They also work on the lightning network, which creates middlemen.
In general, all Blockstream's products are solutions to the problems of (1) bitcoin being hard to change/fork, and (2) the block size being small. Blockstream's products are thus more relevant and useful if bitcoin is difficult to improve, and has limited capacity.
This is because all Blockstream's products are built on Sidechains: https://blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf Rather than change bitcoin itself, a sidechain lets you create an alternative set of rules for bitcoin, that re-uses the actual bitcoins from the main chain, so that users can put their bitcoins on either set of rules. Sidechains let users move coins between chains with different rulesets. Thus, Sidechains are useful only if it is difficult to add desired features to Bitcoin itself. All Blockstream products (like Liquid above) are implemented as Sidechains.
Thus, Blockstream's products will have no purpose unless Bitcoin is limited, and difficult to change, creating a need for a Sidechain.
Blockstream employees unanimously oppose every proposed hard fork to bitcoin.
At last October's Bitcoin Dev Workshop in San Francisco (ironically run by the Bitcoin Foundation), Blockstream CTO and Bitcoin Core Dev Greg Maxwell, who invented most of the Sidechains tech, said on stage (video recording is online somewhere) he was bummed that so few people use Sidechains, and that his biggest surprise was how much work it takes to get applications in the ecosystem (like wallets, blockchain.info, etc.) to support a Sidechain. He needs people to have a good reason to switch to a Sidechain. If Bitcoin keeps improving, there will be no good reason.
Blockstream employees unanimously oppose every proposed hard fork to bitcoin. They are making it hard to improve bitcoin.
That said, Sidechains is VERY COOL technology, and the Blockstream developers make VERY COOL new features that could be added to Bitcoin. Unfortunately, by building a company on Sidechains and looking for profitable applications of it, they have become attached to a single technology that's only useful if Bitcoin itself slows its pace of improvement.
He asked about Bitcoin transaction middlemanship, not alternative ledger consensus systems. It should not be surprising that alternative ledgers exist that provide some features that Bitcoin doesn't.
> They also work on the lightning network, which creates middlemen.
LN transactions are just zero-conf Bitcoin transactions with some extra opcodes and defined behavior around the semantics of when certain transactions can be verified. see http://lightning.network/
> In general, all Blockstream's products are solutions to the problems of (1) bitcoin being hard to change/fork, and (2) the block size being small. Blockstream's products are thus more relevant and useful if bitcoin is difficult to improve, and has limited capacity.
Bitcoin is more useful if it's difficult to be "improved", period. Auto-update mechanisms take away voluntary participation and this is too dangerous for a financial system that is attempting to be decentralized (who's gonna "authorize" the updates, eh?). So yes maybe Blockstream has an incentive to assist with maintaining the current Bitcoin decentralization mechanisms... so what?
> Blockstream employees unanimously oppose every proposed hard fork to bitcoin.
jtimon? sipa? dude you know these people, wtf.
> He needs people to have a good reason to switch to a Sidechain. If Bitcoin keeps improving, there will be no good reason.
No, he doesn't need a good reason for people to switch. He needs a reason for people to use sidechains, thankfully he and everyone has many. This isn't about switching -_-.
> If Bitcoin keeps improving, there will be no good reason.
That's like saying "if positive changes are made to bitcoin.git, there's no reason to use sidechains"... That's not a reasonable argument.
> Blockstream employees unanimously oppose every proposed hard fork to bitcoin. They are making it hard to improve bitcoin.
They are opposed to hard-forks for many reasons, but perhaps most important here is because they aren't in control of Bitcoin network hard-forks. And they are unwilling to campaign to add those particular hard-forks into Bitcoin Core. It's wrong to claim that Blockstream is making it hard to improve Bitcoin when it's naturally hard to do so by design in the first place.
First, you're confusing me for my brother. It's a common mistake. He is Jonathan Toomim, and I'm Michael. Together, we are... the Toomim Bros!!! https://toom.im
Now, you've written seven different statements here, but they aren't connected to a main point. Could you put your thoughts together? Are you trying to address whether Blockstream are middlemen?
> First, you're confusing me for my brother. It's a common mistake.
I feel sort of cheated because you two use very similar HN usernames. You are not as bad as the Rayhawk brothers, though, which I am convinced are all the same person.
They also work on the lightning network, which creates middlemen.
In general, all Blockstream's products are solutions to the problems of (1) bitcoin being hard to change/fork, and (2) the block size being small. Blockstream's products are thus more relevant and useful if bitcoin is difficult to improve, and has limited capacity.
This is because all Blockstream's products are built on Sidechains: https://blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf Rather than change bitcoin itself, a sidechain lets you create an alternative set of rules for bitcoin, that re-uses the actual bitcoins from the main chain, so that users can put their bitcoins on either set of rules. Sidechains let users move coins between chains with different rulesets. Thus, Sidechains are useful only if it is difficult to add desired features to Bitcoin itself. All Blockstream products (like Liquid above) are implemented as Sidechains.
Thus, Blockstream's products will have no purpose unless Bitcoin is limited, and difficult to change, creating a need for a Sidechain.
Blockstream employees unanimously oppose every proposed hard fork to bitcoin.
At last October's Bitcoin Dev Workshop in San Francisco (ironically run by the Bitcoin Foundation), Blockstream CTO and Bitcoin Core Dev Greg Maxwell, who invented most of the Sidechains tech, said on stage (video recording is online somewhere) he was bummed that so few people use Sidechains, and that his biggest surprise was how much work it takes to get applications in the ecosystem (like wallets, blockchain.info, etc.) to support a Sidechain. He needs people to have a good reason to switch to a Sidechain. If Bitcoin keeps improving, there will be no good reason.
Blockstream employees unanimously oppose every proposed hard fork to bitcoin. They are making it hard to improve bitcoin.