The world is a far more nuanced place than most people imagine. For those of you who remember, I want you to think back to when you were working in a corporate environment, who your bosses were and the relationships that you had with your coworkers (I left this environment over 11 years ago). Was there ever any workplace gossip? How often were there negative comments by your coworkers about your bosses? Lots right? I’ve never known a place where there wasn’t any back stabbing. Your employers know it goes on because they were once in your position. They are counseled on how to deal with this by going to management skills workshops.
The same is true in the rest of the world. This goes for banking employees too. Many of them are just as fed up as you are about how the Federal Reserve has ruined their pensions and taxes them excessively with fractional reserve and inflationary policies. Half of the population (among the 1.5 billion privileged with banking access) think the answer is just to tax the rich more to balance the budget. There’s much more to it than that.
What we really have is a parasite problem. Government has been talking about downsizing for decades, but it never does. This is because government cannot see a solution to any problem that doesn’t include itself as part of the answer. When government becomes the problem, there is never any solution that comes from inside. When was the last time you’ve ever heard of a government disbanding itself when it found out it was the problem? Never. They just talk about reform instead. This was the case after Nixon resigned and Ford said “we have to work on restoring the trust of the people”. Sorry but that is total BS. Freedom is never given, it must be taken.
People have been beaten down for so long that they no longer recognize freedom when they see it. Authority always sees the exit though and works on ways to exploit your agnoia (ignorance). Please understand this is not the same as stupidity. Ignorance is a problem that everyone must deal with because we cannot be in all places at all times. Our lack of knowing is being used against us. The only way to defeat it unfortunately is for everyone to become fact checkers. This takes more time than most people have, so we just defer to the leader of our clan. If they say it’s true, then it must be true. You just go with it, even though often times it’s wrong.
I now perceive something prevalent in the general population in the west that I would describe as “self defeatism”. Many have been enslaved for so long you think of your captors as gods with infinite powers. Authority likes this fact about those of you who are broken because it makes their job for control easier. But they don’t have infinite control. The reality is that compared to systems of nature, government is extremely fragile.
There is also a tendency to think in terms of black and white, democrat or republican, left and right, good and evil, when the world is actually multivalent with numerous simultaneous agendas in all directions. Everyone has a tendency toward self preservation and because everyone’s position is at least a little bit different, everyone’s politics is also different. But the weaker sacrifice more of their principles to gain advantage in the few areas they can’t compromise. The strong sacrifice less and say “join me or else”.
Of all of the different cryptocurrencies out there (which number at least 1500) each wants to become the next Google of finance. Many of you are probably aware of the scaling debate in bitcoin. One side wants bigger blocks and the other side wants off chain solutions. Notice that this has been broken down into two sides. The reality is that the number of Bip’s (Bitcoin Improvement Proposals) is in the hundreds and there are multiple sides. So what we have is Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash with a good amount of infighting in between and from within.
Accusation: Blockstream is a “banker” implementation of Bitcoin
When I first heard about this, I was concerned because the accusation seems to check out. Adam Baum says…
The too-big-to-fail insurance giant AXA is one of the main owners of Blockstream - and they're throwing around millions of dollars to any dev / troll / censor who opposes Satoshi's simple and safe roadmap for on-chain scaling (ie: bigger blocks via hard forking).
But fortunately, we can "route around" Blockstream's censorship and centralization: Once >51% of the network uninstalls Blockstream's crippled Bitcoin client, and installs a Bitcoin client from Unlimited or Classic that accepts bigger blocks, then the market and not some clueless devs at Blockstream, paid by central bankers will again be fully in control of the Bitcoin blocksize (and volume and price).
Blockstream is now controlled by the Bilderberg Group - seriously! AXA Strategic Ventures, co-lead investor for Blockstream's $55 million financing round, is the investment arm of French insurance giant AXA Group - whose CEO Henri de Castries has been chairman of the Bilderberg Group since 2012.
If Bitcoin becomes a major currency, then tens of trillions of dollars on the "legacy ledger of fantasy fiat" will evaporate, destroying AXA, whose CEO is head of the Bilderbergers. This is the real reason why AXA bought Blockstream: to artificially suppress Bitcoin volume and price with 1MB blocks.
As is the case with anything in politics (or engineering) there are multiple reasons, not just one reason for why something must be done. I read the Satoshi emails last year which were dated between 2008 - 2011. Satoshi did say that if necessary one could increase the block size. But it’s also clear that Satoshi was very skeptical that bitcoin would need this level of scaling in the future because he doubted it would reach that level of success. I personally don’t think he considered the effect that propagating 1GB blocks on a network would do.
As a software dev with over 2 decades experience, I can tell you that there’s more than one legitimate reason for keeping block sizes as small as possible (though I do think a block size increase is in Blockstream’s future). Remember that that block has to fit through your internet connection every 10 minutes. Once the miner solves the nonce and sends the block out onto the network, it has to propagate to the other nodes world wide. The larger the block, the longer it will take for that block to propagate. This is called latency and it leads to mining centralization.
If you have to wait about 5 minutes to start working on the next block in each 10 minute session, then the miner who solved the nonce has a significantly greater probability of solving the nonce once again. This means that only the few with very specialized equipment will be able to participate in mining. To some extent this is already the case due to ASIC’s mining hardware and electricity costs, but it would be worse if you also have to have internet connection speeds that can download 1GB inside of 10 seconds. I have Hughesnet high speed internet, and within about 2 hours, I would be at my monthly limit for bandwidth consumption.
This however doesn’t mean that there aren’t those who have interests exactly as stated above by Adam Baum. But I do question their ability to assert control on the network. There are multiple sides here. The only way to know for sure is to read the code. Since most of you probably can’t do that, you’ll look to your tribal leader to discern the truth.
All I can say is that I haven’t seen anything in the bitcoin source code that allows the banking system to take over bitcoin. If any of you find any KYC in the code that allows identification of what address exists in a given wallet (which is really a key chain) let me know. I haven’t studied the source code for the Lightning Network yet. Everything that I’ve seen so far about how transactions work on the bitcoin network using addresses derived from public keys which are derived from private keys tells me that KYC info collection on the blockchain itself or the lightning network is impossible.
The best authority can do is trace the address that begins at the exchange you have with national fiat (such as Coinbase) and link that address to another address. After that, if you never reuse addresses, it becomes very difficult to know if a given address belongs to you, or someone else because a wallet can contain at least 2 billion addresses. Now if you buy something online and give your address, then of course that would compromise your privacy.
The banking system as it currently exists gives the authorities the greatest control over your financial future. Bitcoin, whether it’s bitcoin or bitcoin cash, is not authority friendly. But there are coins that are, such as Ripple and Stellar that do work with KYC. My rather cynical view is that the folks at Bitcoin Cash are simply using this conspiracy to prop up the value of the currency. They apparently only have one full time developer who takes Blockstreams commits which are open source and then adapts it to bitcoin cash.
For this reason, I’m skeptical of Bitcoin Cash’s long term success. They will have to take up all of Blockstreams employees or hire alternates if they hope to keep up with the innovations in the marketplace. In any case, I HODL both…
Donations (public bitcoin address):
3FwxQsa7gmQ7c1GXJyvDTqmT6CM3mMEgcv
