Damus

Recent Notes

Tauri | Bitcoin (XBT) profile picture
For those not paying attention: if Bitcoin on Blake2b wasn't doing some things right, do you really think anyone would bother attacking it?

In less than two months:
1) They tried to get it delisted from the few exchanges that added it. One admin was even offered a six-figure sum.
2) They encouraged Chinese Siacoin miners (same algo) to 51% attack the chain.
3) They built a service to get around the Knots and RDTS filters and started dumping thousands of porn images, chopped into hundreds of small chunks, to bloat the UTXO set and troll the community. Still going on, but not for long.

Who's behind it? No idea, they're not exactly putting their names on it. Most of this happened quietly and then got pushed out on social media to boost the effects. It's made to look like trolling, like nobody's doing it seriously. But dig a little and it gets ugly pretty fast.

A million shitcoins get listed on CEXs and CoinMarketCap with no problem. XBT has a market cap in the billions, currently sits in the top 20, and somehow it's a struggle just to get it seen. Makes you wonder why.
Tauri | Bitcoin (XBT) profile picture
It would be nice if one vote for the right candidate could secure a bright future for your children. If only it were that simple.

Yet most people still believe that voting once every 4 years, at the cost of maybe an hour of their time, will improve their future. I know gamblers who are less naive.
Tauri | Bitcoin (XBT) profile picture
The spammer dumping garbage on Bitcoin is about to get filtered out. Hope he doesn't mind.

Core could have done the same on Spamcoin, if they'd served the network instead of doing the industry's bidding.

The XBT devs got no grants. Nobody expected any, and nobody offered. At some point the difference in approach, and in results, will be hard to ignore.
Mr Anderson · 21h
It was already written hehehe! 😂
FEW_BTC · 21h
hmmm, the shotgun delivery approach... appreciate the screenshots... but really dude... just because from your high perch you freakin already know everything... present the information and I'll make up my own mind. thnx
Kudzai Kutukwa · 23h
The BIP 110 drama was kinda like hoaxvid in a way, particularly how it brought to the surface the important question of whether #btc is money or not. Similar to branch covdians vs freedom Maxi's durin...
Tauri | Bitcoin (XBT) profile picture
There was no "BIP-110 drama." The drama was manufactured by the same people who lobbied major pools behind closed doors, set up a so-called "Security Consortium" to insure rule-breaking pools against lost block subsidies, and then told plebs with a straight face that this is how consensus gets built.

BIP-110 was a simple security fix. It aimed to reduce chain bloat and close the attack vector of using Bitcoin to store illicit data. It would have returned Bitcoin to where it stood before Core v30 opened that door, a change that compromised the entire dev community.

What this whole mess revealed is that most of our assumptions about governance were wrong. Data storage is now an official use case. The industry avoids the question of money like the plague. Mining is beyond centralized and captured. And people keep running archival nodes that no longer serve a real purpose.

Comparing BIP-110 to Covid-era fearmongering is backwards. The fight didn't show that the change was bad or unnecessary. It showed who was willing to fight it and why. 110 exposed the cultural rot and everyone who opposed it showed their hand in one way or another.
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Kudzai Kutukwa · 21h
I think it's an accurate comparison in that, the response was to what was supposed to be a simple security fix also exposed bad actors in the process along with other choke points. Me likening it to hoaxvid was more a focus on that part where truth was revealed that would have otherwise remained con...