13 years on and still no privacy or txrate or space improvements in BTC. https://www.reddit.com/r/xmrtrader/comments/qb61wb/daily_discussion_tuesday_... [–]bawdyanarchist[S] 1 point 1 day ago I have the suspicion that at this point, Coinbase is basically working with market insiders, the same kinds of people who ran the 2008 scam. It's how they got listed on the Nasdaq, and had the market peak on exactly the same day that they listed (Apr 14th, 2021). Shady af. It's ironic, given that crypto was created to fight against the kind of chicanery of 2008. Now the lead US exchange is walking hand in hand with those guys. Crypto has been co-opted significantly, and people don't even realize it. [–]bawdyanarchist[S] 1 point 21 hours ago Have you checked out some of these other companies? Barry Silbert, years ago, was a young WEF member. Founder and CEO of DCG, probably the largest behemoth crypto corporation with its tentacles spidered into (nearly) every part of the ecosystem. Blockstream seed capital. Everyone focused on AXA, but the actual founders, the original funders, were Google, Microsoft, WEF, and Bilderberg members. I shit you not Fair warning, the link above is me going pretty hard on maximalists, Blockstream, and Tether. But despite the tone, it's backed up by the research. [–]bawdyanarchist 29 points 4 months ago* I've been seeing alot of mutual fellacio between Tether execs and Blockstream lately. Paolo and Mow seem to have a torrid affair in progress. Adam Back is no stranger to Tether love. Bitfinex is one of the "trusted" federated participants of Liquid. Strike seems to be heavily promoted in maxi circles, and is also directly tied to both Tether and traditional finance. Alot of insufferable maxi thot leaders mysteriously turned from Tether haters into deniers, claiming it doesn't matter that this stablecoin does more volume than BTC, and represents something like 3/4 of crypto volume. All of this finally pushed me to doing my own little investigation into Blockstream last night. I know that it's kind of been done before, but I just wanted to see for myself. Holy shit. I'm only in the first inning of what a proper background check would look like, and it's really bad. I was surprised because I never came across this specific info before; and it really should have been a greater focus by the opposition, rather than just the AXA and MasterCard connections. Let's start from the source itself, who Blockstream says are it's seed funders from 2014. https://blockstream.com/2014/11/17/en-blockstream-closes-21m-seed-round/ Based on those discussions, we invited a few investors to meet with us and learn more about our technology. I’m excited to announce today Blockstream closed a $21 million seed round. Our nearly 40 investors include many well-known pioneers of the Internet and financial services sectors. The round was led by Reid Hoffman, Khosla Ventures and Real Ventures, with investments from Nicolas Berggruen, Crypto Currency Partners, Future\Perfect Ventures, Danny Hillis, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Max Levchin, Mosaic Ventures, Ray Ozzie, Ribbit Capital, Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures and several others. Okay, $21M to start, with a list of the top names. Simple enough, let's do some basic Wiki on these people ... Reid Hoffman Co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn Founding board member of Paypal - Maintain relationships with MC, Visa, ACH, WellsFargo, etc Bilderberg Group member since 2011 Board member of Microsoft since 2017 Nicolas Berggruen Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Member of the World Economic Forum (the same WEF that says after the great reset you'll own nothing) Eric Schmidt Bilderberg Group since 2007, attending all meetings Google CEO (2001-2001); then exec chairman (2011-2015) Apple board of directors (2006-2009) Exec chairman and technical advisro of Alphabet (Google's parent) since 2015 #55 richest person on Earth Chairman of a Dept of Defense advisory council (2016) Sits or has sat on the board of: Carnegie Mellon, Princeton, The Economist, Khan Academy Advisor to Obama campaign 2008, and considered for Secretary of Commerce Max Levchin Co-founder and CTO of Paypal Yelp chairman of the board (2004-2015) Yahoo board of directors (2012-2015) Joined Zuckerberg and Joe Green to form the first Silicon Valley lobbyist group Defended NSA spying in 2013 Ray Ozzie Microsoft Chief Technical Officer, and Chief Software Architect (2005-2010) Quite the credentials this list of superstar seed capital and founders have here! Any company with founders like this should basically be presumed nefarious. I find it no coincidence that Peter Wuille - arguable the most influential maintainer of the Bitcoin Github repo, particularly in consideration of which maintainer is controlling *protocol upgrades*** - was a co-founder of Blockstream from the very beginning. This also against the backdrop of other socially prominent maximalists that were paid by Blockstream such as Greg Maxwell, Adam Back, Luke-jr, and Matt Corallo. I find it no coincidence that a superstar subset of the people who erected the surveillance/censorship platforms of our generation ... have their grubby little fingers all over a corporation instrumental in pushing the narrative that just so happened to win the day. I find it no coincidence that heavy censorship on the few social media platforms used for communication in the Bitcoin ecosystem (at the time) was a major factor in isolating and driving out discussion that didn't align with their desires. I find it obvious how the conflict of financial interests puts these same people in alignment with all of the other corporate, rent-seeking, re-intermediated, heavily surveilled, shitcoin casino, centralized, emotional tulip-style tribalism and gambling rampant in the crypto industry. Anyways, that's proably enough for now. My goal was mostly to point out the more questionable among Blockstream's original seed capital and founders. I know this doesn't necessarily have much to do with Monero. Apart from how Monero stands in quite stark contrast to all of that bullshit, having arduously attempted to prevent corporate interests from infecting the maintainers of the repo or devs. I just thought some of you here might enjoy some supplemental info on who founded Blockstream, and why we should trust them and the people they associate with, even less.