The Bitcoin development community acknowledges that bitcoin cannot get to VISA-level scale using on-chain transactions, because that would destroy the decentralized nature of the currency. It's not a matter of opinion, its a matter of the technical limitations of the system as being understood by ~all technical experts.
Building second-layer solutions such as LN is the only sensible way to grow Bitcoin in the long-term. It'll allow tx capacity to grow by several orders of magnitude with minimal load on the Bitcoin network.
> Most (all?) of them are organized in a company called "Blockstream"
That's simply not true. Out of tens of developers who contribute on an ongoing basis and hundreds who contributed during the lifetime of the project, there are about 6-7 developers associated with Blockstream. Out of the 6 maintainers with commit access on GitHub, only a single developer is associated with Blockstream.
It's also worth mentioning that Blockstream was founded by several prominent Bitcoin developers that have been around for years and have a very strong track record. It's not some company that popped out of nowhere and started hiring Core devs. One of Blockstream's primary goals was to fund development on low-level Bitcoin infrastructure code, which is blessed in my view.
Here's what one of their investors, Reid Hoffman (co-founder at LinkedIn), has to say about that:
> And that’s why I’m participating in this first-round financing as an individual investor, and why Blockstream itself will function similarly to the Mozilla Corporation. Here, our first interest is maintaining and enhancing Bitcoin’s strong open ecosystem. And the structure we’ve chosen will give us the freedom and flexibility to prioritize public good over returns to investors.
> Out of the 6 maintainers with commit access on GitHub, only a single developer is associated with Blockstream.
Please don't be so naive.
Greg Maxwell gave up his commit access for "optics" - to make BlockStream look better.
Meanwhile, Wladimir van der Laan, the project maintainer, says he won't accept any code contributions which are "controversial". That is, he wants 100% consensus for larger blocks. Yet he blindly accepts anything from Blockstream employees such as RBF and segregated witness fee discounts which are controversial.
Also, Blockstream burnt through $10m+ in 12 months, how much of that went into paying consultants and "supporters" such as Peter Todd, Luke-Jr, and even Bram Cohen who laughed at Bitcoin until suddenly in 2015 he loved everything Blockstream was doing?
Finally, investors? Investors will say and do anything if it helps them make money!
> Greg Maxwell gave up his commit access for "optics" - to make BlockStream look better.
My reduction in involvement was not related to blockstream and wasn't discussed in the company in advance. I can't personally take the toxic environment created by people like you and it has been adversely impacting my health.
Unfortunately, even when I have nothing at all to do with Bitcoin for long spans of time people continued attacking and threatening me and my family.
> Blockstream burnt through $10m+ in 12 months
No we didn't. We have most of our seed money funds available after two years of operation.
Blockstream has never paid Peter Todd or Bram Cohen (but sure, Luke-jr has been a contractor, a publicly known fact all along).
Bram Cohen followed the same path as many other technical experts-- he considered it implausible, and then after understanding it better considered it implausible but super interesting. There is no sin in thinking that Bitcoin is a long shot: it's a fantastic, exciting, potentially world changing long shot.
> from Blockstream such as RBF
No one at Blockstream had anything to do with opt-in RBF.
But the functionality-- user selectable replacement for unconfirmed transactions, something that the original releases of Bitcoin had until it was disabled for DOS reasons-- was discussed for months without a _single_ person speaking out in opposition while it was proposed. Only after it it was merged and slated for release did a number of throw away accounts begin a misinformation campaign about it (conveniently arguing that it was a reason to switch to "Bitcoin Classic"). Subsequently, many others in the industry like Stephen Pair at Bitpay have spoken up in support of it.
> segregated witness fee discounts which are controversial
I'm not aware of any controversy there. There appears to be universal agreement in the technical community that UTXO bloat is one of the larger problems the system has which would be exacerbated by bigger blocksizes. At scaling Bitcoin Montreal there was widespread agreement that new costing mechanisms were needed to make fees better reflect UTXO carrying costs. The way segwitness costing works achieves that; by making removing UTXO entries more equal in cost to creating them.
Your President, Adam Back, said on Reddit that half of the initial seed money (which was $21m) had been spent, just after the announcement of your series A ($55m). Who to believe?
Or was he speaking as an "individual" rather than an employee of Blockstream? Are we to believe that multiple employees of Blockstream fly to Hong Kong, stay in hotels, but are there acting in an individual capacity?
> Your President, Adam Back, said on Reddit that half of the initial seed money (which was $21m) had been spent, just after the announcement of your series A ($55m). Who to believe?
The question is one of how the layers should look like. While I don't have anything against LN as such, it would make most custom uses of the scripting language unusable. You can't enforce arbitary year chosen scripts within LN channels the way you can with regular transactions.
A layer for transaction merging built using Zero-knowledge proofs which can preserve the full capabilities of individual scripts would be the ideal solution, and could become fully server independent.
> The Bitcoin development community acknowledges that bitcoin cannot get to VISA-level scale using on-chain transactions, because that would destroy the decentralized nature of the currency.
I don't think the bitcoin development community acknowledges bitcoin can not scale to Visa levels. Perhaps one of them has a crystal ball, but I do not think anyone can say how far bitcoin scales as technology improves.
I mean bill gates said 64kb is enough for everyone, now some bitcoin developers are saying 1mb is enough for everyone. History proved Bill Gates wrong. I'm sure it will prove whoever wishes to speculate as if they have a crystal ball wrong too.
Building second-layer solutions such as LN is the only sensible way to grow Bitcoin in the long-term. It'll allow tx capacity to grow by several orders of magnitude with minimal load on the Bitcoin network.
> Most (all?) of them are organized in a company called "Blockstream"
That's simply not true. Out of tens of developers who contribute on an ongoing basis and hundreds who contributed during the lifetime of the project, there are about 6-7 developers associated with Blockstream. Out of the 6 maintainers with commit access on GitHub, only a single developer is associated with Blockstream.
It's also worth mentioning that Blockstream was founded by several prominent Bitcoin developers that have been around for years and have a very strong track record. It's not some company that popped out of nowhere and started hiring Core devs. One of Blockstream's primary goals was to fund development on low-level Bitcoin infrastructure code, which is blessed in my view.
Here's what one of their investors, Reid Hoffman (co-founder at LinkedIn), has to say about that:
> And that’s why I’m participating in this first-round financing as an individual investor, and why Blockstream itself will function similarly to the Mozilla Corporation. Here, our first interest is maintaining and enhancing Bitcoin’s strong open ecosystem. And the structure we’ve chosen will give us the freedom and flexibility to prioritize public good over returns to investors.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141117154558-1213-the-futur...