Wacky Quotes from Core Devs

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Blockstream Cores were at one point entrusted to lead the Bitcoin community to greener pastures. With over five years of digital warfare, all they’ve managed to do is ‘segregate’ (pardon the pun), the community, and turn it all into one big hate-fueled, undemocratic, assault on consensus. Anyone who disagrees with their view to keep the blocksize small and implement Segwit is attacked, ridiculed, and even DOS’d when running competing clients.

Over many years I have witnessed some of the most outrageous, and outlandish comments come from the Core dev team. I’ve listed a few below with my own commentary.

“Slow confirmation, high fees will be the norm in any safe outcome.” – Mark Friedenbach

Satoshi mentioned Bitcoin will eventually move to a fee-based system, once the mining reward significantly reduces. Although the mining reward has been halved, and halved again, the value of the reward has increased significantly. It has been proven that the network can handle a 4MB blocksize today without any threat to decentralization, in a recent study. So what’s not safe? To advocate “slow confirmations” as if that’s a good thing, demonstrates just how disenfranchised this individual is from the real user. “Slow” anything in software is a detriment to user experience. You learn that in your first year of software dev 101.

“If a block isn’t full then something is wrong, perhaps seriously wrong.” – Gregory Maxwell

‘At capacity’ blocks of an artificial limit are not a good thing. They were certainly not full when Mike Hearn warned us about this creeping problem (and the need to increase the blocksize) in 2015. And nothing was wrong with Bitcoin back then, in fact it was working perfectly; fast confirmation times, no backlog of transactions, easy payment. Fast forward two years, and the problems are rampant. Someone’s logic, it appears, is backwards.

“Just pay a $5 fee and it’ll go through every time unless you’re doing something stupid.” – Luke-jr

Ignoring the condescending tone of this developer, what happens when everyone is paying $5? Will Luke revise his statement to $15, $50 and so on? It’s very easy to see how this resolution falls apart very quickly.

“Confirmation times are fine for those who pay high fees.” – Jorge Timon

Bitcoin was founded on the dreams of a libertarian who wanted to see a change in the financial system. Sadly, Jorge Timon’s statement reeks of the elitist attitude Bitcoin sought to fight against. Bitcoin isn’t for the rich, it is for everyone.

“I don’t think that transaction fees mattering is a failing, it’s success!” – Gregory Maxwell

Greg, when it happens due to technical limits, it’s one thing. But when these fees start to matter due to a very artificial, ‘magical’ 1MB number in the code, there is a problem.

“It is no longer possible to keep fees low.” – Luke-jr

Sure it is Luke! Tweak the magic number.

But my favourite come from Wladimir J van der Laan, whom I have quoted before. But his statement is the give-away reason for not increasing the blocksize.

“I’m afraid increasing the blocksize will kick this can down the road and let people… relax.”

Core don’t want people to “relax”, they want users on edge, and they want users to beg for Segwit. But argue against this organization, and you may find yourself banned from forums, silenced, attacked, and even hacked.

So much for an organization that believes in ‘consensus’.

Eli Afram M.IT
Developer/Analyst
@justicemate