[ANN] POS is Fork Wars 2.0This is a part of an organized, large-scale social, economic, and political attack being built against Bitcoin. The overarching goal:
Make Bitcoin go POS.Since Bitcoin survived the Fork Wars, this is the next iteration of an attempt to usurp Bitcoin. To corrupt it. To turn it into a tame market-circus animal in the service of big banks and VCs.
Some Bitcoiners (
ahem, Jay) are too complacent about this. They underestimate the threat, and overestimate Bitcoin’s robustness against such threats. They forget that Bitcoin only won the Fork Wars because the Bitcoin community fought tooth and nail against a hostile takeover by liars and thieves. Not because of “King Daddy” bravado.
Others are pessimistic. I have spoken privately to people who have already given up: “POS will take over everything.” I have made to them the same argument: “What if we had said the same about Bcash?”
This is an “all hands on-deck” moment.
On a personal note, this is why I restarted posting a few days ago with what was supposed to be a throwaway account.
Between May 12 and May 29, I had some nightmare experiences with altcoins that showed me just how bad POS is—no really,
it’s worse than you think. However bad you think it is,
it is worse! POS means centralization and total corruption, period. My case against POS is far beyond the scope of this post. Rest assured that I am not exaggerating, and I can make the case point by point.
I don’t idealize POW. I do recognize that it is the best solution yet invented to the problem to which Satoshi applied it. Criticizing POW to pump POS is a logical fallacy: POS doesn’t actually solve the same problem, and it creates new problems. To the most corrupt proponents of POS, that’s a feature, not a bug. But most POS believers are innocently naïve about this: Most people lack the requisite technical knowledge for a rigorous understanding of what POW achieves, and why POS fails to achieve it. Until recently, I myself had only a moderate distaste for POS; I have invested in POS coins, considering it a minor flaw to be weighed against other factors. The corruption of POS is subtle and pernicious.
In the same time period, I came across something that I had missed while I was busy struggling not to get wrecked on margin:
The jackals are circling.*And one of my longtime favorite altcoins, a POW coin, announced that its dev team is actively working on a switch to POS!
POS has been growing like a cancer in the crypto ecosystem. I see it, because
I am not living in a Bitcoin echo-chamber. And I see the next step, because
I think strategically. When I put on my Evil Hat(TM), I ask myself,
How would I tame Bitcoin? The answer: Isolate Bitcoin as the only major POW coin, then make mass-propaganda that eventually places Bitcoin in the position of either switching to POS, or losing users to POS coins—
just as Solana’s founder has explicitly proclaimed on CNBC. Add in legal and regulatory attacks on POW—the threat is of a magnitude that Bitcoin has never yet encountered.
It is irrelevant to me whether Bitcoin switches to POS, or Bitcoin is economically replaced by POS coins. A POS “Bitcoin” would not be Bitcoin: It would be a tamed, denatured,
corrupted fake-Bitcoin that serves Goldman Sachs, FTX, and VCs running P&D on crypto-Twitter, all at
my expense. Its economics would become
dishonest, because POS is an economic shell game—and it would be effectually centralized, under a thin veneer of fake “decentralization”.
Seeing the writing on the wall, I came home to the Bitcoin Forum
** and tried to settle in, let people get to know me a bit—then prepare here for my next step, a carefully planned multi-prong strategy I have in mind for
all-out, all-fronts defense against the POSification of all “crypto”. It’s a shame that some low-grade trolls wish to deter positive community contributions.
As I remarked before, they do not care about Bitcoin.Maybe this forum has degenerated into utter uselessness. We’ll see.
Disclosures:If Bitcoin ever goes POS, I will dump BTC. I don’t know to what. There is no alternative, no backup plan. I don’t know what the hell I will do. This is a fight to the finish—all-in, no compromises.
I have no past or present economic interest or investment in POW. I never did mining; my involvement in Bitcoin and in some POW altcoins has only been in other ways. Maybe I will get into mining in the future. If so, that will be motivated primarily by the principle of supporting POW decentralization—not primarily motivated by money, other than “I must do break-even or better here.” A high-risk, effort-intensive, hypercompetitive business with high upfront capital investment and razor-thin operating margins is not exactly what I personally enjoy doing. Some people love it—I’m glad they do!
Footnotes:* That’s a double blow to me, because I have been excited about Solana’s technology. The implementation is a dumpster fire compared to Bitcoin Core; but it has some interesting ideas, and much potential.
I’m not criticizing it to please the WO crowd. To the contrary. In April, I spent weeks avidly studying Solana’s rusty source code—foremost trying to learn enough so that I could do something to make money in their ecosystem, pay off my margin debt, and save my BTC.
I like their ideas on a crypto-nerd “wow, cool” level, and I enjoy coding for their runtime. But I am disappointed by the code quality and, in practice, the absurd unreliability. When my standards for the quality of financial software engineering are set by Bitcoin Core, it spoils everything else.
I was planning that once I stabilize myself financially, I wanted to pitch in, contribute to Solana, help to improve it.
I have fresh ideas for mitigating the account lock contention issues in the TPU; lock contention is the primary cause of Solana’s “degraded performance” under high load. Solana devs have been struggling with this for months, to no avail; check their GH issues. It’s a hard problem, but not intractable. Fix lock contention, close a few more DOS vectors, do some network optimization, improve code quality, tighten up the security of the development process, and Solana will be awesome!
Any Solana dev who reads this will understand what I just said. Any Solana dev who reads this will know that I am an earnest, competent potential contributor. Not a WO Solana-hater.
But now, I am
furious at Solana. Solana’s founder should have considered that if he attacks Bitcoin, then instead of Bitcoin losing users, Solana loses people like me. And I’d wager I am not alone in that. There must be not a few developers who may be attracted to Solana’s technology, but who will be outraged and disgusted by what its founder said about Bitcoin.
** I obviously have long experience with
many accounts on this forum.
Not only one or two. I will neither acknowledge the accounts that are mine, nor deny wrong guesses; why should I?
This is a privacy forum, founded by a pseudonymous Tor user.
The administration explicitly allows, and sometimes encourages the use of alt accounts. I have never done anything wrong. I have never had any accounts banned; I can freely wake any of them, anytime I want. I have never abused multiple identities for fraudulent purposes. I have never bought or sold accounts; I am strongly opposed to account sales, even though it is technically allowed by the forum rules. And I have never sock-puppetted; those who accuse me of “sock-puppetting” do not know what the term means.
My identities and pseudonyms are nobody’s business but my own.
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