Bulldozer00's Blog

Adam Back recently claimed on Twitter that the Bitcoin Core development team is “decentralized“.

However, that’s a dubious assertion at best, and a disingenuous one at worst. Mr. Back is the President of Blockstream Inc. His startup company is financed by $70M from traditional bankstas who could give a shit about billions of unbanked/poor people being given the ultimate tool to: bootstrap themselves out of poverty, participate in commerce with merely a cell phone, and dramatically increase the world’s GDP.

Here is a snapshot of some of the most influential and vocal members of the core development team directly employed by Blockstream. The big guns are Adam Back and Greg Maxwell. Interestingly, Mr. Back, who is now an” executive“, but somehow still strangely thought of as a major technical contributor, doesn’t seem to be actively involved in the design/coding effort. That’s because his presidential title makes him responsible for Blockstream’s financial performance over all else.

Admittedly, not all Bitcoin Core developers are paid by Blockstream, but some are contracted out by the private, for-profit, company. But, as the presented evidence shows, the Bitcoin Core development team cannot be claimed to be DECENTRALIZED.

Startup investors, especially bankstas, expect a high ROI on their risky investments ASAP. Regarding Bitcoin, their investment returns can only come from centralized technologies, known as L2 tech, layered on top of Bitcoin. L2 technologies are to Bitcoin like web sites are to the TCP/IP protocol. That’s where real big money is made. By design, Blockstream is an L2 technology product company that must use the Bitcoin protocol to build on top of.

Hence, by implementing and promoting the SegWit improvement to the Bitcoin protocol before a deterministic, time-dependent, dynamically increasing maximum block size policy, raises suspicion in the Bitcoin community that Blockstream is out to freeze Bitcoin L1 on chain scaling growth after SegWit is activated in order to get money-making L2 technologies deployed as fast as possible. Again, suspiciously, there is no unified, visible, commitment from the Core development team as a whole to pursue an on chain scaling improvement next as priority one to relieve network pressure and allow a marginally increased onboarding of a cluster of new, less well off, users. No room to breathe.

Meanwhile, the Bitcoin network is becoming more exponentially saturated as new users (Venezuela, Mexico, Greece, Cypress, China, Japan, Africa, India) try flocking to Bitcoin to use as cash but are turned back by wildly rising transaction fees and confirmation times – a massive decrease in usability to large swaths of people. The flight from Bitcoin to alternative cryptocurrencies resulting from the poor stewardship of the Bitcoin protocol by the Core development team is vividly visible in this market share chart:

Satoshi Nakamoto, the genius creator of Bitcoin, said something to the effect of:

In the future, there will either be massive BTC transaction volume, or zero volume.

Ironically, the anti-fragile Bitcoin system proven to be indestructible by powerful external forces over 8 years of 24 X 7 operation, may end up instantaneously imploding due to internal forces caught in the throes of a bloody death match.