Topic: Conflict of interest (Read 854 times)

Those who work for Blockstream can effectively block any proposal that does not benefit their interests. Or at least make it very significantly more difficult to get said proposal to get adopted. This effectively gives users the choice between the status quo and what those who work for Blockstream proposes. If the status quo is not what the community wants (like as is the case currently), then the community has little choice other than adopt what Blockstream wants.   

How about saying that Roger Ver and Jihan Wu (and China) should not be making decisions about Bitcoin for the rest of us?

It will be obvious if instead of blindly defending you try and understand with an open mind. In your example both will be same if RED HAT GETS A FINANCIAL BENEFIT FROM IMPLEMENTING A FEATURE INTO LINUX KERNEL AND THEY HAVE THE POWER TO DECIDE/INFLUENCE IT, which is true with blockstream which has direct financial incentive to make segwit/lignting network part of bitcoin.

I would suggest you should read some real world examples of "Confict of Interest" so that you can understand, otherwise no matter what I say, it will not make any difference to you , if you have already made your decision.

Also this is not about segwit/lightning, if it is good thing or bad, even if segwit/lightning is perfect solution as you seem to think, the actions of the core developers are completely unethical and wrong.


If you say it is about making an income , so the developers need to be affiliated with Blockstream, I don't agree. No one can deny that bitcoin core developers are one of the top programmers in the world and they can very easily get a job at any of the top companies and make a good income, but choosing Blockstream and then promoting segwit/lightning is just being greedy and dishonest. They are abusing their position and trust that the bitcoin community has in them.

How is it not the same? Some employees of Red Hat can have the power to decide or directly influence if a change becomes part of the linux kernel. Some employees of the DoD can have the power to decide or directly influence if a becomes part of TOR. It is exactly the same; the people who have the most expertise regarding something specific generally are those who have the power to decide the changes and influence it. And when it comes to Open Source Projects, those people generally work for companies that can use their expertise with regards to the open source project, or their company made the project to begin with.

In the case of some of the Bitcoin Core devs and Blockstream, some of the Core devs have the expertise of working with Bitcoin, and thus they founded or were hired by Blockstream.

No, I never said that. What I said was that they think that block size increases as done by BU, Classic, and XT are a foolish way to increase capacity. I never said that functions are better than constants. If that were the case, then XT and BU should be supported, and they are not.

It was not just those who work for Blockstream who implemented Segwit and lightning and decided that it should go into Core. It was implemented and modified by multiple people, proposed by multiple people, and reviewed by multiple people, many of whom are not affiliated with Blockstream in any way whatsoever.

Dude, they cannot be fired, they're volunteers.

Any company can hijack bitcoin development, they just need to offer enough money to hire enough developers, and there's nothing we can do.

No I am saying you develop whatever you want but you should not have the power to decide or influence whether the feature you developed should be part of an open source project like bitcoin when your company will directly benefit if that feature is added to the open source project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest

Not the same, no one should have any issue with the core developers developing segwig or lightning network or anything else they wish. The issue is that they have the power to decide or directly influence if it is part of bitcoin or not.

And then there is calling other solution foolish:
So by your logic Satoshi's concept of halving every 4 years is foolish or the number 21 million is foolish.

I do think that a lot of people are stupid for ignoring the statements made by other people and other companies. Multiple people not affiliated with Blockstream have said that they think that segwit and lightning will benefit everyone. Multiple companies not affiliated with Blockstream have said that segwit and lightning will benefit their business and products.

No, I never said that. Why do you think I said that or implied that? Do not misconstrue my words for something else.

What I said was that only one Blockstream employee has commit access to Bitcoin Core, and he is not a maintainer. No Blockstream employee controls Bitcoin Core as is oft-repeated by the anti-core group.

So you're saying that everyone who works for a company that does stuff related to an open source project should have no say and cannot contribute to the project? Do you realize how absurd that idea is?

Not my quote 

There is currently no market for 'making sidechains for people'

However there is a market for transacting in Bitcoin. 
Very rarely does VC pioneer new markets as opposed to funding an operation with a solid
business plan to serve a hungry, existing market.

There are a lot of ways they could make money off of sidechains. As one of the only companies with developers who are experienced with making sidechains, they could provide a service where they make sidechains for people. They can also make permissioned sidechains and require people who want to use said sidechain to pay them some fee.

In the same way that people who work at Red Hat who also contribute to the Linux Kernel. Or how TOR is partially funded by the US government and had DoD employees working on it.

They aren't throttling anything, and are not " holding back on upgrading the Block size to pave the way for SegWit & LN". They aren't supporting a block size increase because they think that increasing the block size as people want it to (by changing the constant) is a foolish way to increase capacity. In fact, if Blockstream did control Core, then Adam Back's 2-4-8 proposal should have been accepted without complaint, but it wasn't. Or they would have accepted Pieter Wuille's block size increase hard fork, but it wasn't.

I have not checked in depth and will need to do more research regarding their field of work but a quote from their website:


So you are saying there is no overlap between Core developers and https://blockstream.com/team/
Just because a person of a company is not working on a project of a company it does not mean he does not want it to be successful. An employee is expected to support the projects of his organisation.

It is related more to having the power to directly influence those who will ultimately make the decision. If they  are not part of blockstream then they have equal right as all other developers but when you are to judge on a product your company is working on, you should not have the power of making/influencing the decision.

How can they serve two masters at the same time? Is it not obvious that they working for Blockstream and at the same time holding back on upgrading

the Block size to pave the way for SegWit & LN? You cannot throttle something and then suggest a solution to make it faster, if people accept your

solution.   .... I know these are some of the best developers we have at the moment, but I to think there is some conflict of interest here.  

Sorry...not buying that story.

How is Blockstream going to recoup its 71M VC with sidechains?

Blockstream does not benefit from segwit or lightning. This is an oft-repeated claim that is untrue; Blockstream's work is primarily focused on sidechains, not segwit or lightning. Additionally Segwit and lightning benefits nearly everyone who uses Bitcoin, not just one company.


The Core developers have no way to force everyone to use segwit or lightning. If they were able to, then segwit would have deployed months ago. Furthermore, the Core devs are not working on lightning, other people are doing that, and not under any sort of special instruction from the Core devs to do so.

Only ONE developer who has commit access to the Bitcoin Core repo works for Blockstream. And he is not in charge of Core nor is he a maintainer of the repo.

They did exactly that. In fact, they made 3 BIPs for segwit which were discussed for a long time on the mailing list, on IRC, and changed multiple times throughout segwit's development.

Lightning is different, it does not need a BIP because it does not change any of the Bitcoin protocols. Even so, the people working on lightning are writing up documentation specifying the whole thing, and that also constantly changes and is discussed among multiple developers in public forums (like mailing lists and IRC).

Wherever you are getting your information from is lying to you. They are spreading false information. I highly suggest that you get your information from a different source.

So people dont think that this is an issue. How can the person who makes the rules also be expected to judge if the rule is correct or not.

I've been saying this for 2 years.

I mean none of the people listed at the link below should have a say in whether to accept or reject the segwit BIP.

https://blockstream.com/team/

Nobody can deny that lots of core developer work for blockstream. Yes the consensus may stop some one do something evil, but it's also stop people do something good, this is the real problem.

It's BIP 141:

BIP: 141
  Layer: Consensus (soft fork)
  Title: Segregated Witness (Consensus layer)
  Author: Eric Lombrozo <[email protected]>
          Johnson Lau <[email protected]>
          Pieter Wuille <[email protected]>
  Comments-Summary: No comments yet.
  Comments-URI: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/wiki/Comments:BIP-0141
  Status: Draft
  Type: Standards Track
  Created: 2015-12-21
  License: PD

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0141.mediawiki