w

And it totally smashes the fantasy of some of the miners here that, when capacity will get scarce that they then will earn 5000$ per month through "fee market". He worked 7 years for google in.... yeah right.. capacity planning and explains very well why its not working like that and bitcoinnetwork will crash due to lack of RAM on machines... if there keep coming transactions for e.g. 1,2 MB for a while but Blocksize only supports 1MB..

Well, tvbcof has just told us that they are following a common model for companies doing open source development: charging for technical consulting. I'm not sure whether they can realistically be against blocksize increases per se, the data has got to go somewhere, and there will be necessarily more data than 1 MB could handle to facilitate all these extra transactions.

They certainly favour less simplistic designs than static blocksizes with scheduled increases. I seem to remember Adam Back was talking about something very different from anyone else, but his opinion got put in the "1MB 4EVER" category, probably because it defied the definitions of the categories on offer. Don't remember the details, but it certainly wasn't a 1MB static limit.

You just reinforced my point.  We don't know what Blockstream is really up to.  Meanwhile,
more and more blocks are going to be hitting the 1mb limit until they "save us" with
their "solution". 

I don't think we've gotten to see enough about blockstream to be able to judge. Aside of a concept, there isn't much out there to verify OP's null claims.

uncertainty and doubt for sure, but I think it is warranted.

1. We don't know how Blockstream intends to make money.  We do know they
raised $21M in venture capital, so there must be a profit opportunity somewhere.
What are they doing? 

2. Forgoing or delaying a blocksize increase may not be in the best
interest of Bitcoin, but seems to be what Blockstream wants.

3. It seems possible that 1. and 2. are related.

This is a textbook example of the nirwana fallacy. In June 2016 when bitcoin is crashing due increasing backlog, you have a perfect workable solution called XT. And on the other side you have a theoretical "whitepaper solution", which isn't even skeched out, let alone programmed, tested and then approved. On top of all that there are very dubious financial interests with Blockstream at play here. And that is what you want to prefer?? What do you do in June 2016? Nothing will be ready till then...

So, proprietary, centralised, rent seeking; all FUD?

I still want to know who will be providing the hashing security on these so called chains. It's not obvious to me how the Lightning network could be mined directly.... although possibly that's an extraneous example, as Lightning transactions have to be settled on the main chain anyway (and so it just makes the whole system even more fee efficient?)

Proprietary?  As far as I know, their stuff so far is open source.  Some of the blockstream folks have given lectures about the technology they are working on and it shows no sign of being anything other than pure open-source.  That is one of the things that induces me to have some confidence in them.

As for revenue, I supposed a long time ago that they would have the options of providing technical consulting and development work to people who wanted to run a sidechain currency.  After I posited this thought Maxwell mentioned basically the same thing somewhere along the line on another thread that I ran across..

Secondly, I for one would only use a sidechain which had involvement from this group of people, at least initially.  This group of people have proven their technical abilities by carrying a lions-share of the work needed to get Bitcoin to where it is and many of them have a long and unvarnished history in the crypto-currency space.  In this manner the Blockstream 'seal of approval' is a high value item to would-be sidechain operators.

It is worth note that a lot of people have done quite well in opensource-land by following this business model.  That is part of why I figured it would be Blockstream's.

Yeah, that's exactly what happened when the situation you're describing happened in real life. Everyone stopped using bitcoin and used the cheaper alternatives.... I don't quite understand how the transaction rate was at record highs during the time when everyone stopped using it, but what do I know.

thats the reason why it is important to make bigger blocks!
if too less fee-paying transactions occur miners will include cheaper transactions and stop some of their hardware (lower overall hashrate which leads to cheaper but less secure transactions).

so bitcoin can stay competive against other payment options.

but if there is only 1mb block space.... they cant include many transactions... which theoretically means higher fee: but in practice: nobody will use it because there are cheaper alternatives.

If people aren't able to transact easily, reliably and cheaply, what's the point of using bitcoin?

If there are better ways to transact people will use better ways to transact and nobody makes money with bitcoin, that's the competitive market!

easy: even with unlimited blocksize no miner is forced to include any transaction.
he can just put the ones with enough fees in a block and ignore the rest: thats what i call a competive market!

I think it may be important for a short sidechains refresher also.

Blockstream are designing a protocol extension to enable all other types of side chains, not just Lightning. Potentially including: vote chains, identity/web of trust, "smart" contracts, decentralised DNS/PKI, land registry etc etc.

Powerful concept in theory. All of the bitcoin hashing power could be utilised to secure the data on those chains. This is what makes the main blockchain worth so much, and the testnet chain pretty much worthless; getting 100% control of the testnet chain wouldn't be so cheap even now, but it would be possible. So it's useless for an actual money system, as the data (aka your money) wouldn't be safe. Applying that level of security to all these other information systems would be stupendously brilliant, like living a sci-fi movie. Possibly it might be horrifying for the same reason, but fuck it, the 20th century is over.

That was what I thought the promise of side chains was: and so of couse, under that model, there is no Blockstream tollbooth, you pay the transaction fees appropriate for the market conditions on that chain, whether you're paying someone for something, or renewing one of your ID's. If they achieve that, it'll be so worthwhile. If jonald's fears prove to be well founded, then Blockstream will have passed up an immense opportunity, arguably of the same degree of significance as bitcoin itself.

I agree with this. There is a clear conflict of interest for those Core devs. Blockstream is still in proof of concept phase and we have no dates to when these sidechains can be integrated into the bitcoin.

but that is not what you're doing is it? You're like FULL DERP AHEAD WITH SHITCOIN XT!!  DERP DERP...blockstream are just thieves..FUD FUD FUD!

You may be right , or it could be bad for their business strategy to reveal it.

I think they should try to be as transparent as possible, but there may be indeed a conflict of interest.  Time will tell.

Was my answer any good? As I said, I think it's possible that there isn't a complete/definitive to your question, and that's because the system is still in development. Still needs answering but I'm not really sure what else anyone could do right now.