> This whole stink started because some guy who happened to have a ton of BTC was upset that people running full nodes didn't get a cut of any of the transaction fees.
What? Who?
> Today, the main company that is pushing the Segwit / small block agenda hopes to push everyone to their off chain lightening network where they can collect the fees instead of the miners.
Lightning is open-source and was invented by Lighting Labs, a company that has nothing to do with Blockstream. Blockstream are merely working on one out of 6 Lightning implementations that exists in the market.
Also, Lightning is designed for peer-to-peer routing (and not a hub-and-spoke topology) and it is expected that everyone with some spare bitcoins would run lightning nodes to collect fees, so there should be plenty competition.
Finally, Bitcoin Core is an open-source community composed of tens of developers from all over the world and from different associations, plus hundreds of testers, reviewers and other contributors. Nearly all of them support SegWit very strongly, not only the ones associated with Blockstream.
Mircea Popescu, He is the original guy who started promoting the idea that it was a mistake to raise the block size unless some incentive to run a full node was added to the system. I don't think he actually supports segwit either, he thinks soft forks are crap. He is the original voice in opposition to block size increases though and many people listen to him.
A lot of people disagree with your characterization of how lightening networks will play out. Since they don't really exist in real world usage yet hard to prove one way or the other.
> He is the original voice in opposition to block size increases though and many people listen to him.
Many developers were opposed to reckless block size increases, I think you're giving that guy's voice too much weight. I personally never heard of him.
> A lot of people disagree with your characterization of how lightening networks will play out. Since they don't really exist in real world usage yet hard to prove one way or the other.
They sure do (early and still somewhat buggy alpha, but it does exists and does work):
>it is expected that everyone with some spare bitcoins would run lightning nodes to collect fees, so there should be plenty competition.
Thanks for getting back to me in another comment and I find this assertion interesting. As I said earlier, currently there is no incetive for small players to run full nodes so the network tends towards centralisation over time. How do we know the fees involved in Lightening are sufficient that average users can be convinced to act as intermediataries?
What? Who?
> Today, the main company that is pushing the Segwit / small block agenda hopes to push everyone to their off chain lightening network where they can collect the fees instead of the miners.
Lightning is open-source and was invented by Lighting Labs, a company that has nothing to do with Blockstream. Blockstream are merely working on one out of 6 Lightning implementations that exists in the market.
Also, Lightning is designed for peer-to-peer routing (and not a hub-and-spoke topology) and it is expected that everyone with some spare bitcoins would run lightning nodes to collect fees, so there should be plenty competition.
Finally, Bitcoin Core is an open-source community composed of tens of developers from all over the world and from different associations, plus hundreds of testers, reviewers and other contributors. Nearly all of them support SegWit very strongly, not only the ones associated with Blockstream.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13627371