"as someone who initially fell for blockstream's bullshit I can tell you that it was something of a clinic on how centralization has won in the past. its a weird fact that most efforts to decentralize or reform
something often rely on one trusted party to defeat a network of formerly trusted parties. in the absence of such a figure or organization, vertically integrated legacy power does what
it did here. athenian democracy still needed pericles, solon, cleisthenes in order to become what it was, and even then it barely lasted two decades. the civil rights movement had MLK
and also the black church. otherwise it is very easy to disrupt an anarchist movement, as anyone who has ever been part of one can tell you. the cops can just pay a drunk in booze to
come yell during your meetings and then get right wing press - or opportunist/gentrified left press - to call you hypocrites when you ban him or switch to closed meetings. its a very
the one thing you can do as a decentralized swarm is raise holy guerrilla hell if you want, slow things down, fuck up communications and transport, put transaction costs
through the roof, which, ironically, was the effect of what blockstream did anyway. crypto is amazing not least for how it makes all these ancient combats totally concrete."