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sidkhanooja

r/bitcoin comes to mind whenever I think of the words "Bitcoin" and "cult" in the same sentence.

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If you want to read an interesting story read this.

https://old.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6rxw7k/info...

Good overview, a lot of stuff I didn’t know.

What I do know and have known is that anyone that believes the “it’s decentralized” part about any cryptocommodity is a damn fool. The database might be but nothing else. There are at any time a dozen people that could utterly destroy bitcoin with some well placed shenanigans.

The shit you read on reddit is full of conspiracy theorist nonsense, and completely detached from Bitcoin development. Development is done and discussed in the open on mailing lists, github etc, and is subject to community review. There's a process outlined in BIP2 for any (non-trivial code) changes to the Bitcoin Core software. Of course, anyone can fork the software and make complaints publicly if there was malicious intent from the Core developers. There are a lot of people who have money invested in Bitcoin, and keep a close eye on the developments occurring.

I didn’t read anything on reddit.

If you believe bitcoin can’t be crashed by a handful bad actors I fully encourage you to put your 401K in.

Thank you, that was a great read. As someone that's only ever been interested at the periphery of Bitcoin (though generally interested in the applicability of blockchain tech and the technical problems with same), I was not aware of any of this. Would this story be considered common knowledge among the Bitcon literati? I find it hard to fathom how anybody could rationally invest in BTC knowing this story. Surely this level of influence (if not control) by Blockstream and /u/theymos goes against the very promise of decentralisation that Bitcoin promises?

Don't believe everything you read online, especially in the Bitcoin space, which is flooded with nonsense, conspiracies and deception promoted to push agendas. I highly recommend you do some more independent research before taking your parent comment at face value.

Pretty biased story, sounds like it was Blockstream against everyone else (it wasn't). Most people on the mailinglist thought it was dangerous to increase the blocksize, not just people who worked for Blockstream.

> Some of the employees of Blockstream also put forth some proposals, but all were so conservative, it would take bitcoin many decades before it could reach a scale of VISA.

I hate to bring it to you, but no big decentralized network where everything happens on a single chain will ever reach VISA scale. I'm not sure why people think Bitcoin can do this. I do not work for blockstream and I think just scaling this up is a terrible idea. I only know a handful of technical people who disagree.

> After this free and open source software was released, Theymos, the person who controls all the main communication channels for the bitcoin community implemented a new moderation policy that disallowed any discussion of this new software. Specifically, if people were to discuss this software, their comments would be deleted and ultimately they would be banned temporarily or permanently. This caused chaos within the community as there was very clear support for this software at the time and it seemed our best hope for finally solving the problem and moving on.

IMO the chaos did not come from content moderation but from different groups of people who all claimed their software (bitcoin XT, bitcoin core) was the real bitcoin. And not many people understood what was going on. There was definitely some support for bitcoin XT, but it was always minuscule compared to bitcoin's IMO. This has nothing to do with either Theymos nor Blockstream.

I definitely agree about Bitcoin and scaling, as anybody who can do napkin math would realize that increases in block size to scale to a level of transactions/second competitive with a credit card network would cause the blockchain to grow at a catastrophically unsustainable rate. Bitcoin Cash imho offers absolutely nothing of value because it runs up against the exact same technical problems. Think of it like slightly reducing a constant factor to an O(n^3) algorithm, you haven't made things more efficient in the required way.

I think the main takeaway about /r/bitcoin is that bitcoin claims to be this decentralized democratic technical project where anybody can contribute but in reality many of the places where discussion takes place are completely censored and controlled by entities who aren't transparent about their intentions like Blockstream and Theymos. This also applies to /r/btc for Bitcoin Cash shills.

> bitcoin claims to be this decentralized democratic technical project where anybody can contribute

Where is this claimed? The technical project is just another open source project, not very decentralized. The idea of bitcoin is that you (the user) can decide what software you want to run, if you don't agree with rules imposed by a certain software project you not run it or run an older version. This (as well as how the network works) is decentralized. Ofcourse Reddit and other social media channels are not decentralized, and neither is development of the different node implementations.

I don't think there exists a way to collaborate on any technical open source project in a truly decentralized way. I love to be proven wrong, do you know any project that is? So no BDFL (Linus, Guido), no foundation and actual decentralized contribution?

Ugh. These silly conspiracy theories don't hold up to reality. An overwhelming majority of the technical development community, wider community and industry was and still is supportive of Bitcoin's scaling roadmap. Trying to attribute that to Blockstream or to the moderation policies of a subreddit (among hundreds of online bitcoin communities) is just silly and not grounded on any facts.

See my previous comments on that topic for some more info:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15774816

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15033611

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15033489

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15026822

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13911867

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627362

This is a completely, outrageously false version of events, and it is very frustrating trying to debunk it for non-crytpo geeks who haven't followed things.

There is a group of "altcoin" (ICO and non-Bitcoin coins) investors who have put together a terrific social media team and spread nonsense like this. They run a "The_Donald"-esq subreddit called /r/btc who's head moderator is Roger Ver, convicted felon (sold explosives online and renounced his US citizenship). Somehow Roger Ver bought the domain Bitcoin.com, and has been using it to promote a different coin, "Bitcoin Cash", and outright saying it "is Bitcoin". Of course He's heavily invested in sites like Shapeshift which allow you to buy altcoins... and I assume links like this (posted by"singularity87" who is a top /r/btc poster) are designed to spook people into switching to ETH, Bitcoin Cash, etc. It's bizarre nonsense.

ho another troll from /r/bitcoin. Read carefully, everything is sourced. Everyone favorable to small blocks came to that opinion after all the communications channels were censored by Theymos and the like to delete alternate opinions. Was absolutely fascinating, and disturbing, to watch that unfold.

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