Here's a little company called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockstream with direct ties to the most toxic, anti 'cypherpunk' forces on the planet. http://www.coindesk.com/blockstream-21-million-seed-capital/ "Additional investment firms...Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, " It turns out that blockstream's 'leaders' are pretty 'influential' bitcoin developers. They seem opposed to increasing the block size limit at the moment but they pretend that their political decision is 'apolitical' 'unbiased' 'code'. Now some background. Bitcoin, allegedly "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." keywords, peer to peer, no financial middlemen. Now it gets interesting. Blockstream has a solution to increase bitcoin's capacity, which I don't think can be described as "purely peer-to-peer" and involving no middlemen at all. As a matter of fact, blockstream solution is to create middlemen that will process the vast majority of transaction...because they can't scale bitcoin (technical failure) or they don't want (political failure).