Egads, what a boggling thread. (I will not be sending a christmas card to the mean person that sent me this link!
).
Go read the context.
Someone was asking me why I'm not doing the some PR blitz to influence people's thinking. My response was that I don't care to win people over, that if Bitcoin's survival depends on constantly making rescuing it with a political sales pitch and a mass market PR campaign then I think that would mean that its already a failure. I don't actually believe it is a failure but I'm not frightened of it becoming one, though I'd think it would be a bit sad to have wasted many years chasing a windmill and for the world to lose this opportunity; but that said, I can just leave if it goes the highly centralized route, and go work on something that still has a prospect of success-- there are just too many important things that need to be done. I don't think there is anything "threatening" or anything about that.
I care a lot about defending, protecting, and nurturing the system, but not so much that I feel compelled to go around trying to reprogram people to get my way. To even admit that doing so would be possible is an admission that the system cannot work. So I'm happy to continue to just communicate frankly in the forums and means that I normally communicate in and see how the experiment pans out.
Thanks Greg. There's a tremendous amount of noise in the air.
I personally really appreciate everything you've done for Bitcoin.
Perhaps you can clarify the direction you'd like Bitcoin to go in concrete terms.
I read on coindesk that blockstream recently released some open source sidechain code.
Not to sound demanding, but the questions I would like to ask are as follows:
1. What do you see are the next steps to this being used widely? And what would the timeframe be on that?
2. Is this one of THE key things we need, or are there others ingredients
required to scale Bitcoin? If the latter, what would they be?
3. Is there any conflict of interest with blockstream as far as it being a for-profit company and doing what is in the best interests of Bitcoin?
4. Are you categorically against raising the block size as a stop gap measure to ensure capacity doesn't run out before other plans (sidechains etc) are implemented?
thanks, Jonald