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Comment by vitno | Hacker News Reader

wow. That is really a horrible interpretation of Blockstream. All of Blockstream's work is done in the open, they publish awesome whitepapers, and they work on extending bitcoin to work with cool tech.

They are working with the reality of bitcoin, trying to make it more. Nothing prevents other people from also being able to extend bitcoin. Even if blockstream became dominant in this respect, the system is 100% trustless.

Bitcoin is only one piece of the necessary crypto-currency infrastructure. 2-way pegging is a _good_ way of extending it.

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The question isn't whether or not Blockstream's work on their technology is good or bad, or the quality of their whitepapers. The issue is that if the Bitcoin block size is increased then there might not be as much demand for solutions like Blockstream is promoting and instead of allowing the market to take its course Blockstream has politicized the core dev team in order to ensure future demand for their technology by keeping Bitcoins block size small. Your comment doesn't address that at all.

It would be like if Microsoft employed 90% of the Linux kernel devs and wouldn't let any changes into the kernel that allowed systems with over 8 gigs of memory or something like that.

No, if we are doing analogies, it's more like if Red Hat employed 90% of Linux Kernel devs.

sure, you might be able to do more transactions with an increased block size, but I personally feel the negatives are not worth it. Regardless, having the ability to do things off the main bitcoin chain is a good thing.

Even more so "cripple Bitcoin" it the wrong way of phrasing something that

a) currently how things are

b) intensely disputed in the community

Ok, it would be like if Redhat employed 90% of the Linux kernel team and didn't allow any patches for supporting systems with over 8GB of memory. Then they came out with a proprietary software package you could install on your vanilla Linux kernel to enable big memory support.

> didn't allow any patches for supporting systems with over 8GB of memory

The Bitcoin Core developers are incapable of coercing other users into not applying non-Bitcoin-compatible 8 GB block size limit rules. Also they don't want to apply that patch themselves, anyway, since they believe it is incompatible with what they understand to their best knowledge to be the goals and properties of Bitcoin. (Thankfully their goals also include lots of adoption, and they seem to have some proposals for how to achieve this even in the absence of 8 GB block sizes.)

Linux is not a decentralized distributed consensus rule system, so unfortunately I don't think the comparison is useful.

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