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>a softfork implementation by Blockstream that fundamentally changes Bitcoin to benefit Blockstream

How does it benefit Blockstream?

Blockstream is working on the lightning network, something that greatly benefits from segwit.

So is just about every large bitcoin company at the moment and AFAIK neither of the lightning network main developers are blockstream employees.

Blockstream has said that their work on Lightning is purely for the benefit of the community -- they hired a known open source developer and gave him free reign to develop his implementation of Lightning (there are 5 competing implementations from other organizations!) in the open, on github, with public purview and no strings attached. It is not covered by any patents by Blockstream, and written to be compatible with a community agreed upon standard. It is a fully peer-to-peer protocol with no central clearing house.

So explain to me how Blockstream benefits?

Blockstream benefits because the company is doing lightning network consulting.

That is their entire business model. If the lightning network doesn't come to fruition, their company is screwed.

So their entire business model is lightning which came around 2 years after they launched? How did they convince investors to give them $76m prior to their entire business model existing?

They have parents on a second layer (lightning network) that would run on top of Bitcoin and would make money on the transactions, effectively making bitcoin "theirs".

What patents do they have on lightning network? Also how would they make money on the transactions on the lightning network?

Regarding patents:

https://mobile.twitter.com/Satoshi_N_/status/855852865151172...

Regard LN, there are fees to make transactions, so whoever is facilitating the transactions will make money.

What specific claims of those patents are being infringed? It looks like that person just posted every crypto patent then could find. Also which of those patents do blockstream own? I looked at a few random ones and none were owned by them.

LN fees are optional and if blockstream wanted to charge them for facilitating transactions they would have to provide a service to make it worth while our the transactions would just route around them.

Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin XT and Bitcoin Unlimited all have their own websites.

SegWit was first proposed by Pieter Wuille, a core developer. And it's supported by many core developers several of which who work at Blockstream.

Bitcoin Unlimited is currently running ads on Reddit and elsewhere to encourage people to use it.

The two main supporters of Bitcoin Unlimited are Roger Ver and Jihan Wu, who owns Bitmain. Jihan's company manufacturers the most successful ASICs for bitcoin and litecoin. They've invested hundreds of millions of dollars in bitcoin mining operations.

Roger Ver also has recently launched a cloud mining service on Bitcoin.com which many view as a scam. This is weeks after speaking on camera while deleting an old tweet criticizing Bitclub, a similar MLM cloud hashing service. This speaks to Roger's judgement especially after his Mt. Gox video.

Several dirty tactics have been employed by both sides.

Roger, Jihan and Bitcoin Unlimited proposes to create a President of Bitcoin and some confederation. Jihan on twitter stated he misunderstood the open source community:

"I regretted one thing. In China, open source culture is not popular. I did not understand it. We put too less or 0 money into community."

Segregated Witness does fix transaction malleability which has been a problem for 3+ years.

Nick Szabo, Adam Back (CEO of Blockstream) and 8+ bitcoin core developers support SegWit.

Yes Blockstream has taken $65 million in venture capital, which should be questioned, but Bitman has hundreds of millions invested.

I am unsure who to trust but it's a much more complicated situation than your comment suggests.

If softforks are the dangerous way, what method would you suggest to improve the bitcoin network?

How much less voting should the "economic majority" get on how the network votes on process changes if they don't participate in the processes themselves? Perhaps developers with understanding matter more than any "economic majority" as this is truly cutting edge and screw up once and burn matters of network consensus and in large part computer science.

Your statement that we need a scaling fix now, more than other fixes could be biased. Millions of dollars have been lost to malleability, I'm not sure how many millions have been lost to scalability or potentially to the the quadratic hashing or the potential DOS attack vector larger script sizes allows creating transactions that take exponentially longer to confirm.

Just thinking scalability is the biggest problem doesn't make it so. It might be, but I'd like to see some numbers on it.

So what's the worst case scenario for Bitcoin if SegWit gets introduced? Please don't give me a one-liner. I want details. Is it that they'd go around suing everyone running a full node for patent infringement?

1. SegWit contains copyrighted code from the privately funded company BlockStream.

2. Despite CTO Grerg Maxwell making a "Pledge" to only use the patents "defensively" there is nothing stopping the company from trying to monetize their patents on a portion of the Bitcoin code once the Code is implemented.

3. They would begin to sue large US based exchanges for infringement and demand a small percentage of transfer fees from any exchange using Bitcoin or any part of the "SegWit" code.

4. Companies would slow Bitcoin support and the Crypto community would be further segment, delaying adoption overall but making massive amounts of money for BlockStream.

5. Option 2 is that with their code in Bitcoin, they will be able to sell their services for a much higher price and it will give them a huge amount of leverage in the future.

6. The "Soft" forking and the "User Activated" forking mechanisms devised by BlockStream to get their code into Bitcoin is devious to say the least. They both set the stage for further manipulative changes to the code base, this part of the work is mostly done by one user, BS hired hand, Luke Jr.

7. And finally, as users are pushed off the Bitcoin network due to High Fees and Slow Transactions, BlockStream is supporting development of a "2nd layer" network (patented) from which Node owners will earn the transaction fees and not the Miners, the way it is now, this type of setup would be more like a shared Google Doc or SQL file rather than a blockchain as it is not blocked by computing power.

SegWit contains copyrighted code from the privately funded company BlockStream...

Despite CTO Grerg Maxwell making a "Pledge" to only use the patents "defensively" there is nothing stopping the company from trying to monetize their patents on a portion of the Bitcoin code once the Code is implemented.

Do you have a cite for either of these? Someone mentioned them downthread. It sounds ridiculous that someone would commit code into the Bitcoin client which some third party has copyrighted (what OSS project permits this?) and I can't find any evidence that Blockstream holds any relevant patents. I can only find them saying once that they don't [0].

I downvoted you because saying a bunch of false stuff confidently seems really bad, but I will take it away if it seems like I was wrong.

[0]: http://bitcoinist.com/adam-back-no-patents-segwit/

1. Sounds like you don't understand opensource licensing.

2, 3. What patents exist for segwit that Blockstream owns?

4. Why?

5. Their code is already in Bitcoin. They have a bunch of the core developers on their payroll.

6. How does it get around anything? Can you explain the difference between a soft fork and a hard fork and why the later is better?

This is pure FUD.

> SegWit contains copyrighted code from the privately funded company BlockStream

If by "copyrighted code" you mean the standard copyright and MIT license at the start of every piece of code in Bitcoin Core, sure. That's how open source software works -- you copyright it and use that copyright to place it in a permissive license. Segwit doesn't make any modifications to the copyright status of Bitcoin Core in any way. It is exactly the same!

> Despite CTO Grerg Maxwell making a "Pledge" to only use the patents "defensively" there is nothing stopping the company from trying to monetize their patents on a portion of the Bitcoin code once the Code is implemented.

There is in fact a lot stopping that from happening, such as the innovator's patent agreement.

But this is a distraction anyway because this thread is about segwit, and Blockstream has no patents, provisional patents, or anything else on that technology. And the time period for filing such patents has expired. It's hard to monopolize and monetize a patent that doesn't exist.

> They would begin to sue large US based exchanges for infringement

Infringement of what? Again, there are no patents!

> Companies would slow Bitcoin support and the Crypto community would be further segment, delaying adoption overall but making massive amounts of money for BlockStream

...How? How does Blockstream, a bitcoin services company, benefit from a dying bitcoin?

> Option 2 is that with their code in Bitcoin, they will be able to sell their services for a much higher price and it will give them a huge amount of leverage in the future

It's FOSS. They have no special privileges over anyone else.

> The "Soft" forking and the "User Activated" forking mechanisms devised by BlockStream to get their code into Bitcoin is devious to say the least. They both set the stage for further manipulative changes to the code base, this part of the work is mostly done by one user, BS hired hand, Luke Jr.

Soft forks are how every single change to bitcoin consensus logic has been deployed since the very early days (2011+) and predates Blockstream by a laaaarge margin. The founding of Blockstream is closer to today than the first use of soft forks by the bitcoin development team.

User activated soft forks have nothing to do with Blockstream. Blockstream's CTO has even come out against the UASF on the mailing list. It's a complete red herring to bring it up here. Luke-Jr hasn't done any work on the UASF, just provided some technical peer review, as he has for many proposals, including ones he disagrees with.

> BlockStream is supporting development of a "2nd layer" network (patented)

Again please provide some facts to backup your assertions. I can only assume you are talking about Lightning, which Blockstream has no patents on, and for which the window for filing patents has pretty much closed. Do your research: go type "Blockstream" into your favorite patent search engine. The only hits you find will have to do with sidechains and confidential transactions, neither of which have anything to do with segwit or lightning.

Please come back to reality. Base you opinions on fact and stop spouting conspiracy nonsense. HN is better than this.

> Theymos (Michael Marquardt) controls all the major bitcoin communication channels from r/bitcoin, to bitcointalks, as well as the core slack channel, and the bitcoin mailing list (being the person who sniped bitcoin.org).

Roger Ver, proponent of Bitcoin Unlimited, owns Bitcoin.com. He also runs r/btc. Not as many bullet points as Theymos, but pretty clear that the major channels of communication in Bitcoin are all controlled by parties with specific agendas.