Do I smell a Rat in Bitcoin? (I mean no insult to rats)

Note: Please read first comment by @sames.

I’ve been triangulating potential motivations in the code of bitcoin core vs altcoin projects now for more than a year and not really getting anywhere because there’s nothing obvious in the code that has told me that a banker takeover of bitcoin has happened. The political use of multiple reasons has created plausible deniability in practically every area I’ve looked and because of this, I’ve grown increasingly suspicious. Nature is not usually this meticulous in covering its tracks, which makes me wonder if there’s not some hidden agenda.

I got thrown off track at first because of some obviously bad information on the Lightning Network, which I debunked last year. I still stand by that assessment, but have become concerned that established financial interests have indeed influenced the development of bitcoin, but more simply than by the outrageous claims in the above video. I have no proof of this yet, but I think that by employing core devs who would simply emphasize it’s store of value character in the face of scaling problems, that was enough to slow down the mass adoption attempt that happened last year. In this way, such a coin could not replace national fiat. Did the banks start pouring money into getting technical people involved to steer bitcoin developers in a particular direction hoping to derail it’s advancement?

source

I haven’t been able to find anything on Reddit /r/bitcoin because if you ask about Roger Ver, you’re automatically labeled a troll and censored. Some have called Roger a scammer, but I have yet to hear a logical, coherent or technical argument about any hidden agenda’s he might have.

I’ve been following two channels independently (Tone Vays and Roger Ver) and wondered what they’ve had to say on the subject of the future of bitcoin and the scaling debate. They are widely known to be polar opposites in the bitcoin community so after a google search I found this on the scaling debate. This video came out just a couple of weeks after I first got into bitcoin.

credit - Tone Vays

In retrospect much of what I hear in this video has so far confirmed that Roger Ver was in fact correct. I’ve looked into Lightning Network and it appears to be years away from being a practical solution. It’s also completely unrealistic to expect everyone who wants to participate to run a full LN node. It’s like expecting everyone who wants an internet connection, to become their own ISP (Internet Service Provider).

Also talked about in the video is how segwit would solve the scaling problems. Once again Roger was correct that segwit would not be adopted for quite some time after this video. It’s finally just coming online now with limited adoption. But now that bitcoin is not being used that much, transaction fees have subsided for multiple reasons.

I think the argument that Gavin Andresen got pushed out because he was an inferior programmer to be complete horse shit. The same seems to have happened to Craig Wright. I also find the argument that Satoshi Nakamoto wasn’t that great a programmer very weak as well. If the core programmers were in fact so much better, why had they not invented bitcoin years earlier?

One of the arguments against a block size increase made last year is that it would consist of a hard fork and that it would be dangerous for bitcoin. That also turned out to be bad information at least on a practical level. How many forks have happened since last August? I've lost count. Forks turned out to be a non-issue. Maybe that's because it was handled carefully, or maybe it's because that fear was overplayed for political purposes.

I find the political situation surrounding bitcoin troubling. If Roger Ver does in fact have some sort of scam agenda that I’m not aware of, please let me know in the comments. I’m well aware though that increased block size can create latency issues, but the thin block proposal was also rejected by Blockstream as stated in the above video. Decentralization is not a boolean variable. It’s a matter of degree. The question one should be asking is “is it decentralized enough?”.

I personally think that since early 2014, with the advent of ASIC's, mining has since then been more or less "centralized". Yet it doesn't seem to be a problem. Mining is one part of a five part ecosystem involving end users, verification nodes, miners, merchants and bitcoin programmers.

So far the lack of double spends on both networks seems to suggest that Satoshi’s recommendation to increase block size as necessary was not unreasonable. While such a move would prove unworkable for micro-transactions (do we really need to do that now?!), there could be improvement by modest increases.

It was also strange to see Andreas Antonopoulos contradicting himself by saying that it’s generally bad engineering practice to solve problems before it’s necessary to solve them (which would seem to be the case with promoting a solution for micro-transactions years before they are needed). I hope I'm wrong about LN and that it will solve the problems of bitcoin scaling, but as a software dev with decades of experience, even I'm finding it challenging to run one of these LN nodes. If I can't, I seriously doubt that the average person can, which leads me back to wondering, why would Blockstream complicate matters this much? It's really looking to me that Blockstream did this intentionally to slow down bitcoin adoption. I hope that I'm wrong.

---

Donations (public bitcoin address):

3FwxQsa7gmQ7c1GXJyvDTqmT6CM3mMEgcv

---

---