Cryptocurrency: Blockstream... BTC's Major Problem

[grarpamp]

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_october_19/hhah2f7/


[–]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.