Now we are left with 3/25 for BIP side. Or 12%. Or a combined ~14.25% of all work reviewed.

note — we reviewed issues and pull request in the same fashion as with review Bitcoin Core branch and found the same distribution. Not worth detailing again

In conclusion, there is no quantifiable evidence based on publicly available information or actual work to indicate that BlockStream has taken over the Bitcoin repo or BIPs. As a matter of fact, Wladimir J. van der Laan aka laannwj , the main contributor and maintainer of the bitcoin core repo, is not attached to any corporate body, was nominated by Gavin Andresen for that position and has contributed more then any BlockStream employee by a wide margin.

Update — a good point was raised in the commentary on twitter that current employee, contractor or consultant is not necessarily equal to past. Since this type of thing is not public info,we asked Samson Mow , CSO of BlockStream, directly to confirm if any past contractors or consultants were paid to work on the bitcoin repo or submit BIPS and identify who has. He stated that there have been “0 past contractors” that have worked on either project. Whether you take the word of the CSO of a company that there is some level of distrust in by certain parties is not what this article about. Provable data is and still leads to the same conclusion.

Update2 — another good point that came out of conversation was that part of narrative was that current BlockStream employees put the cap in place or that they put it in place after others had been changing it at an incremental level. Actually MAX_BLOCK_SIZE in main.h has been 1MB since 2010(as imported from sourceforge) https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/a30b56ebe76ffff9f9cc8a6667186179413c6349 . As you can see the commit message isn't very clear but this was the first addition of MAX_BLOCK_SIZE. This decision was reached by Hal Finney and Satoshi in order to reduce the change of spam attack. (this was before 0–0.05 cent transaction spam was an issue). Hal Finney is deceased and was never BlockStream employee

(end of fact only article)

Commentary

We made some effort to quantify possible social influence using the bitcoin news group and twitter. Unfortunately, this became much harder as many anonymous account popped up that are not attached to any known GitHub , obvious twitters names or companies. If we (fairly or unfairly) bucket anonymous accounts as trolls, we still do not arrive at a substantial numbers.

We made no effort to verify censorship claims. That is an entirely different topic (but potentially related)

Our opinion based on twitter, reddit and the news group is there are some very opposite social and economic views which has become politicized and incentivized. This has provably lead to camps of people who are willing to argue and propagate unsubstantiated arguments to support their view. Whether it really has to do with bitcoin the technology or not.

Further more, one source commented with convincing telegram and wechat conversations that paid social media campaigns have been occurring since February 2017 to push various agenda items forward and slow others (segwitts profit impact on asic boost mining for example). This is not the first time that we’ve seen leaked conversation between parties on wechat discussing a group effort to prevent something such as the segwitt adoption in Litecoin. Never mind the Birds platform on bitcoin.com— which pays in bitcoin for likes and retweet.

If this not paid advertisement were not sure what is.

Finally, we are not just “Core Shills”. One of the five people behind WhaleCalls has 0 btc, two have minimal btc amongst a portfolio of coins and tokens, one purely trades alt coins back and forth to cash (taking advantage of the volatility). Three of us have software engineering backgrounds and believe that forking is a normal part of a software engineering cycle. It is usually done to prove out some breaking change. If it works out, that code can be merged back in at some later point. However, we do not like or agree with smear campaigns to promote an over dramatic narrative.

A solution should win on its own merits, not by the verbal deprecation of others or false narratives.

Thanks for reading

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