This is the first video I've seen of Gregory Maxwell. This adds some confirmation for me of my upthread speculation about Greg seeing himself as critic and the smartest person in the room. He specifically states in this video that his role is more as a reviewer than a doer (even his stated goal is maximum impact with the least coding...which is a desirable goal but only if it is not the only one), right after admitting that he was wrong in 2004 about decentralized consensus being impossible. The audacity. Socrates taught us that recognizing that we are not omniscient is a primary attribute of cognition.

(Edit: in the "Selection Cryptography" portion of the video, he elaborates on why his role is appropriate — "Pragmatic has its place, but beware against biasing against competence")

No doubt this is a very smart guy with powerful crypto+math domain knowledge who can add considerable analysis and even new ideas. You'd definitely want him on your team (I would) if he can contain himself to a non-leadership role. But hand him the keys and you are likely to go too far down dead-end paths—e.g. CoinJoin—because my impression of him so far (limited interaction) is he is more of a narrow space thinker who doesn't pay as much attention to what is going on in the kitchen when he is in the basement (unless if he a lead on a very narrow space, orthogonally contained project domain such as an audio codec). And this is precisely what I told him the very first time he spanked me in public in these forums; I warned him that I am more of a pragmatic generalist and that we tend to paradigm shift around people like him (which is precisely what I am hoping to do accomplish this year). The first exposure I had to Greg was when I was very impressed by his forum post containing analysis of a proposed proof-of-work hash for something bytemaster was proposing (I forget the details).

I am taking a deeper look at Blockstream and side chains today for the first time. I will report back my findings shortly.

P.S. I am only 10 minutes into the linked video and it is particularly poignant so far. I highly recommend it. So far it appears to be making the case for Monero. It admits Tor is weak against the State, which is a concept I was promulgating since 2013 and was initially resisted (afair by Greg and many others). Good to see that my work in the forum in 2013 finally was accepted. I will say as AnonyMint, I was pushing hard for greater in anonymity starting in 2013 with some posts I made in the anoncoin thread.

The anti-"Eclipse" (Sybil attack mitigation) slide at the 11:45 minute mark is a very important point. An inherent weakness in PoW is the simultaneity requirement which makes network topology so critical (think orphan rates, selfish mining attacks, etc) and which is also difficult to anneal because of the self-referential relativity of the paradigm. This is one of the main fundamental flaws I want to address in crypto currency. I had referred to this recently as "anti-aliasing". Ironically where Greg says Satoshi's solution to decentralized consensus achieved something "not quite as strong" as that which he thought he had proved was impossible, the same applies to my solution to centralized consensus which implicitly resists centralization and scales to micropayment volume.

Another interesting point at 21 minutes, that multisig negatively impacts decentralization and scaling. This is another fundamental aspect my solution fixes. Schnorr as a potential solution to this problem for Bitcoin lacks optional accountability (or loses some of the scaling and decentralization advantages with Greg's TREE scheme) and has a simultaneity issue vaguely analogously related to the problem with CoinJoin.

Regarding Greg's redefinition of Cryptography at the 40+ minute mark, he is on the right track but I fundamentally disagree with his definition because it presumes we could both exist and information could be entirely free, i.e. it is vacuous because it presumes mutually incongruent assumptions. The generative essence is that the entropy of the universe is trending to maximum (i.e. not infinity) according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics (refer to the upthread philosophical discussion about existence and theoretic physics). I would instead define, "Cryptography is the art of structuring information such that hidden entropy doesn't collapse to 0 over known domains in time and computability".

If i remember correctly Hearn said on btc dev mailing list that in curr xt version user agent string is screwed up

edit: add source http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/34155603/

Surprisingly I was able to pick my node off that list accidentally just by city and isp... Had to check my ip but sure enough it was me - and it's showing me as satoshi client even though I'm running XT.

bad smell all over xt ... note it is not even a faithful branch fork of the main bitcoin repo look https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt at the main link, if it was fork it would have a link beneath it to the git repo it was forked from. So what? you might ask, software forking with git trackinng is subtle ... what this means is there is no way to easily know what has and hasn't been left out of XT that was in Core ... why do that? Git is a system of hashing every commit so you can easily verify every commit back to the original source dump and know it hasn't been messed with, exactly like a block hash chain ... XT has branched in such a way you will never really easily know how it is different from Core, except for, yes you guessed it, "just trust us".

On the front page you can tell things have been changed that have nothing to do with "only 3 major differences" there is a file called "pkg.m4"https://github.com/bitcoinxt/bitcoinxt/blob/0.10.2A/pkg.m4 that was removed from Core because of erroneous behaviour that made every system it was built on to default to using it instead of the system pkg.m4 ... why put broken behaviour back in? Maybe some bad coding reasons but way too much fishy shit right on the front page of XT to trust in the slightest. Removed files put back in, and not a correct, verifiable fork of Core, it looks dodgy as all heck. If it was just some anonymous guy on the internet I would expect coins to go missing immediately if you ran this code.

Meanwhile...

https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd/pull/430

https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd/commit/58f29ad939c967e03838c1cc7e354ca6e6ed452b

No one is suggesting massive jackhammer blocks to put every coffee cup transaction on the planet into the blockchain.

Yes there is a balance between everything on the blockchain and something smarter.

But something smarter still requires much larger than 1MB blocks, and 20MB blocks is in no manner a dumb jackhammer that kicks people off the network. I have a crappy home network and will still be able to function fine with 20MB blocks.

Something smarter is also not available today. Options that do not exist and are ready today are not solutions to be discussed. 20MB blocks provides breathing room to find a smart balance. That balance BTW will very likely settle on even larger blocks.

Not creating that breathing room starves Bitcoin today of usage, usage that it needs to constantly grow.

i smell Monero all over him.

that's good that California is winning:

https://coincenter.org/2015/06/our-thoughts-on-the-bitlicense-california-is-winning/

You still haven't answered my bolded question below.

I have reviewed the pegged side-chains idea at Blockstream. The idea is BTC value can be moved to orthogonal blockchains. Assuming these "pegged coins" remain fungible (which is dubious and probably an incorrect assumption[1]), then in theory the shared-in-common unit-of-account network effects are not hindered, yet the network effects due to interoperability is lost because competing chains are not required to interopt, i.e. spending from one chain to another might require a trip back through the Bitcoin blockchain which defeats the scalability due to constricting the Bitcoin blocksize.

Pegged side-chains are a hack that move the same problems that need to be fixed in the main blockchain to the side-chain, but the fundamental problem remains. Worse they destroy interoperability and probably create a huge mess of fungibility.

Bottom line is that Bitcoin is an overly complex, highly flawed mess that can not be fixed. There is only one outcome which will be accepted by the masses, which is the one where they are insured and protected by the State, i.e. Coinbase, Paypal, Circle (CPC). Whether this is achieved with huge blocks (much greater than 20 MB eventually) and centralized Bitcoin mining, or CPC interoption on their proprietary "side-chains" is irrelevant. It doesn't matter which choice is made now, the effectual outcome on the masses will be the same.

[1] For example someone creates a side-chain with anonymity, so then these coins on the Bitcoin blockchain become tainted and subject to blacklisting.