Great interview, @Paula.

https://youtu.be/tvY_oZNSWF4?si=tOsChezqsLe4ctYf

Centralized Unicity and Distributed Multiplicity

I won’t speculate on personal allegations.

My concern is strictly technical and philosophical: #Bitcoin Core’s posture toward spam and incentives has shifted in a way that endangers Bitcoin’s narrow optimum.

Reducing Bitcoin’s security model to a generic market for blockspace, sellers and buyers exchanging bytes, may adequately describe a distributed data store, but it fundamentally misrepresents a monetary network.

Bitcoin’s blockspace exists first and foremost to serve censorship-resistant monetary transactions. This market is constrained by a higher-order objective: preserving individual sovereignty.

Bitcoin is not a morally neutral protocol; it is a weapon against tyranny.

In the struggle against centralized unicity, state power concentrated behind infinite fiat, only one force can prevail:

Distributed multiplicity.

The plebs running nodes. They anchor consensus, enforce rules, and give economic meaning to mining. Miners are paid because nodes validate; incentives exist because the system is defended.

Without node operators, there is no table at which anyone eats. In any system, economic or otherwise, turning against your primary client is fatal.

If blockspace were truly neutral, if “data were just data,” then any sufficiently funded actor could flood blocks indefinitely, crowd out monetary use, and neutralize Bitcoin’s purpose entirely.

If that model were correct, Bitcoin would never have existed. This is not a debate about arbitrary data competing for space; it is a question of what the system is for.

Bitcoin persists because it is not secured by pricing alone. It is secured by social consensus enforcing constraints that privilege monetary use over abuse.

This is the human factor.

Filters, standardness rules, and policy limits do not violate the market; they define it. They form the narrow optimum that makes Bitcoin resilient rather than fragile.

That narrow optimum is precisely what the plebs defend.

It is fragile by design and resilient by consensus.

Sixteen years of near-perfect operation can dull perception, but removing constraints does not strengthen Bitcoin; it dissolves the conditions that made it work.

Anti-fragility does not come from loosening limits; it comes from enforcing them.

What I will say is this: when an ecosystem concentrates legitimacy in a single reference implementation and discourages exit, it creates conditions where individuals cannot act freely, even when they should.

Plurality is not rebellion; it is protection.

Running alternative clients is not an attack on Bitcoin. It is how pressure is released, how incentives realign, and how people are allowed to stand upright again.

Do not confuse centralized unicity with distributed multiplicity. A hard drive can always be outbid. A monetary network anchored in shared norms, human restraint, and collective defense cannot.

Bitcoin is not a decentralized database.
It is a system for human sovereignty.
Blockspace is a means, not the purpose.

--dewmap

In the software practice, it is possible to write code that compiles and runs correctly, but that fails to fulfil, or even corrupts the business purpose that the software is being written for.

Software is not something that runs by itself in its own universe; ir runs in a context - "To Serve Mankind".

It's therefore very odd to praise people who write software that harms people. It doesn't matter how clever they are, how hard they work or how good a mentor they've been; if they're doing something horrible and wrong, they're not worthy of praise. They should be condemned.

Going forward, anyone who doesn't understand what Bitcoin is for, and who doesn't understand that bitcoin is not, "an experiment", or that "data has no meaning" or that Ordinals are evil, should be kept very far away from working on the reference client, whih in any case, should be in maintenance mode and when update is beneficial (Schnoor signatures for example) updated only when it is clearly demonstrated that performance will not be downgraded and parameters and purpose altered.

In other words, all changes and improvements must be for the sole purpose of bitcoin's reason for being. If you want to extend the capabilities of bitcoin, you should fork it and play in your own kitty litter sandbox, where others can join you if they want to.

People who do bad things are not "great", and praising them is distasteful and indicative of at worst, a bad character and at best, a painfully naïeve and credulous personality.
--beautyon

It’s deeply counterintuitive how hard it is to simply buy and hold Bitcoin.

Humans evolved to react.
#Bitcoin demands that you don’t.

That’s why so many people grasp Bitcoin intellectually yet fail at it behaviorally.

The real moat isn’t technical knowledge or clever optimization — it’s emotional discipline sustained over years, not weeks.

“Just buy and hold” isn’t simple.

It’s minimalistic, adversarial, lonely… and quietly violent to the ego.

If it were easy, everyone would do it.

--dewmap

Dear Gloria Zhao,

On behalf of #Bitcoin maximalists worldwide, I want to express our deepest gratitude for your priceless, unwitting service in exposing the terminal decay inside what was once Bitcoin #Core and is now more fittingly called “Coretard.”

No measured technical argument, no patient explanation from the filter side could ever have achieved in a decade what your brief public appearances accomplished in a handful of videos: you single-handedly obliterated any remaining pretense of apolitical, competence-driven development.

Your visibly confused ramblings, sanctimonious ideological posturing, and openly stated desire to “transition” Bitcoin into a progressive social-experiment token have done more to awaken the broader ecosystem than a thousand blog posts or whitepapers ever could.

You have convincingly demonstrated to anyone still paying attention that something profoundly rotten has taken root behind the formerly respected — but now irrevocably compromised — closed doors of Core.

Having you as one of the most prominent public faces of modern Core development is the single most effective anti-Core propaganda the #Knots side could have ever dreamed of. Whether your colleagues have noticed it yet or not, you and the activist clique that surrounds and celebrates you have already signed Core’s death certificate in the only place it ultimately matters: the court of public opinion.

So please, from the bottom of our hearts — keep going exactly as you are. History will record you as the accelerant that finally persuaded the broader Bitcoin world to abandon the sinking, woke-infested husk you so proudly pilot.

With sincere and everlasting thanks,
A Bitcoin Maxi who genuinely owes you one
P.S. Thanks to you, humanity’s lexicon has been permanently enriched with a new and instantly understandable term: Coretard. Your legacy is secure.

--dewmap