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In a recent tweet, Gavin Andresen claimed that Bitcoin may have been “hijacked” by Blockstream.
More plausible: btc was hijacked by a corporation named Blockstream, by hiring key developers and heavily censoring discussions.
But I don’t believe either of those narratives; it is sad the community split into spiteful, warring factions.
— Gavin Andresen (@gavinandresen) May 26, 2020
Andresen started working on Bitcoin in 2010 and was the main developer of the Bitcoin Core client software after the disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto. In 2012 he founded the Bitcoin Foundation and some even speculated that he is the one hiding behind the pseudonym of Satoshi.
However, since February 2016 he stopped contributing to the development of Bitcoin Core and opposes the decision of not increasing the capacity of the blocks. Since 2017 he has been involved in the Bitcoin Cash project, claiming that it is a continuation of the project he had been working on since 2010.
A few days ago, HRF’s Chief Strategy Officer, Alex Gladstein, shared and commented very critically on a tweet from Andresen in which Gavin claimed he was proud not to have a Bitcoin full-node.
Bitcoin vs. Bitcoin Cash
Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) supporters are divided into two factions, often in stark opposition to each other, disagreeing on the principles behind Bitcoin.
In particular, BCH supporters argue that over the years the Bitcoin project has increasingly deviated from Satoshi Nakamoto’s original goals and that Bitcoin Cash is the true legacy of that original project.
Meanwhile, BTC supporters argue that BCH is just a clone created for commercial purposes and is in fact another project, completely separate from Bitcoin.
Andresen contributed to this diatribe with his tweet, declaring:
“More plausible: BTC was hijacked by a corporation named Blockstream, by hiring key developers and heavily censoring discussions. But I don’t believe either of those narratives; it is sad the community split into spiteful, warring factions”.
This tweet in fact addresses a hypothesis launched by Gladstein, according to whom in 2017 miners and some companies, that together accounted for 83% of the hashrate, failed in an attempt to hijack the Bitcoin project by imposing the doubling of the capacity of the blocks because they could not overcome the defence system constituted by the full-node.
That failure gave rise to the Bitcoin Cash project, in which the capacity of the blocks was first doubled and then increased to eight times that of BTC. Additionally, it also gave rise to the deep rivalry between the supporters of the “old” BTC, and those of the new BCH.
In response to Gladstein’s tweet claiming that this was an unsuccessful attempt to hijack Bitcoin in 2017, Andresen speculated that it would be more plausible in his opinion that it was Blockstream that hijacked the Bitcoin project over the years.
However, the conclusion of Andresen’s tweet, expressing regret about the real war between factions that has started between BTC’s and BCH’s supporters, gives a good idea of how this conflict has now bored many people, as it doesn’t seem to be bringing real benefits to anyone.
Competition is certainly useful and there should be some, but when competition turns into war, perhaps even violent, it ceases to be useful and tends to become deleterious.