BTC sandcastles and the next civil war

BTC is a grandiose sandcastle on the brink of collapse—a monument to the folly of straying from Bitcoin’s original blueprint, governance, and economic balance. The story of BTC is one of gradual but consistent self-sabotage and a classic example of good intentions degrading into an almost complete collapse. Bitcoin, properly ossified, is a currency, a payment system, and a money implemented as a digital cash that should have been robust by today. But with each “improvement,” BTC has veered off course, leaving behind the principles of sound money and becoming a convoluted tangle of ideas, caught in a perpetual identity crisis that is currently devolving rapidly into yet another civil war.

At face value, change and flexibility are good things, but with a sound money, every little change adds power to the people who make changes, which means that every change makes the asset a little more like fiat and a little bit less like gold.

Here’s what too much power looks like today:

PSA: “Inscriptions” are exploiting a vulnerability in #Bitcoin Core to spam the blockchain. Bitcoin Core has, since 2013, allowed users to set a limit on the size of extra data in transactions they relay or mine (`-datacarriersize`). By obfuscating their data as program code,…

— Luke Dashjr (@LukeDashjr) December 6, 2023

So, let’s look briefly at some of the steps that got us here, and then we can talk about the chaos that is coming.

RBF

Remember Replace-by-Fee (RBF)? This was one of BTC’s first misadventures, touted as a fix for mempool congestion. But let’s call a spade a spade: RBF shook the very foundation of Bitcoin’s reliability. By allowing transactions to be easily replaced, RBF turned a supposedly steadfast system into one where transaction certainty was up for grabs such that it could never be used practically for in-person commerce—far from Satoshi’s vision of a rock-solid transaction protocol.

SegWit

Then came Segregated Witness (SegWit), stirring up a storm within the Bitcoin community. Pitched as a scalability panacea, SegWit was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, altering Bitcoin’s block structure and moving away from Satoshi’s original white paper. This wasn’t just a technical tweak; it was a radical shift that compromised the very definition of a bitcoin.

Taproot

Taproot might have seemed like a smart play to tighten up some of the mess in BTC Core. The change promised enhanced privacy and efficiency with some fancy tricks in the repo and consolidating every possible address hash type into a format that doesn’t change even if payments are simple, multi-sig, or even launching other types of on-chain contract types. But let’s not kid ourselves—this was another layer of needless complexity. BTC was turning into a labyrinth of technical intricacies, moving further away from its roots as a transparent, straightforward ledger, and this change opened up the network for Ordinals, which Taproot’s developers have largely panned as an “attack” on BTC.

Lightning Network: A detour from Satoshi’s roadmap

The Lightning Network, along with other Layer 2 fantasies, was supposed to be BTC’s silver bullet for scalability woes. But instead of sticking to the script of on-chain scaling, these solutions opened a Pandora’s box of dependencies, further complicating what was supposed to be a simple peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

Ordinals ignite internal strife

And now, the Ordinals saga has thrown BTC into a fresh maelstrom as the BTC family feud turns into an all-out civil war. These tokens have sparked a new battle over BTC’s soul, challenging the already fragile consensus on what BTC stands for, and there is a chaotic mix of ideas floating around trying to be the official narrative as increasingly toxic rants make their way to social media, and newcomer experts try to make sense of the malaise. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs from BSV blockchain continue to innovate and create momentum on the BTC chain, much to the chagrin of the Ordinals creator and the toxic small blockers!

Then there’s the venture-backed teams that raised money on trying to be the official narrative about bitcoin now pumping their bad takes to make sure the checks keep coming in, too. It’s just a mess.

Like this.

Bitcoin L2s can be new rails for BTC, the asset. No need to change the L1.pic.twitter.com/Ni0Pgbmpwd

— muneeb.btc (@muneeb) November 27, 2023

Years of warnings

As big blockers, we have been warning about the problems of soft protocols, a core dev team, a BIP process, soft forks, UASF-style governance, and focusing on L2 solutions while L1 remains inefficient.

There are many more problems with BTC’s complete unbalance in culture and incentives, paradoxes to navigate. Are small blockers anarchists, or corporatists? Do they want everyone to run a node, or do they want BTC to become an institutional grade asset? Should things be decided by a free market of open source devs and users running code, or should Blockstreamers sue big blockers for proposing new implementations? Is BTC an open network, or are unapproved uses (in the opinion of the ruling class) literal attacks?

BREAKING: Ordinals was just submitted to the NIST National Vulnerability Database as CVE-2023-50428

The laser eyes have literally turned to the US federal government for help trying to censor Ordinals transactions.

You can't make this stuff up. pic.twitter.com/1dZOMi4r7e

— Leonidas (@LeonidasNFT) December 10, 2023

All of that is very unclear. Mostly because guys like Adam Back have deleted their heinous threats of lawsuits in the wake of deciding that only Dr. Craig Wright sues people…

@pierre_rochard @adam3us @twobitidiot Turning to lawsuits implies you have lost both the tech argument and the community.

— Ser Jeff Garzik (@jgarzik) August 17, 2015

The facts

Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper that defined the form, function, purpose and governance of a new protocol, and then he issued assets on that protocol—which set those rules in stone as a sound money system. Not a democracy or a fiat protocol.

A SOUND MONEY SYSTEM.

And one of the major ways to clarify an unchanging protocol, set in stone, is that a valid transaction and a valid asset on the date of issuance (January 3, 2009) should be a valid transaction and valid asset forever. Otherwise, what’s the point?

BTC can try to claw back all of the backfiring problems with their hair-brained ideas, but they do it at the peril of their own narrative of unchanging Bitcoin, and that is a real problem.

So, as the small blockers prepare yet another layer of bubblegum to patch the holes that their previous changes had created, we stand over here in the BSV economy continuing to advocate for a fixed and open protocol, limits chosen by node policy instead of protocol consensus, broad and open rules so entrepreneurs can develop freely, and unbounded scaling determined only by capitalism. Lightning Network is collapsing, Taproot and Segwit created cheap ordinal “SPAM,” and sly snipers are using RBF to double spend JPEGS, while “cat meat” is trending on social media because COPA founder Jack Dorsey started a new mining pool dedicated to censorship of any transaction that Luke Dashjr doesn’t like.

I wonder how BlackRock‘s due diligence team feels about all of this, don’t you?!

Luckily, they have the opportunity to look at the only blockchain that has ossified the Bitcoin protocol and continues to encourage aggressive research and development into scaling to be the best money in the world and a distributed ledger upon which to hold and transfer all value. It’s very simple, and if we can get past the memes, the half-truths, and the outright lies, Bitcoin just might win—as BSV.

Watch: On the very start of Bitcoin