kenny 🎩
@kenny
"The person deciding the new EF leadership is me" need a feature where I can go back and drop a screenshot into all the debates I've had on here about BTC vs ETH decentralization
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shazow
@shazow.eth
sounds more appropriate for blockstream vs EF debates
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kenny 🎩
@kenny
what is a significant protocol change BTC has enshrined recently that was led by Blockstream coordination?
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shazow
@shazow.eth
It has to be recently? Blockstream literally owned the BTC/BCH fork and funded almost every core maintainer for years after, far more than EF did for the ETH/ETC fork and onward. The fact that EF has suddenly become socially relevant in the last few weeks is kind of its own thing. Narratives aside, they played a similar role.
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kenny 🎩
@kenny
at the time of the fork there was a legitimate schism in the community, no one was looking to Blockstream as the clear undisputed leader deciding fork choice there were plenty of influential community members on the other side as well and it just so happens that the market chose the side that Blockstream supported huge difference between the role they've played in the community and the undisputed guidance the Ethereum Foundation has given to Ethereum over the past decade
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shazow
@shazow.eth
Coming from the "big blocks" side of the schism, I disagree with that description of events. Everyone on the "small blocks" side looked at Blockstream as the clear undisputed leader of Bitcoin by accepting BTC as the "legitimate" fork (Blockstream employees were literally the ones who rebranded it as "bitcoin-core" and lead the dev on it at the time). A big part of the schism was precisely this fear, we didn't want Blockstream to have so much power, to ossify the protocol prematurely just to force us down the dead end of Lightning Network -- which is what we got! Don't forget, this all started when Vitalik got laughed out of the community by the very same Blockstream people. I think "the market choosing" is a claim we can make in retrospect, but at the time it did not look that way. Perhaps "the market" will choose Vitalik as the sole supreme sequencer of Ethereum, or perhaps "the market" will choose the "ethereum has 100 bd teams" the EF always talks about and cement EF's irrelevancy.
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kenny 🎩
@kenny
coming from the "small blocks" side of the argument I didn't care at all what Blockstream had to say I believed in an ossified protocol because I got into Bitcoin because of a distrust of humans managing monetary policy going down the path of "oh we'll just make the blocks a bit bigger now" opened the door to a world where we'd constantly be tweaking the protocol (like what Ethereum does now) and I didn't want that I supported the side that wanted to keep Bitcoin simple and it turns out that was fine because the market is coming up with solutions instead (plenty of cracked teams working on Bitcoin L2s now)
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shazow
@shazow.eth
I mean, a founder of Blockstream was literally the maintainer of bitcoin-core until just a couple years ago. If Ethereum had just one client by decree of the EF and Vitalik was the one deciding which PRs get merged, then that would be comparable to the power Blockstream took when they pushed out Gavin, the BCH community, and what would later become the ETH community.
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shazow
@shazow.eth
Btw I enjoy reminiscing of the good ol' days with one of the few people who were there too! From a tech perspective, Bitcoin has been working on sidechains since before Ethereum. That was also a Blockstream narrative (remember the Liquid Network that was supposed to conveniently address the shortcomings of small blocks?). It's still unlikely Bitcoin will hardfork the necessary opcodes to make L2s comparable to Ethereum's rollups, it would need to effectively enshrine programmability beyond Bitcoin Script's scope and totally break any backwards compatibility. The L2s that it can get are just somewhat more robust one-way bridges than a regular sidechain. Better than nothing, but definitely not "turns out that was fine."
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