FREEDOMAIN INVESTMENT ROUNDTABLE 11: OPPOSING BITCOIN!

Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain discusses the latest updates in the wonderful world of Bitcoin!

NOT investment advice of course...

But damn useful!

(sorry, I misspoke, the Ether fees were only 5x the price)

FREEDOMAIN NFT: www.freedomainnft.com

www.freedomain.com

Source arguments against Bitcoin from a Freedomain listener.

I wrote out a few of my arguments for why I think Core is compromised. No pressure to read all this, but I didn’t want you to think I couldn’t make a case for what I was asserting.

a. They have a financial incentive. All the Core developers work for a company called Blockstream. Blockstream’s main product is a thing called Liquid. They call it a sidechain, but basically it's a payment network that runs on top of Bitcoin and they collect fees from it. If Bitcoin works as a payment network, Blockstream doesn’t have a business model. They need Bitcoin to suck as a payment network in order for their product to have a place in the market. https://blockstream.com/liquid/

b. They lie. In 2016 representatives of Core met representatives of Bitcoin miners to discuss increasing the blocksize. At the time miners were signaling that they were going to switch to running code produced by a different development team. The Core developers promised the miners that they would double the blocksize if the miners promised to update their nodes to include a new feature called Segwit. Segwit was needed for Blockstream’s Liquid sidechain to work. When the time came they insisted that Segwit be activated months before the blocksize increase and the miners complied. Then after the Core devs got what they wanted they refused to include a blocksize increase in their code, even though they had promised to earlier. https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-consensus-266d475a61ff

c. They contradict themselves. At the time Core proponents said that it was immoral to change the code if not everyone agrees to it. That doesn’t make sense, because they had no problem making an enormous controversial change to Bitcoin’s design, but if anyone wrote code that disagreed with Core’s code, it was an attack!

d. They’re wrong about important stuff. A big argument Core said at the time for why we shouldn’t do a blocksize increase was because they said Segwit was already a blocksize increase. Segwit rearranges data in the block in a way that in theory can trick a miner into thinking a block is smaller than it really is. Core said that effect would roughly double the amount of transactions the network could process. Then they said if we do a doubling of the blocksize on top of Segwit that would really be like a quadrupling of the transaction throughput and that would be crazy dangerous. In reality, Segwit had almost no effect on transaction bandwith.

e. They lied about the lightning network. All the Core devs said there’s no need to worry about transaction throughput because the Lightning Network was coming. That was like 5 years ago and it still doesn’t work even in concept. They promised it would be like a giant mess network, so people could still pay each other peer to peer, but when they were asked how payments were supposed to route though the mess network, which is the most important part of the concept they just pretended it would be this easy thing to solve and they’d figure it out later. The lightning network today is like 4 big banks that have payment channels with each other. You have to custodially deposit your money with them, because there is no way to route your payments without their assistance. It's nothing like what they promised and said would be ready years ago. Rick Falkvinge has a good video explaining how the routing problem is one of hardest unsolved problems in computer science and the core devs were betting everything that they would just figure it out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFZOrtlQXWc

f. They use censorship. /r/Bitcoin and Bitcointalk.org were the main forums for bitcoin discussion back in the day and one day the moderators of both forums just literally started deleting and banning everyone who talked about the original scaling plan. Thousands of people making rational arguments got banned. I got banned. It only looked like there was consensus to change the scaling plan because they banned everyone who disagreed with Core. From the CEO of Coinbase in 2016, “There continues to be rampant censorship on /r/bitcoin regarding this debate, which is unfortunate. I continue to encourage everyone to move to /r/btc as an alternative that is censorship free.” In case you weren’t aware /r/btc is the main forum for BCH discussion. That’s where everyone went when they were banned from /r/bitcoin. Then later the split happened and Bitcoin Cash had to take a new ticker. That’s why it has the wrong subreddit name. Also, I want to mention Coinbase used to be very vocal that they were only ever going to be a Bitcoin company and it was after that meeting they realized they needed to diversify, because the CEO of Coinbase “realized we all had a much bigger problem: the systemic risk to bitcoin if Core was the only team working on bitcoin.” https://blog.coinbase.com/what-happened-at-the-satoshi-roundtable-6c11a10d8cdf