What in fresh hell is this bullshit

BITCOIN CORE'S LOSS OF FOCUS The legacy technical leadership in bitcoin is becoming increasingly less effective. -- Almost universally, Core and "graybeard" devs are not focusing on _the_ fundamental problem in bitcoin: preserving trustless UTXO ownership. Instead they are distracted with valuable but secondary issues like mempool policy, Core code architecture, and minor IBD performance. These things are important in their own right, but they fundamentally don't matter if in times of trouble most users can't take possession of their own coins. Core devs are exceptionally talented people. The brightest engineers. But the priorities of the project are out of whack. The aggregate focus does not reflect the thing that makes bitcoin a unique asset: trustless custody. -- Given the current limits of bitcoin, even upper-middle class Americans will not be able to self-custody, let alone the rest of the world. If bitcoin doesn't figure out how to ensure that most users have a trustless way of owning and sometimes moving coins, it will become basically indistinguishable from a gold ETF. A row in some OFAC-compliant database. Another financial widget that is subject to the regulatory dictates of government. In fact, if bitcoin does not scale UTXO ownership, gold will have the advantage that at least small amounts of it *can* be self-custodied and traded peer-to-peer. The same won't be able to be said for bitcoin. In a world where on-chain fees are in the thousands of dollars and there is not a workable, trustless layer two, most coins will be stuck with custodians. Forget payments. I'm talking about savings. I'm talking about less than checking-account volume. 1-2 transactions a month. If you think that most people should be able to DCA and withdrawal to self-custody once a month, maybe spend once every few years for big purchases, I've got news for you: Given bitcoin's current limitations, only 18 million users can do that. A little over 5% of Americans. -- Right now, the chain capacity is able to meet demand for self-custody because we are in a time of relative peace. Most don't feel at risk keeping their bitcoin with a custodian. That can change very rapidly. As bitcoin grows in value and challenges fiat currency, governments will increasingly want to control it. They won't ban it, which is now obvious, but almost certainly they will impose OFAC-like restrictions and possible wealth taxes. When the regulatory hammer comes down, tens of millions will look to withdrawal their coins into self-custody. But they may not be able to. -- Unfortunately this risk does not seem to be top of mind in the current Core culture. One instance of a tone-deaf Core response to this kind of problem relates to CTV. As @JeremyRubin has been pointing out for years, CTV would be the most efficient way to guarantee that people can withdrawal coins from institutions in times of chain-panic and congestion, allowing exit to happen during crises without fully "unrolling" transactions. I wrote about this at length in 2023, and why it seems there is no more efficient way to do this (delvingbitcoin.org/t/thought…). And yet technical figureheads like @TheBlueMatt and @murchandamus downplay the value of CTV, claiming that it has no compelling uses. CTV is one of the primitive building blocks that we need to figure out UTXO scaling solutions. (Not to mention its use in applications like vaults.) Some Core devs might argue "well okay, maybe we need that functionality - but CTV isn't the right way to do it. We need to think harder!" The problem is that time is running out. As nation-states begin to enter the technical ecosystem, soft forks that promote scaling and self-custody will be more difficult to deploy. Powerful actors will not want bitcoin to change - they're perfectly happy letting regulated custodians act as the L2. As the market cap grows, the stakes of change go up, and it will be much harder to get economically relevant actors to run new consensus. Because Core devs aren't paying close attention to the covenants conversation, they may not realize that CTV is upgradeable, simple, and well-tested. It's good enough. This gap in understanding partially reveals that those devs prefer to work on more smaller self-contained puzzle problems that are more tractable. Maybe this is understandable given the fraught Core development process and historical drama of soft forks, but neither of those are an excuse for abandoning the core challenge of realizing bitcoin. -- Segwit and Taproot were massive changes, and I can almost understand why so much drama was spent on them. They both basically reinvented how locking scripts are stored and executed in bitcoin. But to make significant headway on finding a scaling solution for self-custody, it may only take a few opcodes - much more narrowly scoped bits of functionality. Changes that are much easier to test and reason about, and don't reinvent the engine of bitcoin. -- As I continue campaigning for a renewed focus on scaling coin ownership, some may compare me to the "big blockers" of the 2017 scaling wars. The big-blockers camp wanted to raise the blocksize for the sake of housing the world's P2P payments. They resisted the use of Lightning and other second layer solutions. The reality is that they have been partially vindicated. Lightning has not solved our problems, and given the on-chain footprint that existing channel constructions require, it categorically cannot. Lightning certainly helps reduce on-chain payment volume once someone has opened a channel - but to do that for most people will require a layer 1 innovation. I don't share the big blockers' objectives. I don't think that trying to fit the world's P2P payments on the base chain is a reasonable target. But the ability to resist near complete capture of UTXO custody by third-party financial institutions - *that* is intertwined with the core purpose of bitcoin. In Satoshi's whitepaper, the first sentence claims "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." If most users become unable to even take possession of their own coins a few times a year, we have failed on the objective. -- I am not writing this out of any sense of antagonism. Yes, I am frustrated that after numerous attempts, Core devs are not engaging more productively with the few people trying to translate scaling strategies to the base layer. But I'm hoping that by calling attention to this issue, we can get some of these great minds to refocus on bitcoin's critical mission, and to realize that ossification will come sooner than we thought. The existing (and well-funded) power structures *want* stasis. The recent show of rapid institutional affinity should make you suspicious that bitcoin in its current form isn't a threat to the fiat order. The lack of "ivory tower" attendance in the recent OP_NEXT and the broader covenants discourse demonstrates that, like many of America's elite institutions, there has been mission drift in bitcoin's technical elite. I hope this changes. -- The risk of merging many of the opcodes proposed during the last few years is limited. OP_CAT, OP_CTV, lnhance, probably OP_CCV, some others; they're all fine. If sufficiently tested, great additions to bitcoin. We can pretty easily mitigate what risk there is with comprehensive testing and analysis, provided the focus is there. The upside is almost infinite: a reasonable attempt to continue the preservation of bitcoin's unique function - trustless self-custody that is practically available to most.

I've been watching markets compulsively for the last few years, and it's obvious that we're headed for some very strange times. I've been meaning to write about this - and how Bitcoin ties in - for a while, but finally got around to it this weekend. jameso.be/2019/08/24/bitcoin…

My dad was the man, the GOAT. Miss him forever.

THE CONSENSUS CONUNDRUM Bitcoin faces a one-of-a-kind leadership problem — A lot of consensus-change proposals for bitcoin are on the table at the moment. All of them have good motivations, whether it's scaling UTXO ownership or making self-custody more tractable. I won’t rehash them here, you’re probably already familiar. Some have been actively developed for years. The past two such changes that have been made to bitcoin successfully, Segwit and Taproot, were massive engine-lift-style deployments fraught with drama. There have been smaller changes in bitcoin’s past, like the introduction of locktimes, but for some reason the last two have been kitchen sink affairs. The reality not often talked about by many bitcoin engineers is that up until Taproot, bitcoin’s consensus development was more or less operating under a benevolent dictatorship model. Project leadership went from Satoshi to Gavin to… well, I’ll stop naming names. Core developers will likely quibble with this characterization, but we all know deep down that to a first order approximation that it’s basically true. The “final say” and big ideas were implicitly signed off on by one guy, or maybe a small oligarchy of wizened autists. In many ways there’s really nothing wrong with this - most (all?) major opensource projects operate similarly with pretty clear leadership structures. Oftentimes they have benevolent dictators who just “make the call” in times of high-dimensional ambiguity. Everyone knows Guido and Linus and the based Christian sqlite guy. Bitcoin is aesthetically loathe to this but the reality, whether we like it or not, is that this is how it worked up until about 2021. Given that, there are three factors that create the CONSENSUS CONUNDRUM facing bitcoin right now: (1) The old benevolent dictators (or high-caste oligarchy) have abdicated their power, leaving a vacuum that shifts the project from “conventional mode of operation” to “novel, never-before-tried” mode: an attempt at some kind of supposedly meritocratic leaderlessness. This change is coupled with the fact that (2) the possible design space for improvements and things to care about in bitcoin is wide open at this point. Do you want vaults? Or more L2s? What about rollups? Or how about a generic computational tool like CAT? Or should we bundle the generic things with applications (CTV + VAULT) to make sure they really work? The problem is that all of these are valid opinions. They all have merit, both in terms of what to focus on and how to get to the end goal. There really isn’t a clear “correct” design pattern. (3) A final factor that makes this situation poisonous is that faithfully pursuing, fleshing out, building, “doing the work” of presenting a proposal IS REALLY REALLY TIME CONSUMPTIVE AND MIND MELTING. Getting the demos, specs, implementation, and "marketing" material together is a long grind that takes years of experience with Core to even approach. I was well paid to do this fulltime for years, and the process left me with disgusted with the dysfunction and having very little desire to continue contribution. I think this is a common feeling. A related myth is that businesses will do something analogous to aid the process. The idea that businesses will build on prospective forks is pretty laughable. Most bitcoin companies have a ton on their backlog, are fighting for survival, and have basically no one dedicated to R&D. The have a hard enough time integrating features that actually make it in. Many of the ones who do have the budget for R&D are shitcoin factories that don’t care about bitcoin-specific upgrades. I’ve worked for some of the rare companies that care about bitcoin and do have the money for this kind of R&D, and even then the resources are not sufficient to build a serious product demo on top of 1 of N speculative softforks that may never happen. --- This kind of situation is why human systems evolve leadership hierarchies. In general, to progress in a situation like this someone needs to be in a position to say “alright, after due consideration we’re doing X.” Of course what makes this seem intractable is that the Bitcoin mythology dictates (rightly) that clear leadership hierarchies are how you wind up, in the limit, with the Fed. Sure, bitcoin can just never change again in any meaningful way ("ossify"). But at this point that almost certainly resigns it to yet another financial product that can only be accessed with the benefit of a large institution. If you grant that bitcoin should probably keep tightening its rules for more and better functionality, but that we should go "slow and steady," I think there are issues with that too. Because another factor that isn’t talked about is that as bitcoin rises in price, and as nation-states start buying in size, the rules will be harder to change. So inaction — not deciding — is actually a very consequential decision. I do not know how this resolves. — There’s another uncomfortable subject I want to touch on: where the power actually lies. The current mechanism for changing bitcoin hinges on what Core developers will merge. This of course isn’t official policy, but it’s the unintended reality. Other less technically savvy actors (like miners and exchanges) have to pick some indicator to pay attention to that tells them what changes are safe and when they are coming. They have little ability or interest to size these things up for themselves, or do the development necessary to figure them out. My Core colleagues will bristle at this characterization. They’ll say “we’re just janitors! we just merge what has consensus!” And they’re not being disingenuous in saying that. But they’re also not acknowledging that historically, that is how consensus changes have operated. This is something that everyone knows semi-consciously but doesn’t really want to own. Core devs saying “yes” and clicking merge has been a necessary precursor every time. And right now none of the Core devs are paying attention to the soft fork conversations - sort of understandable, there’s a bunch to do in bitcoin. But let’s be honest here, a lot of the work happening in Core has been sort of secondary to bitcoin’s realization. Mempool work is interesting, but the whole model is more or less upside down anyway because it’s based on altruism. For-profit darkpools and accelerators seem inevitable to me, although that could be argued. Much of the mempool work is rooted in support for Lightning, which is pretty obviously not going to solve the scaling problem. Sure, encrypted P2P connections are great, but what’s even the point if we can’t get on-chain ownership to a level beyond essentially requiring the use of an exchange, ecash mint, sidechain, or some other trusted third party? My main complaint is that Core has developed an ivory tower mindset that more or less sneers at people piatching long-run consensus stuff instead of trying to actually engage with the hard problems. And that could have bitcoin fall short of its potential. — I don’t know what the solution to any of this is. I do know that self-custody is totally nervewracking and basically out of the question for casual users, and I do know that bitcoin in its current form will not scale to twice-monthly volume for even 10% of the US, let alone most of the world. The people who don’t acknowledge this, and who want to spend critical time and energy wallowing in the mire of proposing the perfect remix of CTV, are making a fateful choice. Most of the longstanding, fully specified fork proposals active today are totally fine, and conceptually they’d be great additions to bitcoin. Hell, probably a higher block size is safe given features like compactblocks and assumeutxo and eventually utreexo. But that’s another post for another day. --- I've gone back and forth about writing a post like this, because I don't have any concrete prescriptions or recommendations. I guess I can only hope that bringing up these uncomfortable observations is some distant precursor to making progress on scaling self-custody. All of these opinions have probably been expressed by @JeremyRubin years ago in his blog. I’m just tired of biting my tongue. Thanks to @rot13maxi and @MsHodl for feedback on drafts of this.

CTV + CSFS: a letter to the technical bitcoin community from 43 engineers Full text at ctv-csfs.com

So what do you call the position where - you realize that the monetary system is broken and fixing the money is basically most important thing in civilization - you realize blockchains are extremely experimental and bitcoin is the most conservative and safe design (1/n)

In 1971, a house cost 2.5x your yearly salary. What's that number now? 10x, 15x? Why has this changed? Haven't materials gotten cheaper, technology better? Could it be that gov't manipulation of price of money has caused huge asset inflation => wealth gap?

This is true.

Getting increasingly worried about the dev funding situation in Bitcoin right now. A few (really talented) Core devs are losing funding pretty soon; there apparently isn't money enough to go around. It'd be really nice to see more Bitcoin businesses step up. This could get bad.

I made ~$37,000 trading in traditional markets in 2020. Some fancy derivatives trades. Real smart guy stuff. Given what I put at risk, that's about a 37% return for the year. Know what I would've made if I had just kept my Bitcoin? About 10x that. Who's smart now?

I've just published a paper with a new proposal for how to construct vaults in Bitcoin, OP_VAULT. I think vaults are maybe the single most impactful change we could make to Bitcoin to help derisk custody at any scale. jameso.be/vaults.pdf

I have bizarrely elaborate home infrastructure; I self-host music streaming, DNS servers, monitoring applications, bitcoind nodes, a network isolated security system, routers, highly redundant ZFS NAS servers, file syncing, LLM models, YouTube archiving. All of this is accessible when roaming via wireguard. To manage this zoo I wrote configuration management software with minimal dependencies because I'm paranoid about supplychain attacks. I'm curious: is this worth documenting? Would anyone even care, or are the people who would pay attention to something like this just doing their own thing anyway? If it's worth documenting, what's the right medium? A book, video series, blogs?

Here's a copy of the note about Bitcoin I'm sending out to friends and family this season. This leans pretty heavily on "number go up," but that's what gets most people thinking. docs.google.com/document/d/1…

Would bet a lot of money that quantum computing is obvious bullshit.

This is the most bullish thing I've seen for Bitcoin all year bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Exhausting to be made to pay taxes to fund a genocide for a cause that has nothing to do with American interest because most members of Congress are owned by AIPAC.

lol you can't write this stuff

This book by @steveinpursuit is the most interesting thing I've read about bitcoin since Mastering Bitcoin. The Blocksize War? Good work but not new info, either because (like me) you were there or because you've absorbed the history secondhand, since it has become unquestioned orthodoxy. Revisiting the other side of the story has been a revelatory process for me. The big blockers weren't completely right. The question of how to deal with app spam given large amounts of blockspace is an important one. They also don't often acknowledge that an important limiter of bitcoin's ultimate success is a lack of organic demand for self-custody in the first place. But, given the benefit of hindsight, they were and are absolutely right about many things, and their set of tradeoffs probably would've been better to make on net than the ones that we've made. Understand that bitcoin's time of origin and initial use was before Venmo and Cashapp. I have a good graybeard friend whose first exposure to bitcoin was settling up a dinner tab peer-to-peer over cell phones with Roger Ver, and his mind was blown. We forget that wasn't a thing that corporations did. Bitcoin had the chance to be a true, subversive P2P value transfer/savings platform. I'm pretty sure that chance is gone now, so in one sense this post is crying over spilt milk - but it feels important to address in the hope that we can avoid similar mistakes in the future. -- The big blockers were (and are) right about the following crucial points: - "Node can run on my raspi" wasn't a good trade to make for capacity. The people who care to run nodes will fork over $1k and a gigabit internet connection, and everyone else will run a light client anyway. SPV-like schemes are a perfectly fine trust model for relatively low value, and there is an important middleground between "$100 computer" and "Solana datacenter." - The BTC camp doesn't really acknowledge that there's a "Laffer curve" associated with miner fee revenue. Miners can and probably would make more in fees with larger blocks and smaller per-transaction fees. The idea that a sky-high fee market is somehow essential to miner survival in the long run is a fallacy. - Block size, within some threshold, is not necessarily a centralizing factor for miners. We have compact blocks now as it is, and when the mempool eventually keels over -- i.e. individual mempools become wildly out of sync due to large backlog -- weak blocks can forecast which transactions are likely to be confirmed next. Weak blocks are in miners' interest, because no miner wants their block orphaned due to slower propagation time. - Second-layer scaling has not yet proven to be a workable way to scale trustless self-custody to more than a small fraction of users. It's not only that this stuff isn't implemented - we don't even have workable sketches that check out, given the current consensus rules. -- I still own bitcoin but my ownership is largely nihilistic. I no longer think Bitcoin as BTC will actually challenge the fiat order meaningfully, though I'm pretty confident number will still go up on the basis of narrative, momentum, and the US gov't seeing an opportunity to transmute debt via pump. I strongly suspect that BTC in its current form (which likely means its permanent form) cannot meaningfully scale to a high enough rate of self-custody to actually obviate fiat animals like stablecoins. And I think its capacity for the kinds of changes that would enable that are gone, thanks to circumstance, leadership failures, "success," and the kinds of false narratives that are highlighted in Steve's book. Core as an implementation and leadership structure will not likely be unseated - the incentives for an alternative just don't pencil out. It remains a crucial control point. Maybe obviously, I hope I'm wrong about those things. -- For those whose main goal is to challenge the fiat order, there remain two positive outcomes of bitcoin: 1. Enrichment of a fiat-hostile class, and 2. A technological legacy that provides "ingredients" for another system to emerge that can actually facilitate real P2P value transfer, once it becomes more obvious that BTC will not accomplish its stated objectives. For that reason, bitcoin is still worth paying attention to and working on. But for me it's become more about seeding the next system with the resulting wisdom and tech that this experiment has yielded so far. Thanks to @steveinpursuit and probably @rogerkver for the wake-up call. I hope the (obviously political) legal persecution of Roger ends. That persecution in itself is a new marker of credibility.

Jan 3 Pull all your coins off custodians Just to see if you can

I started working on Bitcoin because I want the state to be much smaller than it is today, and I don't think it should have the ability to print or control money. It might surprise you how little enthusiasm there is for that among the Core org. Motivations matter.

I happen to agree with the Core guys on the filter stuff, but Maxwell's sentiment here is simplistic bordering on disingenuous. "You can just do things!" Well, not really. Core has a tremendous amount of latent power for at least two reasons: (i) every business has basically hardcoded the use of that implementation with levels of risk aversion surpassing "never got fired for buying IBM," creating an amazing de facto monopoly on economic nodes, and (ii) bitcoin is so complicated that any non-developer inherently must delegate to some technical authority they trust, and Core winds up (for most sane people) being the target of that delegation. This is a tremendous amount of sticky power. To not acknowledge that is naive. Yes, in theory a large part of the ecosystem could decide to run an alternate implementation - but the switching/coordination/incidental-risk costs there are huge. It would take a 5-10x reward:risk proposition for most businesses to switch. And meanwhile, the Core line is so often "well running another implementation would be dangerous! think of the possible consensus incompatibilities!" Convenient. This single chokepoint is going to be a big problem for bitcoin, even if the filters issue isn't per se an epitome of it.

tx signed, broadcast pending Happy New Year!

👀 seeing a potential 9% global speedup in Bitcoin Core, coincident with a 8% reduction in memory usage thanks to @sunitram's good work on hashmaps. github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/p…

I would never tell someone who is actually poor to have fun staying poor. I will absolutely tell pontificating Dunning-Krugerized macro celebrities to have fun staying poor.

I really like "have fun staying poor" as a meme because it has a spiritual and intellectual interpretation that is perhaps more profound than the obvious financial one.

Transported anywhere on earth instantaneously Carried anywhere physically undetected Can't be censored Can't be diluted Can't be confiscated It sounds like a device out of Arthurian myth, but it's here You can use it You can understand it You can work on it

I'm really excited for the release of NYDIG's Bitcoin Task Bounties program. This is a new and unique part of the funding ecosystem for Bitcoin, in part because it suggests entrypoints for devs that want to get involved. nydig.com/bounties

In good news today, my bechmarks finally finished: @pwuille's updates to libsecp256k1 look to have sped up Bitcoin Core's validation by roughly 7%. github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/p…

There two things I'd like to do before biting the dust: 1. Raise a family 2. Help implement a monetary system that can't be debased or confiscated by bureaucrats

Man I'll never forget the feeling of dumping BCH for BTC on some shady exchange at the first possible opportunity. Probably the only form of genuine alchemy I'll ever experience.

Some news: I'm leaving NYC to move to Tokyo. Still working on Bitcoin (that goes without saying), just doing so at @dglab_official instead of @ChaincodeLabs.

This book has much more legitimacy than most in the Bitcoin orthodoxy will give it credit for

Seems like a pretty good day to buy Bitcoin

- actively put yourself out there - don't assume you're unqualified - be honest and work hard cool things will happen!

I'm back working on opensource Bitcoin software full-time and I'm starting to shake the tree for funding. These are my priorities. (hint: the theme is stability) jameso.be/2021/03/24/back-to…

Ten year anniversary of my first PR today. Bitcoin was $242 a coin when this PR was filed, and the project had eyes on much more ambitious, interesting work than it does now. I'm sad for the state of development today, and that trivial issues like mempool policy & "quantum" dominate the scene rather than substantive, tangible proposals that will meaningfully improve bitcoin's usefulness, like covenants. github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/p…

Bitcoin is a lot easier to sell than gold. Which is why you shouldn't.

Hi. I'm asking for money from you to keep working on Bitcoin Core. Here's a thread about it. github.com/sponsors/jamesob

Huge red flag - Rust's serialization library serde, which is basically its stdlib for JSON, ships with a precompiled binary for which there is no alternative. The maintainer mysteriously refuses to offer an alternative despite the fact that there is no technical reason shipping with a binary is necessary. This is why I beat up on Rust for having a shitty stdlib. This npm-style proliferation of separate packages to do basic things is a security nightmare. github.com/serde-rs/serde/is…

Most people think that the innovation of America was representative democracy, or having a vote. That's a red herring. America's unique feature is the explicit limitations put on government, especially as outlined in the Bill of Rights, which we're steadily reverting.

I've outsmarted myself out of a lot of Bitcoin. Don't try to be clever! Use Bitcoin like a savings account, and treat USD as working capital. Sell if you need to buy something worthwhile (mortgage, school, etc.), but otherwise just let it be.

OFT FORGOTTEN BITCOIN SCALING LIMITS Many aren't aware of how limited current on-chain capacity is. Forget P2P commerce or checking acct volume; even savings acct. vol. (2 tx/mo.) or L2 use is out of reach for all but 2.7% of the US, or 0.1% of the world. Some numbers:

To all those who think "maybe in a few years we'll have a softfork:" What do you think happens if/when a signature gets put on this, and Bitcoin becomes a strategically important reserve asset of the US government? You think a few people on the internet still get to do softforks? The language here specifically calls for intelligence involvement to help secure the coin.

Seeing a ~14% speedup in Bitcoin's validation time after @pwuille enabled a new optimization in libsecp256k1, Bitcoin's digital signature library. github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/p…

Market sending a clear signal on just how worried it is about Lagarde's ability to regulate Bitcoin

I've proposed draft changes for a softfork that encompasses BIP-118, BIP-119, and BIP-345. This might not be the route that we ultimately go, but having a tangible possibility on the table is important for progressing the technical discussion. github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/p…

I feel like a big psyop was run against Ohio in the 2000s. I'm in Cleveland right now and it's awesome.

Bitcoin pulled libertarianism out of the realm of LARP, and I'm happy for it every day.

Hi - @NYDIG_BTC is hiring people who have chops with Bitcoin, Lightning, or applied cryptography. Get in touch if you're interested or know someone who is. bitcoinerjobs.co/company/nyd…

Did you ever think we'd be governed by USSR apologists?

Don't forget: the real minimum wage is always $0/hour.

Fair metric for the health of the project, and it's not good

WTF happened in 1971? wtfhappenedin1971.com/ h/t @matt_odell @MartyBent

You're going to be a terminal user once I get through with you

Stacking on the road in rural Indiana

After watching Bitcoin awhile, it's clear that some of the most serious threats will be businesses trying to shape the protocol to serve their own ends at the expense of long-term security, e.g. Segwit2x and Coinbase's UTXO snafu. Wouldn't have been my first guess.

Today we lost 6 of our 10 chickens to a fox while we were away from the house. @mshodl had the unfortunate privilege of getting home first to find the ensuing mess. She decided to go fox hunting. I'm just glad that I'm married to a woman who's competent with a shotgun.

Broke: paying $44 for halibut in an airport terminal Woke: walking around at all times with multiple tins of $3 sardines in olive oil like a total psycho

I've said it before and I'll probably say it many more times: the 2020s will be a continued (and unfortunate) wealth transfer from those who do not hold financial assets to those who do. cnbc.com/2020/08/24/powell-s…

Last Friday I started the process of selling most of my gold. Had to call someone on the phone, haggle over price, then go buy packing materials. Had to print out shipping labels, double box the stuff (label on each box), and then drive it to the UPS store.

What makes Bitcoin special - i.e. trustless, unconfiscatable, borderless - is that it's 100% digital. As soon as you try to make it a token for a physical asset (gold, cars, houses, ...), you now need a legal system to enforce the redeemability of the token. Trustless no more.

Oh, you want to decrease the blocksize? How about just increasing the utility of the chain so that people actually use it?

Scrolling through the 52 accounts that @CIA follows, okay... okay... wait what

In hindsight it's going to look so obvious: how the $*@# did we take on so much debt as a society and expect to get away unscathed?

.@LynAldenContact's latest article is maybe the most lucid, complete description of our (very unusual) monetary system that I've read. Lords of Finance was good, but this is way more concise. lynalden.com/fraying-petrodo…

An excerpt from the original Lightning Network paper that succinctly describes why scaling needs to happen off-chain. Volume at Visa's scale would create 400 terabytes of txn data per year.

Everything I'm reading about this policy response is just making me want to hate-buy Bitcoin. Even despite a strong conviction that BTC's going to be sold off along with every other liquid asset in the coming weeks.

It wasn't obvious that the combination of a new virus and the dissolution of an oil cartel would bring markets to their knees. It *was* obvious that overleveraged corporates with historically high P/Es pumped up by unnaturally low rates can't tolerate the unexpected.

*checks Twitter, sees people complaining about Bitcoin maximalism* *goes back to reviewing PRs*

Oh yes because libertarians have been running the government for so long

(author unknown)

Call your grandparents! Way better use of 15 minutes than browsing this website.

Huge thanks to @PubKey for putting me on the decks two shifts in a row in Vegas. Had the best time.

Have you been thinking about taking the plunge into full time opensource Bitcoin development? There is (industry-competitive) funding available! If you're a good engineer with interest, send me a DM and I'll be happy to talk. opensats.org/blog/announcing…

You're arguing about basically inconsequential mempool policy when you could be arguing about terrifically consequential consensus changes CTV/CSFS is waiting

Your blockchain isn't real unless you can sync it on this

It's going up forever, Laura

So I was thinking. Obvious we need to split up the country, right? Big problem is: who takes the national debt? Well, leftists like MMT which says that debt "isn't actually a problem." So they should have no issue taking it while other side reboots w/hard money. Problem solved!

A big congrats to Sjors Provoost (@provoost) for receiving well-deserved long term support from @OpenSats. Between sponsoring @MarcoFalke, @josibake, and now Sjors, I'm really proud of what OpenSats is doing to stabilize work on Core. opensats.org/blog/sjors-prov…

Man is there anyone left who makes a decent browser and isn't actively trying to censor the internet?

You can both (i) be critical of Core and (ii) support the removal of ineffective OP_RETURN mempool policy But this particular issue is misdirection. It's of minimal value compared to simple consensus refinements that will help us - scale UTXO ownership with better L2s (CAT/CTV/CSFS) - scale self-custody (vaults: CTV/CCV) - allow compact exit during correlated panic (CTV) - decentralize mining with compact payouts (CTV) - enable workable ZKP layer 2s (CAT/CTV) - improve lightning (CTV/CSFS) Don't let this hype and froth distract you from the work that's actually going to make Bitcoin a viable financial system. CTV and CSFS are ready to go. Let's focus on discussing a plan for imminent code review and activation.

Bitcoin™!

BTC, in its current state, is pretty much guaranteed to be captured from a technological standpoint. BTC's major value is as a memetic Schelling point for people who want to express dissatisfaction with fiat money.

Really interesting point made at the conference by @TheBlueMatt about lightning that hadn't occurred to me: HTLCs for amounts below the prevailing L1 feerate are not trustless, since you're paying as much in fees to deter theft as the value of the transfer itself. Does this mean that in the probably inevitable high fee environment that low value lightning usages don't make sense? If so, isn't that a pretty big caveat?

The OP_VAULT proposal has been assigned BIP number 345 🎉 github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull…

Of course bitcoin twitter is talking about an SBR - everyone wants to be rich It's the street-smart, principled bitcoiners who are talking about the other side of this - guys like @markgoodw_in. We're trading a bag pump for a freeze of any scaling/privacy innovations in the protocol. What are we here for again?

Looking homeless feeling great

This is also fundamentally not funny

It's probably time to normalize running forks of Core

The count is now 62 high-PoW bitcoin engineer signers Let's focus on what matters: progressing bitcoin's consensus toward better self-custody and scaling

The Twin Towers are unmatched. Icons of America at her peak. They should've been rebuilt just as they were.

The second most useful blockchain was invented in 2020 by @udiWertheimer

I've created and written up a demo of a simple vault implementation using OP_CTV. I think this design has the potential to make custody at any scale much less nerve-wracking. github.com/jamesob/simple-ct…

This is a bad meme; Israel is the only side of that being funded by US

CDC budget increased from $5.6B to $6.6B '19 -> '20, try harder bro.

I'm not even beefing on the US government wanting to buy Bitcoin, that's perfectly understandable. I'm beefing on our lack of acknowledgement that that likely means immediate protocol ossification, and how bad that would be for Bitcoin.

Buying Uber credits over the #LightningNetwork on @bitrefill using the Joule browser extension (lightningjoule.com), no personal data required. WebLN + Joule is a great UX; nice work, @juscamarena @wbobeirne!

anyway when you find out what that position is called, let me know and I'll put it in my bio (5/5)