In this petition I ask for the signature of everyone who has been touched or affected in any way by Blockstream's aggressive social media tactics. These consist of name calling, personal attacks, bullying and harassment.

In 2014 a company called Blockstream hijacked the Bitcoin open source project by hiring the majority of the developers and revoking access to whoever proposed changes that were not aligned with Blockstream's business interests. Because consensus is crucial to any open source project, after taking over bitcoin's developer team Blockstream then resorted to censorship in order to manipulate consensus.

In August 2017 an independent developer, Amaury Sechet, managed to hard fork the original bitcoin blockchain before the implementation of Segwit which modified the essential nature of bitcoin in an irreversible way. The original Bitcoin blockchain, today is referred to as "Bitcoin cash" in mainstream media. All the bitcoin early adopters and initiators like Gavin Andresen, Roger ver, Jihan Wu, Rick Falkvinge, Vitalik Buterin (who later launched Ethereum) support Bitcoin Cash over Bitcoin Core. Bitcoin cash is also known as Bitcoin BCH and Bitcoin Core is also known as Bitcoin BTC. The reasons for this support are both technical and political. Technically bitcoin cash allows for a superior user experience through fast transactions and subcent transaction fees. Politically speaking, bitcoin cash is decentralised because multiple development teams work on it and all changes are done through consensus and open debate. From a technical point of view, Blockstream has imposed an artificial block size limit of 1MB which it justifies with the unproven claim that "onchain scaling is not possible" and not even worth trying. In the meantime Blockstream has been working (unsuccessfully so far) in what is known as a second layer solution. By capping blocks at 1mb and destroying user experience through slow transactions and high fees, users will be forced to use Blockstream's second layer solutions whose technology is known as Lightning. Lightning is not bad per se, but Blockstream's strategy aims to destroy "on chain" user experience in order to transfer all transactions on lightning where liquidity providers (Blockstream & exchanges) collect fees for clearing transactions.

Since the creation of the fork in August 2017 Blockstream has been involved in an aggressive social media campaign that aims to silence dissent, discredit anyone advocating bitcoin BCH or "big blockers", and report/flag as spam/scam content that exposes Blockstream's methods.

Full history of /r/bitcoin on Reddit

A (brief and incomplete) history of censorship in /r/Bitcoin



The ex-CTO of Blockstream Greg Maxwell (/u/nullc) was caught compromising the accounts of /r/bitcoin subscribers to engage in vote brigading in November 2017 (he resigned in November 2017 although it was made public only in January 2018)

The uncensored bitcoin subreddit /r/btc where discussions of bitcoin cash (BCH) are allowed was hacked while bitcoin cash was at an all time high in December 2017

Reddit's email servers were compromised in January 2018 to attack bitcoin cash users specifically

Here is a tweet by Adam Back, Blockstream CEO, admitting that it's a large teams full time job to debunk and disprove the "FUD" spread by Bitcoin BCH users & supporters. By every appearance this large team is a troll factory or a network of accounts controlled by few people.

Hundreds of botted accounts post simultaneously "Bitcoin cash is trash"

Six year Twitter account tweets only "Bcash bcash bcash"

Recently the @Bitcoin twitter account, was restricted and we suspect this was due to mass reports from Blockstream trolls although only a Twitter investigation can determine this with certainty.

Today this video by Roger Ver was removed by Youtube for "spam and deceptive practices". Please watch the video to see that there is nothing scamful in it and this is yet another case where Blockstream takes advantage of editing loopholes where content moderation is heavily automated and not vetted by humans in order to censor dissenting voices by employing troll factories or vast networks of accounts that abuse the report feature.

If you are not a bitcoin user your signature matters even more. Bitcoin aside, free speech is at stake here. Blockstream's tactics have led to thousands of voices being silenced only for speaking their minds or believing in something different from what Blockstream wants to sell. The same methods could be used to hijack any open source project or, even worse, for political purposes. Our signatures will raise awareness of weaknesses in social media platforms such as Youtube (extremely vulnerable), Twitter (superior to the rest, they reacted with a manual investigation and unrestricted the @bitcoin account) and Reddit (extremely vulnerable, if you hijack moderators of a big subreddit you can censor anything) where because of excessive reliance on automation, censorship by resourceful actors is possible indirectly.

I am aware that permanently suspending Blockstream on Twitter will not put an end to this issue, but it will for one raise awareness of the current SM manipulation loopholes. Then it can lead to a deeper investigation by Twitter and suspension of the entire network of accounts involved like it happened with the US election accounts. Last but not least, it will send a blow to Blockstream and serve as admonishment to any company who might be debating hiring troll factories to hide facts by harassing whoever dares to state/post/share them.