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Comment by cflynnus | Hacker News Reader

> >In the stormy world of crypto, Bitcoin is the port. This is an idiotic statement. Bitcoin development has completely succumbed to corporate capture at this point by Blockstream and the likes.

I disagree. Bitcoin has never had a hard fork. There isn’t a “Bitcoin classic” chain floating around with an old set of consensus rules. Block stream and/or minors can’t force a hard fork like ETH devs can.

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Bitcoin absolutely has had hard forks.

> There isn’t a “Bitcoin classic” chain floating around with an old set of consensus rules.

Yes, there literally is a Bitcoin Classic, and prior to that was a Bitcoin XT. There's also Bitcoin Cash, and many others.

Even excluding hard forks which were chain splits (so upgrade only), there have been several. There were two hard forks in 2010, one to add OP_NOP and one fixing a critical bug where anyone could spend any Bitcoin. There was a hard fork in 2013 (BIP-50) because a block broke a limit and at least one double spend occurred.

Why comment if you aren't educated on the topic? Or rather, why actively spread misinformation?

Bitcoin has not only had a hard fork, but it reversed a full five hours of chain history after a bug let someone mint extra coins.

https://decrypt.co/39750/184-billion-bitcoin-anonymous-creat...

Does Bitcoin Cash not count for some reason? Because the original chain is more popular and the fork is smaller?

Yeah I’m far from a expert but I do remember that fork. That sounded awfully similar to the ETH / ETC fork.

Around blocksize if I remember correctly.

No, this was very different than ETH/ETC. Bitcoin cash was a minority of people forking away from the BTC chain to increase the blocksize. ETC was the original chain that was forked away from to reclaim stolen funds because of a smart contract hack.

Generally when people are talking about “hard forking” they are referring to the majority making a backwards incompatible change that leaves little activity or economic value on the original chain. Bitcoin never forks like this, because who would coordinate it?

Bitcoin core maintainers tried to fork it and were not successful (See bitcoinXT).

Miners and community leaders tried to fork it and were not successful (see bitcoin cash).

Bitcoin exchanges and businesses tried to fork it and were not successful (see segwit2x).

And many more will come, I imagine a PoS fork will inevitably come and not be successful.

Every bitcoin fork I've seen forked to make their own change that the main project refused to make. They forked because bitcoin changed too little.

ETC forked because the main project made a change some people disagreed with. They forked because ethereum changed too much.

Sure, but I would argue that blockstream and others control bitcoin not by forcing upgrades, but instead by preventing upgrades to the network and creating commercial solutions to easily fixable problems.

I'm not saying that blocksize, LN, etc are solved problems. But I am saying that the indecision and lack of community involvement is slowly killing bitcoin. It is succumbing to corporate capture. They continue to invent increasingly custodial methods of using bitcoin.

There is a fundamental difference of opinion here. There will always be people pro changes and against. Its conservatism against progressivism. So, while it's useless to even argue (you're either one or the other, and that probably won't change, ever), let me just say that if you want any kind of digital property to exist, it's pretty important for such property to remain constant in regards to it's features, or better say, both it's virtues or flaws. That's why Bitcoin maximalists, as they are called, are very conservative towards bitcoin development.

Because of all that, making a case that someone controls Bitcoin just because they are preventing changes is rather far-fetched. So, while your other points may be valid, this is certanly an invalid one.

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