By @hodlonaut
I fully accept what happened yesterday. It is sad, I will admit that. But it also feels like a catharsis.
BIP-148 is celebrated as Bitcoin Independence Day, because it proved that ordinary users, running nodes in their homes, could force the most powerful mining cartels and corporations in the industry to back down. The users had no hashrate, no exchanges, no lobbyists. They had conviction and they had nodes, and that was enough.
BIP-110 ran the same play with the same conviction, a reasoning that was shared by all bitcoiners five years ago (Bitcoin is money and not a grift database), and node support at levels at least comparable to 2017. This time the miners and the corporate layer simply refused to follow. They extended their spam-friendly chain and moved on like nothing happened.
Remember yesterday as Bitcoin Dependence Day.
What changed between 2017 and 2026?
Not the users. They showed up with the same fire.
What changed is everything that grew in the years between. ETFs. Treasury companies. Custodians holding millions of coins for people who will never touch a node. Hashrate concentrated into a handful of pools building templates for the whole world. Capture of the governance of the reference implementation resulting in stark philosophical pivot.
Those already celebrating Bitcoin Dependence Day are not simply cheering an outcome they won. They are treating evidence that miners and the corporate layer now control Bitcoin as if it were a grand cypherpunk victory, while ridiculing the people who fought for decentralization and for Bitcoin as money.
In my opinion, and in my heart, legacy Bitcoin is not what I signed up for. Captured. Centralized. Led by suits.
No longer about freedom, sovereignty, or the mission of separating money from state.
No longer about the things that made me a ride or die bitcoiner for many years.
The fire that originally drew me to Bitcoin is still alive in the node runners who supported BIP-110. I will follow it where it goes.
As for legacy Bitcoin, I have no interest in it anymore as a freedom project. In my mind, it is now a stock.
I fully accept what happened yesterday. It is sad, I will admit that. But it also feels like a catharsis.
BIP-148 is celebrated as Bitcoin Independence Day, because it proved that ordinary users, running nodes in their homes, could force the most powerful mining cartels and corporations in the industry to back down. The users had no hashrate, no exchanges, no lobbyists. They had conviction and they had nodes, and that was enough.
BIP-110 ran the same play with the same conviction, a reasoning that was shared by all bitcoiners five years ago (Bitcoin is money and not a grift database), and node support at levels at least comparable to 2017. This time the miners and the corporate layer simply refused to follow. They extended their spam-friendly chain and moved on like nothing happened.
Remember yesterday as Bitcoin Dependence Day.
What changed between 2017 and 2026?
Not the users. They showed up with the same fire.
What changed is everything that grew in the years between. ETFs. Treasury companies. Custodians holding millions of coins for people who will never touch a node. Hashrate concentrated into a handful of pools building templates for the whole world. Capture of the governance of the reference implementation resulting in stark philosophical pivot.
Those already celebrating Bitcoin Dependence Day are not simply cheering an outcome they won. They are treating evidence that miners and the corporate layer now control Bitcoin as if it were a grand cypherpunk victory, while ridiculing the people who fought for decentralization and for Bitcoin as money.
In my opinion, and in my heart, legacy Bitcoin is not what I signed up for. Captured. Centralized. Led by suits.
No longer about freedom, sovereignty, or the mission of separating money from state.
No longer about the things that made me a ride or die bitcoiner for many years.
The fire that originally drew me to Bitcoin is still alive in the node runners who supported BIP-110. I will follow it where it goes.
As for legacy Bitcoin, I have no interest in it anymore as a freedom project. In my mind, it is now a stock.
122❤️6👀1💯1😢1🙁1
