Coindesk is intimately linked with blockstream, the company that has gone to great lengths to take over the github repository, censor /r/bitcoin, and ultimately keep the block size limit at 1 MB so that they can profit from fees on their own 3rd party chain.
The controversy surrounding BlockStream is fairly well known, but what is the connection between them and Coindesk? I've not been following that side of things.
As far as I can tell, they both share a minor investor, Barry Silbert. And anyone who thinks that means anything hasn’t been paying attention to what went down regarding the New York Agreement, where Blockstream (standing alongside many others) opposed Barry and won.
Which part do you think is a theory? Censorship on /r/Bitcoin is trivial to test, just go there and post something about censorship, criticism of blockstream, the high fees on the main chain due to block size restrictions, etc. See if your comment stays. Don't forget to log out and check that it wasn't silently grey listed.
As I said in another comment: "As far as I can tell, they both share a minor investor, Barry Silbert. And anyone who thinks that means anything hasn’t been paying attention to what went down regarding the New York Agreement, where Blockstream (standing alongside many others) opposed Barry and won."
> the company that has gone to great lengths to take over the github repository,
I have no idea what this is in reference to. The Bitcoin Core repo? The release manager for Bitcoin is employed by MIT DCI. The largest group of contributors is from ChainCode Labs. Of the half-dozen or so people who have commit access (a meaningless metric since no one has unilateral authority and they operate by consensus), only one works for Blockstream, and he has some sort of special contract where he is independent and isolated in his decision making capacity and can leave, with pay, at any time for any reason.
> censor /r/bitcoin,
There is no relationship I know of between r/bitcoin and Blockstream. r/bitcoin seems to like Blockstream, but that's not their fault. r/bitcoin has also had some issues with excessive moderation, but none of the mods there work for the company or are in any way tied to Blockstream afaict.
> and ultimately keep the block size limit at 1 MB so that they can profit from fees on their own 3rd party chain.
Blockstream's supposed scaling solution is Lightning, a peer-to-peer protocol where the users collect fees from each other, which they are developing in an open source basis with multiple compatible implementations and no vendor lock-in. It will probably reduce the fees paid to miners for comparable levels of transactions, but with those fees being collected by users directly. There doesn't appear to be any profit opportunity for Blockstream here except perhaps consulting income in helping people and industries setup and maintain such networks, which has been their "RedHat of Bitcoin" model from the beginning.
