Do you think Blockstream is being unduly influenced by their politically connected investors?

Poll ended at Sun Oct 30, 2016 10:33 am

Yes
68%
15
No
9%
2
Maybe
23%
5
 
Total votes: 22
1truth
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Follow the Stream (of money)

Fri Sep 30, 2016 11:30 am

Posted without comment for discussion:

Legend:
the green is wall street interests and distributed ledgers.
the light blue are neutral investors (diverse investments spread across the industry)
the blue are big blockers.
the violet are small blockers.
the red is Billionaire business magnate (owner of Hong Kong)
the orange is US gov influenced
the light grey is assumed neutral

http://imgur.com/a/LguOP
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Follow the Money.png

_Mr_E
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Re: Follow the Stream (of money)

Fri Sep 30, 2016 3:53 pm

Very impressive, Good work!

iFixBTCmemoryIssues
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Re: Follow the Stream (of money)

Fri Sep 30, 2016 7:49 pm

This is the same as Apple saying NO to the FBI in backdoors of its products. Bitcoin development must not have any conflict of interest.

I have to throw these people under the bus even further, how they have treated their userbase, colleagues, pretty much everyone, is appalling.

I can assure you that NO board would ever have let things go this far, especially not in a billion dollar market-cap with future trillions at stake. They would all be fired on the spot.

There is nothing good to say, it has been an absolute disaster.
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achow101
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Re: Follow the Stream (of money)

Fri Sep 30, 2016 8:13 pm

Not everyone who works at Blockstream is a Core Dev. To list them all there as Core Devs is disingenuous.

Also, to call Roger Ver a neutral investor is just plain false. He is by no means neutral.

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Re: Follow the Stream (of money)

Sat Oct 01, 2016 1:56 am

Not everyone who works at Blockstream is a Core Dev. To list them all there as Core Devs is disingenuous.

Also, to call Roger Ver a neutral investor is just plain false. He is by no means neutral.
Actually the "core devs" in BS should be relabelled co-founders, you are correct. Most in the list are core devs (as in they commit to the repo) though.

Roger is neutral the same way the others marked neutral are. IE they only want Bitcoin to appreciate in price (as evidenced by the fact that they diversified their investments to many companies in the industry). The "neutrality" the document refers to real world political neutrality. If you want to profit from the honest growth of a new industry the best strategy is to invest diversely across many companies in the space. If you want to exert political influence and shape the industry yourself you pick a central player in the space and you put all your investments in them, making them dominant.

If you want to interpret "neutrality" in terms of block size debate, then yes, he is not neutral.
In the same way, he is not neutral in that he wants to overthrow the current corrupt fiat system. And similarly the Orange and Red colored influences want to preserve the current system at all costs.

djc
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Follow the Stream (of money)

Sat Oct 01, 2016 2:16 am

Wow what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!

Kind of makes me think that all Bitcoin core protocol development should be funded only by donations, anonymous or overt.

1truth
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Re: Follow the Stream (of money)

Sat Oct 01, 2016 3:55 am

Seeing as how redditors are making a big stink about r/btc censorship of taint analysis of btc funds here
https://ceddit.com/r/btc/comments/559mi ... om_kraken/

Let's see how long it takes for the r/bitcoin mods to remove this 'taint analysis' post hahahaha

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/commen ... oin_space/

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jamie.redman1
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Re: Follow the Stream (of money)

Sat Oct 01, 2016 6:58 pm

Isn't Andreessen Horowitz also an OpenBazaar investor? This map just shows them backing Coinbase. They also backed 21inc. AH is behind a lot more than this map depicts. Good graphic though, It is interesting.

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Re: Follow the Stream (of money)

Sat Oct 01, 2016 7:04 pm

Isn't Andreessen Horowitz also an OpenBazaar investor? This map just shows them backing Coinbase. They also backed 21inc. AH is behind a lot more than this map depicts. Good graphic though, It is interesting.
It paints a beautiful picture :) :) :)
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Re: Follow the Stream (of money)

Sun Oct 02, 2016 2:26 am

Larry Summers, in the DCG board ( http://dcg.co/who-we-are/ ) is a Blockchain good, Bitcoin bad kind of guy. Why is he pumping so much money into BlockStream and Coindesk ?

http://www.coindesk.com/larry-summers-u ... t-bitcoin/

The stream of money is indeed very informative.

1truth
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Re: Follow the Stream (of money)

Sun Oct 02, 2016 11:53 am

I added the other connections to "Blockchainers" and Federal Reserve Board through DCG.
This seems like small blockers (or 2nd layer scaling) folks are ones that would benefit from blockchains. Which essentially means this is a fight between those who want Bitcoin as a technology to upgrade the current monetary system, vs ones who want Bitcoin to replace the current monetary system.

In this light, isn't lightning just a bank account layer on top of Bitcoin? I wouldn't surprise me why current banking interests would be pro-lightning and pro-sidechains/private blockchains.

Follow the Money.png

1truth
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Re: Follow the Stream (of money)

Sun Oct 02, 2016 11:58 am

Isn't Andreessen Horowitz also an OpenBazaar investor? This map just shows them backing Coinbase. They also backed 21inc. AH is behind a lot more than this map depicts. Good graphic though, It is interesting.
added

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jamie.redman1
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Re: Follow the Stream (of money)

Sun Oct 02, 2016 6:18 pm

Isn't Andreessen Horowitz also an OpenBazaar investor? This map just shows them backing Coinbase. They also backed 21inc. AH is behind a lot more than this map depicts. Good graphic though, It is interesting.
added

Good stuff. Excellent work.


1truth
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Re: Follow the Stream (of money)

Mon Oct 03, 2016 6:19 am

Good to know that others have been keeping tabs on Blockstream as well! Surprised to see how many more connections are in there.
Is this really Private Blockchains and FiatCoins vs Bitcoin in the race to be the dominant global money of international commerce?

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Re: Follow the Stream (of money)

Mon Oct 03, 2016 6:52 pm

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Diogenes
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Re: Follow the Stream (of money)

Tue Oct 04, 2016 11:43 pm

What is the connection between Theymos and Blockstream?

Theymos has hired an unknown developer firm, Slickage Studios, to build out a new forum software. Their monthly fee is $100,000 (https://archive.is/npFQF), for 4 full time developers. That's $25,000 USD per month, per developer. That would be a lot to ask for even the best developers in the world, but I should point out that Slickage is a group of four college kids at the University of Honolulu.

Information on Slickage is scarce. Their website is just a landing page. They have no portfolio. Their twitter is scarce. I was only able to easily confirm two employees:

1. James Wang, CEO (github:wangbus)
2. Julie Sakuda, CTO

Theymos claims he has hired "four highly skilled developers" (link)(https://archive.is/K3nFq). But attempting to find any info on them is difficult indeed. In that reddit thread:
Let's take a look at the guys behind Slickage. I found them through the github page.
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/anthony-kinsey/55/141/17a (https://archive.is/P8cVg) - This guy's only credentials are a bachelor's degree and a consultant position at "eWorldES," a Honolulu-based "enterprise solutions" firm that boasts such prestigious clients as The Honolulu Advertiser and Catholic Charities Honolulu. Remember guys, this guy gets paid $300k a year.
https://github.com/FFAxKenny (https://archive.is/tCRxZ) This guy, who is currently earning his bachelors degree at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His personal website makes no mention of Slickage anywhere. I'm sure he writes great code for $300k a year, but I wonder why one of his most popular github repositories is of a Java implementation of the game Hangman.
Next up, we have "SomeoneWeird" https://github.com/SomeoneWeird (https://archive.is/dnueS) He seems to have a bit more experience and more followers on Twitter, but still, no mention of Slickage anywhere.
The last guy, "WangBus" https://github.com/wangbus (https://archive.is/D3tEV) actually does mention Slickage on his page, but nothing stands out to me to indicate that this guy is somehow a top-coder. Also lives in Manoa, Hawaii.
Further down in that thread (https://archive.is/wr7vI):
Slickage was recommended by Warren Togami, who has himself done important technical work for the forum and Bitcoin Core. I trust him. After talking to James, I was satisfied that Slickage would be able to do the job. There are many software development firms. I probably could have found one that's cheaper and better. But I don't have time to research this (I'm a full-time college student), I don't really know how to determine whether one firm is better than another anyway, and few trustworthy people were willing and/or able to help me find one. So I picked the first firm I found that was capable of doing the job well (after several years of looking).
While looking through some of Slickage's code on github, I found this: https://github.com/slickage/baron/blob/ ... travis.yml (https://archive.is/uN0mj)
A Google search of Warren@slickage.com reveals that this person is Warren Togami. He has been using the warren@slickage.com email address at least since 2014 on various Linux mailing lists.

A Blockstream blog post (http://imgur.com/BWdjdlk) dated May 27th, 2015, announces the hiring of Warren Togami as Technical Project Manager.

According to Warren's github page (https://github.com/wtogami), he has been making contributions to ElementsProject since May 2013, and Slickage since March 2014. I also note that as of September 2016, Warren is still contributing to Slickage projects on Github, which would seem to indicate that he is still involved with them despite his other employment at Blockstream.

Warren was also on the planning committees of both ScalingBitcoin Montreal and ScalingBitcoin HongKong.

Will either Theymos, Warren, or Blockstream clarify the nature of the relationship that clearly exists here?

1truth
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Re: Follow the Stream (of money)

Thu Oct 06, 2016 8:58 am

What is the connection between Theymos and Blockstream?

Theymos has hired an unknown developer firm, Slickage Studios, to build out a new forum software. Their monthly fee is $100,000 (https://archive.is/npFQF), for 4 full time developers. That's $25,000 USD per month, per developer. That would be a lot to ask for even the best developers in the world, but I should point out that Slickage is a group of four college kids at the University of Honolulu.

...snip...

Will either Theymos, Warren, or Blockstream clarify the nature of the relationship that clearly exists here?
Well, I don't know, but if I wanted a way to embezzle the money that was donated to Bitcoin.org, then laundering it through private contracts with Slickage --> Blockstream --> [future contract or sidechain token payouts that pay back to Theymos] would be a way of doing this.

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Re: Follow the Stream (of money)

Sat Oct 22, 2016 5:46 am

Just linking this thread ( https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5 ... _board_of/ ) and this post for posterity:
Don't forget, Glenn Hutchins is on the board of DCG. (http://archive.is/6BLgo) The wikipedia entry about him shows that he was a President Bill Clinton economic advisor. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Hutchins). From wikipedia:
"Hutchins serves as chairman of Silver Lake portfolio companies SunGard and as a member of the board of NASDAQ OMX Group. He has previously served as the chairman of Instinet, prior to Silver Lake's exit from that company. Additionally, he has served on the board of such Silver Lake portfolio companies as TD Ameritrade, Seagate Technology, MCI, Inc., Gartner and Sabre Holdings.
Hutchins sits on the board of The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he was reelected as a Class B director for a three-year term ending December 31, 2018.[3] Vice Chairman of the Brookings Institution.[4] A member of the Council on Foreign Relations.[5] Partial owner of the Boston Celtics.[6] "
Here's an old Bloomberg article on Glenn:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... -alchemist (http://archive.is/qhQFW)

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Diogenes
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Re: Follow the Stream (of money)

Sun Oct 30, 2016 4:38 am

Posting for posterity: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5 ... _with_the/
Archive link: http://archive.is/ust2J

This post further delves into the multitude of high-profile ties between the US Government, Bitfury, and DCG.

iFixBTCmemoryIssues
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Re: Follow the Stream (of money)

Mon Oct 31, 2016 6:36 pm

Posting for posterity: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5 ... _with_the/
Archive link: http://archive.is/ust2J

This post further delves into the multitude of high-profile ties between the US Government, Bitfury, and DCG.
Thanks for the update!

Toxic organizations hi-jacked Bitcoin Core.
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Re: Follow the Stream (of money)

Mon Sep 16, 2019 12:29 pm

anonymous or overt. :o
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