True, that's a big disadvantage for them. They have no idea who they sued. According to court papers, they hired private investigators to find out my identity. As expected those investigators failed to find anything. Going into a lawsuit completely blind is beyond stupid, especially when your claim is very weak.

Another disadvantage for them is the publicity this case is attracting. If he wins this case, he is legally recognized as Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin. He's asserting he has "database rights" to the Bitcoin ledger. He asserts he owns the "Bitcoin" name. He'll inevitably claim the Satoshi coins. This is why he fights so hard to get a court to declare him as Satoshi, so he can begin enforcing these claims against exchanges, wallets, developers, etc. Obviously he will lose, but I suppose he's deluded himself and his followers into believing this is a viable strategy to take BSV to the moon. But there are just too many eyes on this, and too much money in this space to allow someone like him to even have the chance to legally assume the Satoshi moniker and associated intellectual property. The best intellectual property law firm in the UK is actively working on this whitepaper issue. He is outgunned legally.

Someone sent me this thread. Just wanted to say thanks for making it.

Lawyers like his who are willing to go along (and seem to enjoy) with filing completely made up cases are some of the biggest scumbags IMO. There is nothing real to litigate, because everything is made up. There isn't even a hint of truth behind any of it. They're just attempting to use the legal system as a tool to dox people, and financially ruin them. I don't know what's going to happen with my case, but no doubt he will appeal and file more cases against me for more made up nonsense. How do you deal with this crap, when someone can just make up a story, and sue you? And you have to spend money and years of your life fighting against it?

These are quite dangerous and desperate people, so I'm still exploring ways I can fight this while keeping my anonymity. It's looking like it may actually be possible, but we'll have to see about that. I'm surprised he hasn't attracted the attention of law enforcement yet, especially after trying to seize £3B worth of Bitcoin with a totally made up story.

Hopefully it won't be too long until he's thrown in jail.

This whole CSW stuff has become quite annoying now, ever since his grand entrance all over mainstream media, and Gavin's subsequent removal from Core (which whipped up big blockers even more and contributed to the division -- if not for CSW, Gavin could have been removed quietly), he's been stirring up endless drama and being a thorn on the side of Bitcoin. For a while we got rid of him, and he fucked off into Bitcoin Cash, where he caused even more drama, hash wars, etc. It's not enough that now he has his own new SV coin, and a lot of brainwashed followers, he's going ever further with these endless legal disputes with various people.

This story isn't going to well. His own issues, combined with the people who are convinced he's Satoshi and put a lot of money into SV, and Calvin's willingness to just throw millions of dollars into this money pit of litigation, it's going to all come crashing down with many people bankrupted and ruined along the way. If he really does go after people contributing to open source Bitcoin projects, I think big money and well connected folks are going to step in and nudge the relevant government agencies to start investigating him, guys like jack, saylor, etc.

People don't get how big Bitcoin has become, there's huge financial institutions stepping in, lots of billionaires invested, and lots of quiet Bitcoiners in various branches of government, heck, I was surprised to see Anthony Scaramucci's firm start hosting the whitepaper. Even Fidelity essentially told him to fuck off and started hosting the whitepaper. He got a taste of the type of blowback he might get, but that's nothing compared to the war chest of money and influence that will come crashing down on him if he makes good on his legal threats. He really also has to keep in mind that it doesn't cost that much to 51% attack BSV, and if he keeps doing this shit, I can see SV's chain getting fucked with too.

Let's see if his law firm SCA ONTIER distance themselves from him, perhaps realizing they risk exposing their business to a lot of negative press here.

OK.


What's so crazy about an inventor of a piece of technology not fully understand its future implications? There's nothing to suggest Satoshi anticipated these hard fork dramas, and if he did, there was no warning from him, which would have been nice.


I wasn't talking about value, I was talking about attributing the name "Bitcoin" to something. Value is derived from the free market and is systemic as you say, but attribution requires subjective interpretation. Let's assume two chains derived from Bitcoin compete in the free market, with one valued more than the other, you don't determine the "real" Bitcoin from value alone because the market might put a premium on a chain that disagrees with your ideals (e.g. the chain increases the 21M limit).


How can you claim gold is less sound than Bitcoin? Bitcoin has existed for a little over a decade as money. Gold has been used as money for thousands of years. In all that time, gold has never really changed. We need to let more time pass before we can even begin consider claiming Bitcoin is more sound than gold.


I would argue a lot more than "some" of that soundness comes from users running nodes and verifying that everybody is following the rules. But again, we can't say Bitcoin is more sound than fiat, gold or equities because Bitcoin simply hasn't been around long, and we need to let more time pass before we can make such claims.


I didn't say it was an all or nothing decision, you can allocate whatever value you want into Bitcoin. My point has been that there are possible scenarios in the future where you might have to do your own evaluation of whether something actually is Bitcoin or not compared to your specific subjective ideals.


You don't get it. It's not sound money if it can split up in that way, definitely not more sound than gold. You can put all your value in gold and at least be assured that it won't split apart into two competing forms of money. You won't ever need to allocate between two different forms of gold and watch them compete with each other in the free market. Your casual dismissal of Bitcoin breaking into two with a "so fucking what?" shows that you don't really understand why Bitcoin has value in the first place.


They are ahead in acknowledging the politics more openly.


Bitcoin extends political disagreements in the community into the money. How hard is that to understand? I'm not exaggerating anything. Go look at UASF, where a small minority of users got together in a movement and pressured Bitcoin miners to activate Segwit with the threat that they would reject their blocks otherwise. Here, the reasonable technical solution to preserve value was to just wait it out. But these users were willing to fork themselves off the Bitcoin network if they didn't get their Segwit activated right now. You won't find this level of naked populism and politics in any other form of money. Can you imagine if a minority of Americans threatened to use their own spinoff version of the U.S. dollar unless the treasury made certain economic concessions to them?


It's not fantasy, I'm just telling you the realities of Bitcoin that most people have figured out already but you haven't.


I didn't say Bitcoin wasn't a success, but it's a success because of continued change and improvement.


Segwit2x burned out a lot of people, it was stressful and caused massive amounts of harm and distrust among members of the community. We can't go through that each and every time a faction of the community wants to change Bitcoin in some way.

I also want you to pay attention to your language, because the language we use reveals a lot, you say "And, also not having to resort to something less than overwhelming consensus to get segwit passed", does that not almost sound like a legislative battle, something that would be said about a political process? Replace the word "segwit" with "obamacare" and it sounds like a sentence you would hear to describe something that happened in congress.

You can't just bury your head in the sand and completely ignore how political this stuff is. You do yourself a disservice, presumably you have a lot of money tied up in Bitcoin, just like most of us. So you should really know what you're getting involved with here.


I'm fine mate.


I've never had a problem with Segwit, and it's funny how you immediately jumped to that conclusion. You likely assumed that because we disagree on some stuff today, we must also also disagree on Segwit (another thing that got heavily politicized).

Agreed, gold is ideal if you want to escape the problem of subjective human beings, and assuming you can store it yourself securely for many years.

People react one of two ways to this problem in Bitcoin, they either fall into an extreme "no hard fork" position where they believe no hard fork change in Bitcoin is ever justified, or they fall into what can be best described as advocating for some vague "social defense" of Bitcoin should anyone attempt to redefine it. The problem is these attacks don't come from an external source, they come from other Bitcoiners disagreeing with each other. Some of the people that enjoyed reading nullius' post and agreed with it might have a future disagreement with each other, at which point they won't see themselves as allies but as enemies and each person will believe he's defending Bitcoin. Furthermore a soft fork can change Bitcoin just as much as a hard fork can, and many Bitcoiners might reject a chain if it introduced certain soft fork changes (e.g. a tax on miners to fund development can be implemented as a soft fork).

The only way we can reasonably deal with this is by never changing. No soft forks. No hard forks. No consensus change ever again. And let the protocol sit and calcify so nobody could ever change it. That all but guarantees Bitcoin will become a failure though, and it's impossible. Technology needs to keep up with the times and continue to be maintained and improved on so bugs and security issues get resolved. But each time Bitcoin undergoes a change, we risk it turning into a political quagmire and exposing the cracks hidden in the system. We all remember the dirty drama with Segwit and UASF.

The legacy of the block size debate is it exposed the politics behind how Bitcoin actually works. I remember when I got into Bitcoin, just like everybody else, the first thing I admired was how this system was designed without anybody in control. Nobody could freeze your transactions, nobody could charge you back, there was no central authority. Bitcoin doesn't care whether you're a murderer, saint, North Korean dictator, or a 12 year old. Bitcoin just is, it works for everybody without passing judgement. When you start out, it's really easy to see Bitcoin as being something that exists in objective reality, just like every other piece of software, and even physical gold. The problem though is that this isn't true; Bitcoin is subjective money. Satoshi didn't fully understand the implications of his invention, and that's not a dig at him either because most inventors don't.

Let's take physical gold as an example. Gold exists in objective reality, whether you ascribe value to gold or not is up to you, but were somebody to give you physical gold and you had the tools to verify the purity of it, you can't deny the reality that it is gold. Gold is the most objective form of money, but even fiat money is quite objective. With fiat money, the value and trust comes from government, this leaves less room for interpretation and subjectivity than you might think. Even though Donald Trump might be president, if you were to take the angriest liberal alive, somebody who doesn't even believe in the legitimacy of his presidency and government, even he won't refuse dollars because "those dollars were printed by Trump, his government is illegitimate, therefore those aren't real dollars, sorry". Even if this liberal has lost trust in the legitimacy of the head of the executive branch of his government (the branch that prints money), the power of fiat money is so strong that it blocks him from following his beliefs down to their logical conclusion, he still holds on to the collective delusion of the dollar, to do otherwise wouldn't even enter his mind.

For whatever reason, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general behave more subjectively. Perhaps it's because these systems are individualistic; you verify the blockchain yourself, you don't trust anybody else to do it for you, why would you? Bitcoin exists as an idea in your head, each Bitcoin user is different with respect to changes they would accept or reject. Almost all Bitcoiners would reject the 21 million limit being increased; but there exist gray areas like block size, where the tolerance and threshold for change is really subjective and varies wildly from user to user. I'd probably be OK with the block size being doubled. You might not be. You might want it reduced. Let's hypothesize there was a change that split the community cleanly in half: for whatever reason, one half of the community accepted the change, the other half rejected. This then led to a blockchain fork, with equal amounts of hash power, would anybody be able to objectively say which fork was the real Bitcoin?

Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV are years ahead of us with some of these issues, rather than ignore the politics present in these systems, as Bitcoin is doing, they seem to be fully embracing it. Economically this will damage them short term, but by figuring this stuff out, they are learning some important lessons. With the BSV fork, we saw that it's possible for a divergent chain to be valued more than it's competing origin chain, even if it's only temporary. Bitcoiners feel a natural disgust when they look at what's going on in these communities, especially when they hear about Bitcoin Cash developers taxing miners and stuff like that, but the disgust they feel is coming from a place of insecurity, because these divergent Bitcoin spin-offs are exposing what was always hidden under the surface of Bitcoin too. It's not something that can be articulated well, but after the block size debate it was something that could be felt; a feeling that Bitcoin was a lot more subjective and therefore more vulnerable than we'd hoped.

Bitcoin is not apolitical money, it's hyperpoliticized money. Throughout history, when people in communities disagreed with each other, they simply killed each other until a winner emerged. This proved to be a less than ideal way to resolve disputes, so over time more democratic ways of deciding things emerged. Whether through violence or through voting, politics is played in a very narrowly defined battlefield and everybody intuitively understands that it doesn't go beyond its scope. These cryptocurrency systems bring politics into money itself, in ways that aren't predictable and for which there aren't any parallels in thousands of years of human history. Imagine a world in which a democrat and republican can't exchange value with one another, without an intermediate neutral form of money, because they disagree on money itself, one is using democrat dollars and the other is using GOP bucks -- both with totally different ideals and visions.

If I were to put you in a time machine and drop you off into the year 2120, and assuming Bitcoin still existed (or something claiming to be it). You would have to spend days researching every split and fork, every upgrade, the history of tradeoffs behind every dispute, etc, to finally settle on which variant of Bitcoin running at that time was the real Bitcoin. People still hate Roger Ver, years after Bitcoin Cash forked off because he's exploiting Bitcoin's biggest flaw, the fact that it can be subjectively redefined; Roger Ver is just the first, if Bitcoin really catches on, over the next few decades Bitcoin will be redefined again and again by some of the most powerful people and entities in the world, and just like those obscure BCH/BSV guys, one day we too might find ourselves on some dark lonely corner of the internet screaming into nothingness about "the real Bitcoin", to a world that doesn't care.

Lauda needs to be permanently banned just to improve the community. Never seen a more horrible person on a forum before.

theymos controls too many resources, it's better to pick somebody else, even though he's obviously very trustworthy.


Smart people can waste decades on things that don't turn out to lead to anything. Academia is filled with scientists and mathematicians who spent a good portion of their life creating new systems and concepts that, with respect to them, can be described as a waste of time and a net negative for the world, because that person could have been pursuing better ideas with their time. I personally know a physicist who regrets spending years involved in string theory research. You would be surprised at how common it is for smart and highly technical people to fall into toiling away at flawed projects.

Lightning has a lot of flaws. How do you train users that to spend money, they need to put it in a channel first? OK. Maybe the wallet can automatically open channels. How do you explain that some of the users money is gone because transaction fees spiked on Bitcoin, and more satoshis had to be reserved for when the channel needs to be closed? OK. I guess you can put a disclaimer, or alert. How do you explain watchtowers? How about backups? The user probably expects to receive arbitrary amounts of value, but you're going to need to tell them to get some inbound capacity if they want to receive anything substantial. At some point, Lightning Labs will choose to abstract all this away, but that's going to pressure them to centralize (a centralized directory of liquidity providers, watchtowers, well connected nodes, etc).

Blockstream is a hostile actor in the space. They don't want Bitcoin to succeed. There are some good people working there, but those few good apples mostly collect their salary and focus their time on Bitcoin Core and cryptographic research, they tend to distance themselves from Blockstream's damaging products. Have you ever seen Pieter Wuille shilling Liquid? Nope. It's unclear to me how they ever plan on making money, but they will no doubt abuse their position of influence in the community for their own business interests at some point. They already attempted to market Liquid as "trustless", which lead to founder Matt Corallo publicly shaming them on Twitter.

The worst thing Blockstream has done: they made a block size increase on Bitcoin absolutely impossible. They whipped up a mob to such an extent that, for the foreseeable decade, we're not going to get any increase because a mass of uneducated morons will oppose it. I don't ever see a hard fork in general as a possibility, which sucks because some nice things could have been fixed with a hard fork, and the "no hard fork" mentality hurts Bitcoin as more and more technical debt will accumulate because of ever messier soft forks. I suspect this is what they want: an ugly system, that is slow and congested, so they can market their sidechains as better alternatives.

Before Blockstream, the general consensus was that hard forks could be done in the future, carefully and far ahead in advance. They ripped that consensus out of the community. Any Bitcoiner who doesn't view Blockstream with some level of suspicion has no intellect; you don't need to call them a fucking conspiracy, but you better raise a bloody eyebrow when there exists a company that benefits from Bitcoin not working.

Bitcoin Cash had no chance of ever getting called "Bitcoin" on major consumer services like Coinbase and wallets and payment rails. The attempts I fought against would have been presented as "Bitcoin" had they succeeded. At best, Bitcoin Cash might have confused and tricked a few people, but it wasn't as bad as the three wave of attacks that I was against. Adam Back supported something called the "Hong Kong agreement", a precursor to the "New York agreement" which Segwit2x was based off. Unfortunately, Adam for a brief moment also bought into the idea that Bitcoin could be changed by deals made between businesses.

There was no need for me to fight against Bitcoin Cash, because it clearly posed no risk to Bitcoin. It helped Bitcoin since big blockers left Bitcoin and focused their efforts on Bitcoin Cash. Some people just believe in scaling on-chain, others with solutions like Lighting, there was always going to be a split. The question was just whether it would happen by Bitcoin tearing itself apart, or by the big blockers just forking off into an altcoin.


For a company's who's motto is "don't trust, verify", all their products require quite a bit of trust. Let's go through and evaluate:

• Blockstream Satellite: A service that broadcasts the Bitcoin blockchain to the entire world with the aim of reducing Bitcoin's dependency on internet access. It isn't hard to see where things fall apart here. First, you can't obviously do an initial sync from a satellite, it just broadcasts the latest blocks. Secondly, if you run the satellite receiver, you are putting all your faith in Blockstream's uplink to give you the right blocks. Should you find yourself in a situation with no internet, and only a satellite, you are blindly putting faith in Blockstream's version of the Bitcoin blockchain. It's even worse than running an SPV node, Blockstream is basically sybil attacking you. At any time they can just choose to stop sending you new blocks and you're shit out of luck.
• Blockstream Green: Claims to be a simple and secure Bitcoin wallet. It isn't simple, nor secure. It uses 2-of-2 multi-sig, between you and Blockstreams' server. All transactions you do require Blockstream's signature. If their server goes down, you can't do any transactions, since they can't sign off on it. All your amounts are co-owned by Blockstream. It's even worse than running an SPV wallet. Because they sign all your transactions, they can also see all your transactions, and your IP addresses, destroying your privacy.
• Blockstream's Liquid sidechain: A federated sidechain that lets you do faster transactions and apparently gives you privacy. Here, users are asked to hand over their BTC to a federation, so that it can become L-BTC, the federation can literally steal all your bitcoins and block any transactions you make. They tried to market it as "trustless", until one of their own co-founders called them out on it: https://twitter.com/TheBlueMatt/status/1060101587584991233.

They present themselves as in support of trustless solutions, but everything they put out there is inevitably worse than the very stuff they used to criticize so much. These were the guys rallying hard against SPV wallets, and now they push a wallet in which you can't even transact without their permission. These were the guys criticizing other projects because their networks were too centralized, now they run a network that will gladly gobble up your BTC, give you some L-BTC, to let you transact faster, all while giving them the power to steal every last satoshi from you, but "Bitcoin Cash is a scam!" right?

Let's assume for a moment that Adam Back owned bitcoin.org, would you character assassinate him for supporting the Hong Kong agreements? Or what about Luke-jr, would you smear him because he pushed UASF very hard which could have split the network? What about Peter Todd, for pushing that shady coin Viacoin? Maybe you would claim Jameson Lopp is a scammer because he once supported Bitcoin XT? Andreas is obviously a scammer too, he says good things about Ethereum and wrote a book about it, ETH is pre-mined garbage, fuck him too right? Can't trust him. theymos must be a scammer too, he said too many good things about Grin, screw him too right?

Some of you really need to chill out. The Blockstream propaganda of "Cobra is evil!" really has you totally duped.

Doesn't sound very neutral to me:

No, you didn't do anything before because you were scared it would have consequences for you (it wouldn't have), or that it would make you look stupid (it would), so you only acted now, which is cute.

My reputation is fine, most people just don't care about these things. Even if it was damaged beyond repair, being liked by random people on the internet isn't something I strive for. Who cares?

Take a look at the words you're using; "comply", "evil", "greater good", and insulting random users because they gave merit to one of my posts, how insecure, immature and ignorant are you? What are you so scared of? It's you that's the villain; screaming at me to comply, making demands, and aggressively smearing projects that have done more good for Bitcoin than you ever will. Shame on you.

It's people like you that make this forum so unwelcoming. By the way, thanks for your negative trust feedback, funny that you only mustered up the courage to do that after I was no longer owner of bitcointalk.org, perhaps you understood negative trusting the owner of the domain of the very site you're using would be comical.

Wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. These forked coins are not Bitcoin's biggest vulnerability, I would actually argue that Bitcoin Cash forking hurt the big blocker movement within Bitcoin pretty badly. Bitcoin Cash basically came out of nowhere, and many big blockers eventually kind of *had* to support it, after all the hard forks they tried in Bitcoin failed. Bitcoin Cash basically removed all the extreme big blockers from the Bitcoin community, it even took Roger Ver a little while to jump on board, but once they all did, it actually made Bitcoin safer as there was no longer a group of big blockers shouting a uniform narrative from within the Bitcoin community. Without Bitcoin Cash, we would have still had these extreme big blockers in the community for a lot longer. The forked coins with "Bitcoin" in the name are mostly harmless. As far as I'm aware, basically every place where you actually can purchase Bitcoin is clear to present BTC as Bitcoin, and everything else as "Bitcoin Cash" or "Bitcoin SV", etc. Users don't ever really get confused, they quickly intuitively understand that Bitcoin is what they really want, and everything else is some kind of derivative.

The real risk to Bitcoin was in the hard fork attacks which were supported by most of the major consumer companies and exchanges and were aimed to takeover Bitcoin completely. A lot of the companies that didn't support it explicitly would have also jumped on board once the hard fork actually won. It was essentially a corporate attempt to takeover Bitcoin, with decision making power shifted from open source developers to a handful of big companies. Had they won, Bitcoin would still get developed and worked on, but ultimately it would have been them guiding the development in ways that favor their interests. Over time the community would have also shifted and been brainwashed to accept the new reality.

Bitcoin.org was one of the most extreme and hostile towards these hard fork attacks: like here https://bitcoin.org/en/posts/denounce-segwit2x, and here, https://bitcoin.org/en/posts/hard-fork-policy. I was fervently against attempts like Bitcoin XT, BU, Segwit2x, etc, anyone who was around at the time will remember how aggressive Bitcoin.org and I were. We removed wallets from companies that supported the hard forks. We removed the exchanges. We notified users with big notices at the top of the site, had I wanted to "backstab" Bitcoin this was my chance, especially when some of these companies and people approached me in private to try to "turn me", but I still was vocally hostile and did everything I could to damage them. So did theymos, and he will back me up on this that all my private communications with him showed me to be someone who above all was concerned with Bitcoin being co-opted and fought as hard as I could to resist it. And yet shamefully, people like you with no knowledge of anything are so quick to present me as a risk or threat.

Their attempts to takeover Bitcoin would probably have had a much higher probability of success had I sided with them. If you're going to convincingly take over Bitcoin maliciously, you need 3 things: the miners so you can claim to have the most secure chain and have a stable blockchain (they had 80% of the hash rate), the consumer facing companies and exchanges so you can present your hard fork as Bitcoin to users (they had a lot of the companies backing them), and key public facing resources of trust like Bitcoin.org, that give you legitimacy and an endless number of incoming users from people searching "Bitcoin" through which you can gradually rebuild a new "Bitcoin community". The fact that they didn't have that hurt them a lot. No matter how much you try to trick users, if the first Bitcoin site started by Satoshi himself, and mentioned in the whitepaper is calling your hard fork a fake, it's really hard to build legitimacy.

The real nightmare scenario is not these coins with Bitcoin in the name damaging trust, but a world in which there are disagreements over the name "Bitcoin" itself. Imagine a world in which a user learns about Bitcoin through Bitcoin.org, then goes on Coinbase and buys "Bitcoin", and then hears on Twitter or Reddit that what they bought was not Bitcoin, and then finds out about this software called Bitcoin Core and a community of people claiming *that* to be the real Bitcoin, and then finds an exchange like Bitstamp and buys something else called "Bitcoin" on there which some people say is the real Bitcoin. Then this user interacts on social media with folks, never knowing which is the real Bitcoin since at that point it would be hard to answer. We got very close to that being our world had me and others not done everything we could to damage these hard fork attempts.

And about your screenshots of the Slack chats: I don't really see anything wrong there to be honest with you. It's funny how Adam Back was so hostile to me back then about me seeing some good things in Bitcoin Cash because I always thought a blockchain that sacrifices some decentralization in order to be able to handle more transactions was kind of necessary, and now he's out there pushing Blockstream's Liquid which is literally a sidechain controlled by companies in which your BTC gets morphed and required to be held in trust by federation partners so you can get the benefit of quicker transactions since blocks are more regular.

More or less the reason people don't trust me is because I said some good things about Bitcoin Cash a while ago, that's all it boils down too. They don't actually have a reason beyond that, and their calls for me to transfer the domain to others are intended to push me out because they fear me. They'd rather have someone in control of bitcoin.org who is easier to manipulate and who bends to groupthink and public pressure more easily. They won't ever talk about how much I've done to fight off many attacks, or when people were pressuring me to hand over the domain to the Bitcoin Foundation because it was more "respectable" and legitimate seeming, and I resisted because the foundation seemed shady (back then very few people realized it).

I handed bitcointalk.org over to theymos because; I trust him and his judgement, and I was not really active on the forum anyway. You can question my trust all you like, but I have been in a position for a long time to screw over you guys if I wanted too, but I didn't. Some users will instinctively understand that and ignore the nonsense you're spouting off, others will get sucked in, but either way I don't really care and I'm going to continue to do my best to help Bitcoin succeed.

Unfortunately you are giving bad advice here. You shouldn't trust a particular domain name to download Bitcoin Core at all, not bitcoin.org, or bitcoincore.org, or Github. You can download Bitcoin Core from just about anywhere safely, so long as you verify the signatures are valid, something I always urge users to do. Don't trust particular domain names, ever.


I question your judgement directing newbies to bitcoincore.org, a plain site with no real information about what Bitcoin actually is. There are plenty of good resources for newbies, bitcoincore.org definitely isn't one of them. Personally I find bitcoin.org the best for newbies, since it's well established, translated into a ton of languages, guides users through a linear process to learn about Bitcoin, has a good wallet picker to point users to the right wallet based on their needs, etc.

It's funny to hint I'm malicious or untrustworthy, despite managing these domains for years without any wrongdoing. I remember when these same people were hinting at me eventually turning bitcoin.org into a Bitcoin Cash site, yet it never happened, but it didn't stop them scaremongering and screaming about it like it was inevitable. Now here people are, hinting at some vague notion of me being untrustworthy, despite me safely and without incident handing the domain over to theymos. I think this is a problem with some people on this forum in general, they just assume everyone is malicious and some scammer, unless said user is in their clique.

The truth is, while you are spinning up nonsense and trying to spook people and smearing bitcoin.org's reputation, we are educating tens of thousands of new users each day. Millions of users learn about Bitcoin with us yearly, we send so much traffic to exchanges and wallets it's ridiculous, all of which translates into expanding the Bitcoin community. When you measure the objective good Bitcoin.org has done for Bitcoin over many years, it becomes really hard to trash it. You can find flaws in the best of people, MLK was a plagiarist, Gandhi was a racist in his youth, Mandela literally blew up civilians, but judgements about people and entities are generally done by subtracting some abstract idea of total good by total bad.

With respect to Greg's comments, I don't really know what he's hinting at either. My interactions with Greg have bounced between courteous and hostile over the years. I'm really confused by his response. I would hazard a guess that he generally doesn't trust me, and that he prefers bitcoin.org be owned by someone he's associated more intimately with.

I just renewed bitcoin.org and bitcointalk.org all the way up to 2029.

This whole thing backfired badly on Ethos Capital. Not only have they caused a PR nightmare for themselves and raised questions around corruption at ICANN, they've also made their intentions so obvious that many .org domains have already renewed up to the maximum limit preemptively, limiting the revenue Ethos can extract in the future.

Always been curious about the power of these registry operators though. Suppose Verisign one day went crazy and suspended Google.com or refused service, can they even do that? Or just simply refused to allow Google to renew the domain and then took it for themselves?

There will be a big push to move away from ICANN eventually, and more towards alternatives to DNS, but if those alternatives end up controlled by a consortium of companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, etc, it'll just mean these companies will own the internet. They already de-platform certain people, imagine if they can make your site completely disappear from DNS and search engines and social media.

A blockchain solution is unlikely to work here either, it would remove trust and centralized points of failure, but would come with the cost of having to know how to secure your keys which most users aren't interested in doing.

The forum doesn't enforce conformity. On social media platforms if you express the right opinions and cater to specific echo chambers, you get followers and build visibility as a reward. You delude yourself into believing you are leading thought, when in reality you are just a slave to the opinions of your followers, who will destroy you without mercy the moment you deviate from allowed thought. On the forum your opinions are always visible to readers. You don't need to have users on the forum following you to see your posts, much to the dismay of everyone if what you post is nonsense. Now internet communities trend more towards self-censoring filter bubbles, with people getting even crazier and intolerant of each other because they've gotten so used to being around like-minded folks that different opinions are especially more offensive and egregious than before.

LN is technically impressive, but its success depends on people seeing Bitcoin as cash, which nobody seems to want to do because Bitcoin is just perceived as a tool for speculative investment. There was a period where if LN was ready and practical, maybe around 2014, momentum could have picked up to have LN succeed in payments largely due to the Bitcoin community at the time being much more supportive of spending Bitcoin and companies being interested and open. But since then the community has become way too greedy to be able to create an actual Bitcoin economy.

You dodged a bullet there.

Happy birthday!

I'm proud to be involved with such a historic and amazing forum, even in some small way. I hope this place continues to thrive and succeed!

Technically "the forum" is many things, not really a domain, or database, or collection of BTC. I would consider the forum to be an entity mostly defined through trust and legitimacy, not that different from a polity. For the most part that trust is placed in theymos, so he's generally seen as the one in charge of the forum.

I guess on a technical level, I do own the bitcointalk.org domain, but I'm not involved in the day to day operation of the forum. Owning the domain doesn't come with any advantages on the forum itself though. I can't really come on here and boss people around, probably the most egregious thing I could do would be to just redirect the site elsewhere. And as others have pointed out, a domain change is not that big of a deal in the long term (though short term it's a mess).

I never really hear any feedback on this arrangement from anyone though, the little feedback I have got so far suggests people appreciate that multiple parties have differing levels of control over the forum. The forum is not my top priority since I focus more on bitcoin.org, so if anyone has the feeling they would prefer theymos being fully responsible for bitcointalk.org, it would be good to at least hear that opinion expressed.

Roger is permanently mentally trapped in the block size wars, he won't ever get out. He has nothing better but to come up with conspiracy theories and talk shit about Bitcoin because that's basically become his sole reason for living at this point. I actually feel quite sorry for him.

Is it just me or has there been way less enthusiasm for Lightning in the past 1 or 2 months?