Blockstream trying to take over Bitcoin
BlockstreamLocated in San Francisco, is perhaps the most important and at the same time, the least comprehensive company in the community of Bitcoin-World.
Bitcoin is an open source software project where everyone can view the code and propose changes, but only a small group of people accompanying the project can approve the changes and run them into the implementation. Blockstreamhas gathered under its wing many of the most experienced and productive developers of the Bitcoin Core team, including Gregory Maxwell, Peter Will, and Matt Corallo, who over the past year together made more than 1,212 contributions to the Bitcoin code on GitHub. For this reason, people working in Blockstream may have the deepest knowledge of crypto protocols and have the greatest impact in the crypto world.
While the positive influence of many people in the company on Bitcoin is obvious, some people blame the company for the lack of an experimental approach to Bitcoin's development, for the lack of rapid progress at the protocol level over the past few years.
Bitcoin Core is slow to take risks when it comes to making changes to Bitcoin's code. In particular, Core does not support increasing the block size as fast as some would like. Some in the community are afraid that very soon, the bandwidth of the network will become a bottleneck that hinders the growth of user acceptance, which even led to the emergence of offers of alternative customers and development teams (for example, Bitcoin Unlimited, so ardently supported by Roger Vero).
Most of these moods stem from the misunderstanding of Bitcoin's governance structure. Bitcoin was described as democratic, but in reality, it does not represent a democratic structure, where government representatives are elected, receiving the right to make decisions. Instead, Bitcoin is a user-controlled system where the code is associated with all network members (developers, miners, users, exchanges). Not any of the groups are able to make significant changes to the protocol. In fact, this requires an absolute majority of votes. This can be considered as a gift, and as a curse at the same time and this makes Bitcoin one of the most invulnerable means of accumulation that ever existed, but this same feature makes it difficult to make changes at the protocol level.
So what is the role of Blockstream in the ecosystem?
When the company attracted investments at the zero round of financing, the main idea was that Blockstream would be for Bitcoin that Mozilla was for the Internet: a commercial organization that supports the basic values of the protocol.
Since the launch of Blockstream, it has passed more than two years now, and it seems that the company has safely forgotten about it The popular opinion is that Blockstream is using its influence on Bitcoin Core to push out the solutions that are beneficial for the company, and not for the Bitcoin ecosystem as a whole.
The main mission of Blockstream
The founder of the block stream Adam Back says that he believes in the future, where users are given the right to control their own assets. The mission is to take Bitcoin's core peer security and expand it to other digital assets.
Back also says that Bitcoin is the most secure and reliable decentralized value transfer network. It runs smoothly for eight years and is based on computing power, larger than the world's largest supercomputer. The network is based on a simple scripting language with the smallest "surface" for potential attacks. Other blockades, such as the Etherium, are interesting experiments, but they do not compare with Bitcoin in terms of reliability, security, and decentralization.