Jason Sopko

This is central banking in a nutshell: A group of rich guys go to the king and say: "Hey, you need money for your war. We'll give you all the money you want." The king says: "Great, where's the money?" They say: "We're going to make it up. We'll write numbers in a book and that's your money now." The king says: "What do I owe you?" They say: "You pay us back with interest." The king says: "Where do I get that money?" They say: "You tax your citizens." The king says: "What if I can't pay it all back?" They say: "That's fine. We'll lend you more. Same deal." The king says: "And what do you do with the IOUs I gave you?" They say: "We use them to prove we have money, so we can lend even more money to other people and charge them interest too." The king says: "So you made up money, lent it to me, I tax my people to pay you back, and then you use my debt to make up even more money and lend it to everyone else?" They say: "Yes." The king says: "What did it cost you?" They say: "Nothing." That's literally how the Bank of England started in 1694. The Bank was formed to finance King William's war with France. The king gave the Bank a charter, granting it a monopoly on money. The king could have as much money as he wanted. The bankers could always earn interest. Taxpayers covered the bill. Now replace "king" with "United States Government" and you have the Federal Reserve in 1913. Same story, different country. It doesn't end there. 185 central banks exist in the world today. Across the globe, the governments get as much money as they want, the bankers load their pockets with interest, and the taxpayers pay for it all. Oh, and if you don't pay your taxes, they'll fine you, penalize you, or throw you in jail. The ONLY way out of this is to STOP USING THEIR MONEY. As long as you're using the money that central banks control, the central banks will have control. You have to stop giving them energy. Use a different form of money that they can't control. This is why Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin.

Foundry at 45% over the last 24 hours 😰

@ProfessorBigz Sir, this is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Store your non-monetary data elsewhere.

@JasonSopko42 You are the problem. You aren’t a bitcoiner, you are a shitcoiner who will have his own toy shitcoin to play with soon.

How much time you got? Here’s a few ways that BIP 110 damages Bitcoin: 1) Kills scaling and programmability -Bans OP_IF in Tapscripts that destroys MAST, covenants, Ark, BitVM, channel factories, statechains, and almost every future L2 roadmap. -Removes the foundation for Schnorr and Taproot efficiency gains (30–60% smaller multisig, private scripts). -We do not win if we cannot scale 2) Creates worse spam vectors -Forces spammers into fake-pubkey P2WSH multisigs and other unprunable vectors -Results in permanent utxo bloat instead of prunable OR, which increases node costs, slows sync times, and centralizes running a node. -Every new filter just shifts the attack vector to somewhere more harmful 3) Breaks legitimate use cases and existing users -Makes ~560,000+ real taproot spends (vaults, HTLCs, lightning, decaying multisigs) unspendable on the BIP 110 chain after activation. -Retroactively freezes or devalues tens of millions of utxos that belong to real holders, effective confiscation for those users. 4) Chain split risk -Zero miner signaling plus uasf activation will result in an automatic split when miners keep mining data for fees. -Creates a low-hashrate minority chain with no economic support. Easy 51% attacks, reorgs, and confusion. 5) Destroys rough consensus and governance -Trades public debate, mailing list, and proper review for a single dev pushing directly to main with no review. -Sets precedent that any small group can uasf contentious rules and threaten to split the chain. -Turns Bitcoin development into personality-driven drama instead of technical merit. 7) Hurts adoption and economic security -Alienates builders, institutions, and new users. -Makes Bitcoin look unstable and ruled by moral panic. -Reduces long-term fee security budget by killing L2 growth. 7) Security and centralization risks -Forces constant filter updates and centralizes policy in one maintainer. -Increases attack surface (new consensus rules = new bugs, reorg risks). -Makes running a node more expensive due to forced utxo bloat. 8) Sets terrible precedent -Normalizes retroactive rule changes and moralistic censorship. -Opens the door for future forks over what small group decides is“bad data” -Weakens Bitcoin’s core promise of immutability and permissionlessness. Bottom line: BIP 110 doesn’t “fix” spam, it redirects it into worse forms, breaks scaling tools, risks a split, and sets a dangerous precedent. It’s anything but conservative and completely undermines Bitcoin as global money. It’s radical sabotage dressed as purity.

I am pleased to announce Release Candidate 1 of the official port of BIP-110 to Bitcoin Core: github.com/v72t/bitcoin/r… Make sure to verify the PGP signatures, which are linked on the release. Special thanks to our amazing community for making this happen. Onward to activation!

BIP110

I am thrilled to announce the first release of the BIP110 activation client (link below). By running this code, you are actively protecting Bitcoin's usefulness and soundness as money. A huge thanks to our hundreds of contributors and supporters who have brought us this far.

OCEAN is not signaling for BIP-110, are they? I just checked a recent OCEAN block: 933442 (0000000000000000000110e8daa5a2825d2d76fddeba779c56c8d41ab4e0d79a): "version": 536895488 "versionHex": "20006000" Unless I'm reading it wrong or misunderstanding, Bit 4 is NOT set. versionHex ends in "00" - NOT signaling versionHex ends in "10" - signaling BIP-110

If you're lottery mining using BIP110 node, you're NOT SUPPORTING BIP110 ! Let me explain... I've mentioned a few times before, that BIP110 signaling is done by counting Bitcoin blocks containing bit 4 signal. No block, no signal. The only signal your Bitaxe can send to other pools, is sending that tiny hash rate to Ocean pool, for psychological effect, as it allows Ocean to report higher hash rate, despite your Bitaxe hitting nothing but thin air until September. Ocean pool is the only pool able to hit BIP110 blocks daily. BIP110 is like any other soft fork, literally a game of chicken, at which miners NOT running BIP110, risk much more than miners running BIP110. For the love of God, point your Datum+BIP110 node at Ocean pool until October. You can still set Datum back to lottery mode, after BIP110 activates successfully. If you're running a local instance of CKpool/Bassin/PublicPool, you're doing nothing, as you can't point that to Ocean, and you're likely not hitting a block until September either.

The data is in. On a 12-month rolling basis, corroborated by multiple miners, OCEAN earns you more. +3.6% more Bitcoin earned on TIDES vs. FPPS Meaning every 1 Eh/s on OCEAN earned +6.27 BTC more than FPPS. Real numbers. Real value delivered. More for the miners. 💪🌊

Claude writes 3,000 lines of code. I feel worried when I haven't read all 3,000 lines. Ship it anyway. It works. But 'it works' and 'I understand it' are two different things. That gap bothers me more than it should.

An update on this thread, for full clarity: There are now a total of 8 new bugs which can cause wallet deletion or corruption. My initial comment applies only to the initial, severe bug that affects people simply using Core30 normally. @BitcoinKnots _is_, however, impacted by 6 of the others, which are not triggered by normal end users: 3 of these are "power user" functionality (moving wallet files around manually; creating unexpected files in the wallet directory; or using the `bitcoin-wallet` command line tool) 1 of them requires a low-level disk/filesystem/OS problem during shutdown. The remaining 2 are unrealistic to trigger at all, but hypothetically possible if you start the node software again immediately before it finishes shutting down (within milliseconds), or ... have multiple wallets in the same directory, one of which has recent changes, the node crashes or has a power failure, you start the node again and NOT open the recently-modified wallet, open the other wallet, and shutdown cleanly. All six of these issues will be fixed in a new version of Knots soon.

Do you know how many times Knots releases have been delayed because I won't do it knowing there's a _possibility_ of a major bug like this? (Almost all originating from new Core merges they released without batting an eye)

@lemire Did you use Claude to write that post?

I started programming decades ago when I was 12 years old. At first, it was just a game to me. Over time, as I acquired more skills, it became part of my identity. While others played basketball or the violin, I wrote code. It is so deeply ingrained in my identity that when I once stopped programming regularly, I became depressed. Shamefully, it took me years to realize that I need to program weekly to stay happy. Today, the best AI models can write C++ code better than most computer science professors. They are certainly better programmers than my teenage self, who learned without access to the internet. Why play the violin when anyone can find a recording of a great violinist with little effort? This is not a new problem for human beings. What happened to bowmen when the musket became standard military issue? Do you keep showing up on the battlefield with your bow? A bow has advantages over a musket—and bows continued to improve even after the musket’s invention. Yet the writing was on the wall: the future of the battlefield did not belong to the bow. I could also recount the story of portrait painters who struggled with the rise of photography. Programmers are not alone in facing a transformation of their craft. Graphic designers, lawyers, writers, and nearly everyone in the laptop class are impacted. Some do not mind, because their craft was always primarily about achieving professional success. Others are more troubled. Let us be fair. For the last 30 years, the West pursued globalist policies that continually moved industrial jobs elsewhere, leaving many young men without much-needed opportunities. We told them not to worry—their economic losses were more than offset by government checks. And this gets to the core of the issue. Getting the job done is only part of what we care about. Perhaps more importantly, we want meaningful lives, which often come through skill development and its fruitful application. Money alone is not enough—it never was. We also crave status, recognition, and a sense of empowerment. As I look at software programming today, I can accomplish in five hours what would once have taken me three days. Sometimes I can do in 15 minutes what used to take three hours. Other times—especially when tackling something difficult that plays to my strengths—I do like Luke Skywalker: I turn off the targeting computer and code without AI for the best results. At the same time, I see many people (including some of my students) trapped in an illusion of competence. They prompt an AI and generate low-quality code—not because the models are bad, but because a tool is only as good as the person wielding it. What is coming? I cannot predict the future with certainty, but the following seems possible: 1. We may end up with the equivalent of a laptop-class rust belt. People who used to write reports and PowerPoint decks for a living could become obsolete. Teachers might find students turning to AI instead, reducing them to little more than relatively useless bureaucrats. IT specialists might see their entire purpose wiped out by a new AI model. They may still earn a decent living, but their social status could crater—just as it did for factory workers in the West from 1980 to today. What goes around comes around. 2. During the globalization era, the financial industry boomed in the West, and to this day some of the most prestigious and highly paid jobs are in finance. A similar phenomenon is likely unfolding in this AI era. Many of those benefiting will have a background in programming. The people who can build in a month what once took a year will be able to automate tasks that previously weren’t worth automating. What about the sense of purpose and competence? Speaking for myself, it is not gone. If anything, I feel I can leverage my hard-earned skills even more effectively than before. More importantly: I am still having a lot of fun programming.

“So you’re telling me that for months Core™ misled plebs into believing that Knots was buggy and could lead to confiscation and deleted wallets?” “Yes, Dave.” “But we just found out that Bitcoin Core is recalled for those exact critical risks?” “That’s what I’m saying, Dave.”

Dump Core. This is financial advice.

About 24 hrs ago users reported that Core v.30 deletes migrated legacy wallets. Core didn’t find it, users did! Then v.30 was pulled and a warning issued. Since then, not one syllable from the Core cabal who lied to you for months about Knots. You trust these people?

@w_s_bitcoin Core rugged legitimate wallets.

This is going to stick with me forever

These are a few of the Somali men that were involved in the DAY CARE GRANT FRAUD IN MINNESOTA. How did they get away with it for so long?

The Average Salary vs. Home Prices This chart is insanity.