> but that narrative does not hold water.

Right, because your narrative is "righter" than his.

> First off, Gavin, Jeff, Mike Hearn, you know the guys that have spent a lot of time working on Bitcoin since the beginning aren't in the core project, and in the case of Jeff are actively working on the alternative.

With little to no input outside of Jeff and the miners that are funding him. This is the nth (where n > 4) iteration of Bitcoin that Bitmain has funded with the intent of maintaining some degree of control over the reference client. As of yet, he hasn't been successful.

> Trying to draw back some unbroken line of succession to Satoshi Nakamoto whose paper basically completely spells out a big block vision is ridiculous.

I agree, particularly since there's been 100s of contributors to the project. Which makes Blockstreams impact much less valuable than the original comment implied.

> Second of all, the great firewall of china isn't crap, a significant amount of data can pass through it, and actually if the block size gets to be too large this actually damages their ability to effectively process blocks quickly.

That's actually false. Block sizes aren't really an issue for the miners, they are an issue for the nodes. Each miner only needs single full node. What increasing the block size does is make running a full node (which has to store the entire block chain) extremely expensive. The larger the block sizes, the more expensive a full node becomes.

> The miners are not interested in SegWit because it completely changes the economic structure of incentives around mining.

SegWit does nothing of the sort. Lightning Network and Sidechains, which can be built on top of SegWit, certainly reduces off-chain fees. SegWit itself only reduces the fees on witness data, but that's moot for the time being. SegWit will have little impact on fees right now.

> It pulls control into channels and reduces direct fees into some hand wavy future about settlement.

See, this implies you have limited technical knowledge on the subject. That's LN, potentially SC. But that has nothing to do with SegWit.

> It's an attack on their real economic interests, i.e the interests that have driven the entire ecosystem of proof-of-work.

PoW is just the security policy, it's not the ecosystem. The economy is the ecosystem. Miners mine, the economy chooses what they mine.

Long-term, miners need to adapt. Instead of looking at off-chain solutions as a bad thing, they need to consider that they are best suited as a Lightning Node. But that requires a longer vision than the miners have.

No one is EVER going to buy coffee on-chain. No amount of increasing block sizes are going to make instant transactions. It's either off-chain transactions or some other altcoin.

> If we are worries about centralization in China

I don't care about where the centralization occurs, I care about the nature of it. Centralizing mining is bad because it gives them power they shouldn't hold. Centralizing nodes gives governments power over Bitcoin. That is dangerous.

> Both sides are about corporate control of the protocol to a certain extent with a bunch of useful idiots drawn in on the basis of arguments that are tangentially related.

LN is an opensource implementation of something not dissimilar to smart contracts. Calling that control is laughable.