I suppose it is a nice fairy tale to be sold. You carry on the status quo mining small blocks on your dodgy internet connections and we will compensate you by increasing on chain fees 100x - let us take care of the p2p transactions and scaling difficulties - you focus on security (and include our super transactions from our centralised payment hubs - nudge, nudge, wink, wink).



This does mean of course that in the future *any* on chain transaction will also have to cost 100x the current transaction fee to be included in a tiny 1mb block if bitcoin popularity continues to trend upwards. By creating a system like this you are tacitly destroying conventional on chain transactions and use-cases in the long run if bitcoin continues to exist.



As a long term holder this is not good news and should bitcoin bubble pre-halving as July approaches I will be probably reducing my exposure to bitcoin (cannot believe I am even saying this). My interest in bitcoin is as a scalable, frictionless, universal payment ledger for the internet with scarce monetary properties. The unholy alliance of miners and core + LN changes that irrevocably, not for technical reasons, but simply for political and individual selfish motives of those programmers working for Blockstream, who have hijacked the open source project.



The effects are already seen on social media / online fora where bitcoin has lost a lot of its previously vocal and enthusiastic support. Active user numbers are down everywhere as people are either turned off by the hostile division in the community or simply do not like the fact that bitcoin has been sloppily captured. Seeing those previously lauded programmers who contributed to bitcoin Core in the early years demonised (including Satoshi) and the latest cohort revealed for being liars, surrounding themselves with malignant sycophants, whilst actively supporting censorship of healthy debate between the userbase and the development community is probably a massive turn-off to people who believe in bitcoin as censorship resistant!



The longer this saga continues unresolved the more apparent it becomes to me that bitcoin is probably not going to be *the* blockchain for the internet. What is frustrating is that it probably should be.