OK... I apologize if a cAPSRANT is troublesome but here comes a small one... I really should get a substack I guess.
So bitcoin's latest civil war has come and gone... a tempest in a teapot right on the heels of the biggest hardware wallet failure in the history of the corn with triple digit millions in dollar value lost to hackers.
And today the "plebs" have been more than decimated. The acolytes to the Bitcoin Priests all saying in shock "but they did everything right". And now they find themselves saying something about how bitcoin has been captured by the banks. Captured by banks/business/governments again, mind you. Always has. Etc.
I know some of us here even feel that risk at times. I have. But Bitcoin has never stopped doing what it was designed to do. There is a concept I remember being talked about in the bitcointalk forums frequently years ago: "Anti Fragility". Though the man who coined that phrase scoffs at the computer science/economic project that is built on that principle, I believe it is as strong as ever, and even stronger after yesterdays non-event.
But we DO lose sight of things along the way like that concept that Bitcoin is designed to be strengthened by the inevitable attacks on it. And there have been several casualties in this bear market (JEEBUS I cannot believe we are still in the damned cycle... I have given humanity too much credit lol). But it's not all bad. In fact it's great.
Bear markets are healing times even though they suck. The trees (not merkle) get pruned. The salt is being distilled out of the water. Nature is healing.
The things we are letting go of now:
1.
Bitcoin Maximalism The Religion of the CornI actually think "maximalism" even the toxic kind is alive and well. And I am glad. But what has fallen are the simplistic black and white edicts of the various priests. The things associated with maximalism, particularly for the folks who came in sometime between 2018 and last year. And particularly particularly for the sycophants on "Bitcoin Twitter" marching around in circles chanting "Stay Humble/Stack Sats". And boy oh boy if they had actually paid attention to the first part of those magic words they would have been better off. I feel for the fellow who coined that phrase. He meant well. I believe him. He wanted to help people do the right things. And he was sure enough that he knew what the right things were. But it all blew up in a spectacular way.
2.
The Crypto Anarchist Cypherpunk Dream is dead! Long live The Crypto Anarchist Cypherpunk Dream!!!I remember that song someone made called "Jump You Fuckers".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TYezSrzUUs I am not sure, but I think it was first popularized around the financial crisis Satoshi's famous genesis block points to. And it got picked up around here on the forum by a lot of folks who saw Bitcoin as a way to take down the banks and kick out the powers that be (TPTB™). And of course all of us Bitcoinners wanted to see that. It's easy to hate TPTB™. Some of them deserve to burn in hell. Good thing for them, I am not God. Then again, it might turn out even worse for them. Justice WILL come. But I think Bitcoinners have focused more on the negative aspects of this idea than what is really important.
The revolution is not that you HAVE to be your own bank, but that you can. -cAPSLOCK circa 1517
Look at me. I am the Bitcoin Priest now!
Someone start printing the T-shirts.
The bankers are here. So are the governments. And they are trying every trick they have to stack bitcoin now. We have seen the US Government (the HOME of the world reserve fiat currency, mind you) beginning to recognize the reasons Bitcoin might not destroy the Federal Reserve and that there are actually ways for the USD to BENEFIT from the protocol (though I think the smart contract chains might be used here). While it's current arch enemy (oh good grief) recognizes that Bitcoin will allow them to route around the sanctions they have so long been under and
no one can stop them. While China finally gives up on banning it and remains a country with a lot of mining, and pools.
They cant stop it. And the more they try the more they get tangled up in it the more they realize the benefit of being in Bitcoin. If they ban it in the US then they just cut off their own people from one of the most powerful financial tools ever invented. The governments and the reserve banks are slowly realizing trying to stop bitcoin would be like the Postal Service trying to stop email.
I often talk about Hal Finney (RIP) and his early ideas about Bitcoin banks. But the reason is he was right. It HAS to head there. First of all Bitcoin is just as much for "the banks" as it is the papusa seller on the beach in El Zonte. And just as importantly not only can Gamma not custody her fortune in BTC safely, neither can tech savvy "plebs" we have most certainly seen.
Was the protocol designed well enough to hold up under the vast influence of TPTB™? We better hope so. There is no other path.
Will consensus be able to fend off the true threats to the protocol (Inflation, Quantum, Spam...) perhaps even posed by "developers"? I think so. But we will always have to be vigilant, and to be willing to fork when it is right.
But I think this season in Bitcoin's history is shining the light on perhaps the most important threat Bitcoin STILL currently faces. And it is not that we are missing a new important feature like covenants. It is not the problem of spam. It is not (yet) the need to change the cryptography before quantum starts spending Satoshi's coins.
This threat is not new, and it has been being addressed by many in the community. Even some of those MOST firmly on the side of BIP-110. <- that might be the saddest part of this chapter.
Here is what I think is the most important issue Bitcoin needs to solve, and as soon as possible.
Miner Centralization is the baddy.We just made an argument FOR the sort of shenanigans we have seen over the last few days. One of the ways Bitcoin remains Anti Fragile is by there always being an option for the users and miners to fork off when we believe the protocol is under threat. Peter Todd finally gets what he wants and adds a Monero like inflation system to the latest Bitcoin Core implementation? Every last user of the system from the papusa dealer to the governments of the world get to stand together and say "Nope".
But Miner Centralization threatens this. Satoshi foresaw SO many things. Pretty amazing really. But one place he REALLY missed it was mining pools and ASICs. I am pretty sure most of us here understand why this matters, but I will say it anyway for the one or two who might not.
ASIC chips started to centralize hashpower. And this led away from what Satoshi's original vision (I know, I know) was for 1 CPU 1 vote. In fact he expressed dismay via email to the (im)famous Laszlo Haneycz 🍕 when he felt development of GPU mining was happening too quickly. He even said he was not concerned with coin centralization, but with the idea that the end user would not want to run the client and switch "generate coins" on, thus insuring the network stays decentralized.
And if we will have to mine for YEARS with expensive hardware to have even a 50/50 chance of hitting a block then why do it?
Well the community solved this problem. Through one of the best solutions to ANY problem when you want to avoid inefficiency.
Centralization.
So along came the concept of mining pools. Miners would aim their hashpower at a common goal, and be paid out proportionately. It is useful to pause here and credit Marek "Slush" Palatinus as the person who launched the first mining pool. But also Luke Dashjr soon thereafter launched "Eligius" another one of the early pools. And some of Luke's concepts changed the way pools operated as well. He was always trying to avoid the problems of centralization and pioneered concepts of proportional payouts, zero fees, and schemes that would avoid 51% of the hashpower going to one pool.
And more recently his pool Ocean has been working on the Datum protocol which allows individual miners to submit their own templates for what should be included in a block. Want to ONLY include blocks with less than 82 bytes in the OP_RETURN? Ok then. This hands the power back to the individual rather than shifting it to the pool operator.
The latter is dangerous for a few reasons. But perhaps the biggest one would is when there DOES need to be a fork in Bitcoin. The pool operators could easily collude and shut that down.
And I think this is the worst casualty of the BIP110 fiasco. Dashjr and Ocean tarnished their reputations by backing an ill conceived unpopular BIP with not enough time to even begin to gain consensus. Luke let the perfect be the enemy of the good in my humble opinion. So his very important support of Datum might also take a dent.
On the other hand that protocol is
alive and well on Ocean still, and others are working on things like
Stratum along side.
And there is the moment that Ocean did the right thing IN SPITE of the fact the people who run it did not want to include this block. Ocean mined a block on the non BIP110 chain. Why? Because the user who had set up the template was not signaling for BIP110. There is a video of when some of those watching from the BIP110 side saw a miner on Ocean mine a block on the non-BIP110 chain:
https://x.com/justh0dl/status/2086202393998291138?s=20
People are laughing at Ocean for doing this and missing the point entirely. Bitcoin won in that moment. And a single node operator spoke loud and clear.
So... people can hate on Luke... but at the same time he is helping develop some of the most important tech bitcoin needs as soon as possible.
So yeah... nothing happened yesterday.
And everything did.
Poll
