On May 15, 2017, at 3:53 PM, juan wrote:

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).

Once the big money starts sniffing around naturally they want to blow bitcoin up as big as possible... unfortunately (for them), it's transaction model is not scalable to the daily level of individual regular old CC transactions, so i think the idea is to act as a middle man, doing big transactions in bulk, or a series of middle men, who clear out their ledgers with one another at the end of the day in bulk. meanwhile, it completely defeats the point of bitcoin! it's just another bank.

Part of the problem is Bitcoin was initially developed anonymously, aka: reasonably possible for bdfl then tapped anon handoff situation... but was instead handed off to real-worlders (not least of which then thus subject to govts), aka: fatal mistake against initial ethos. Anything non anon will dall and fail due to external demand. Even the Z coins will and have already failed from this. Bitcoin is still worthy, in the fiat cartel sort of way, even of very nice investment payoffs, even if buying in right now today. But its "ideals" appear to have been compromised. Blockchain is done, and fiat and fiat regulated blockchain is done. The only valid next coin will be one that truly scales to "credit card" tx / market feasible rates and beyond,\ or at least real p2p, person to person, phone to phone, neighbor to neighbor, job to job rates, while being... 1) developed and forever maintained, longest chain advantage, under strong anonymity and 2) provides cryptographically strong anonymity to users Govts, being corrupt people, should naturally respect and flock to such an impenetrable. Bitcoin is now not impenetrable, so it will eventually fall to history as some other same old has been seen currency before. Still money to be made with it for now though.

the idea is to act as a middle man, doing big transactions in bulk, or a series of middle men, who clear out their ledgers with one another at the end of the day in bulk.

This is scary to hodlers, as if it's reduced to a clearing network, you don't need to fight (pay) for BTC, just enough to run a tx every night that carries some signed statement, even an integer number of BTC equal to all your possible SWIFT institution payees matrix today suffices for that (plus some bs self cabal party borne mining fees). Public bitcoin price collapses under that since they're all 1:n zero sum matrix every night. The first digital currency that has hundreds of millions of people sleeping overnight with it in their wallets... moon. Whether that'll be Bitcoin... hard to tell. Blockstream representing BTC seems to be having issues reaching that. In particular since original focus growing on retail / end user seems vanished lately.