Lilly

Human nature insures there will never be a time when Bitcoin does not need to be defended and fought for. Complacency is an attack vector. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

By repeatedly adjusting default mempool policy to match what miners will accept anyway (large OP_RETURN uncapped because “they’ll just mine it via bypasses like Libre Relay, or direct APIs”), we are implicitly conceding that miner greed + economic incentives are the ultimate rule-setter, not node-enforced principles. Meaning a (cleverly hidden) capitulation of Bitcoin as a decentralized project. You could say that the “CENSORSHIP!” argument from Core and their supporters on the concept of nodes filtering is a roundabout way of critizing decentralization itself. Nodes were always supposed to be the sovereign check, they decide what they accapt and relay. When we keep loosening policy to align with whatever is the current grift “use case”, and by extension what is short term profitable for miners, it trains the entire ecosystem to treat restrictive node behavior as pointless theater. Over time this hollows out node sovereignty: running a full node becomes more about passively observing the chain that miners + L2s + data-spammers have already decided on, rather than actively enforcing a monetary-first standard. As a cuck bonus it also leads to higher resource costs for every honest node (bandwidth, RAM, storage) à fewer independent verifiers in practice Decentralization starts looking like a performance act. Miners produce the blocks, a handful of relays and L2 sequencers steer the flow, and nodes just… validate after the fact. It’s not a hard-fork capitulation (consensus rules haven’t changed), but it is a cultural, philosophical and operational one. The most profound capitulation in practice. The philosophy flips from “Bitcoin should resist non-monetary garbage even if it costs us some short-term fee revenue” to “whatever pays miners gets standardized because resistance is futile.” Once you accept “miners will do it anyway” as the justification for policy, you’ve already handed the character of Bitcoin over to the highest bidder. Nodes stop being the immune system and start becoming just a polite audience. The OP_RETURN uncap looks a lot like another quiet step toward a two-tier network (miners + insiders set the tone, everyone else just watches. Keep doing this and running a node risks becoming a branding exercise instead of the actual source and guarantee of Bitcoin’s decentralization.

Tomorrow I’m asking for a 20% raise. Since I was already planning to quit on Friday, I figured I might as well swing for the fences first. If they give it to me, that’ll be enough to keep me motivated in the short term…if not, I walk as planned.

5/ Gloria Zhao, Anita Posch podcast, October 2020: "I was feeling really disenchanted with blockchain and Bitcoin in general. So I was thinking of just taking the Google job or the Facebook job." "I don't really know why I'm in blockchain anymore. I've been disappointed over and over again by all these blockchain projects. Every year is supposed to be the year where we move away from proof of concepts and actually deliver on the products that all those ICOs promise to build." "I'm not that interested." She said that last line directly to Jonas when he offered to set up a meeting.

1/ Yesterday, Matt Corallo entered a thread to deny that DEI ever influenced a single hiring or funding decision in Bitcoin Core development history. Let's look at what he said, and what the public record shows.

More people are running Knots than Core 30. More people are running BIP-110 than ran BIP-148. Are we there yet? No. Long way off. Why? Because very few would lose something as a result of segwit. It was just disliked for seemingly coming at the cost of a block size increase (which it also added as a compromise). With BIP-110 however droves of scammers are getting ejected from the space. They will fight tooth and nail to frustrate it and do not care how much disruption they cause in the process. This is why it made sense to act quickly two years ago and not allow the rot to set in. However failure on our side is not an option as this is the last chance to reclaim Bitcoin as money with its traditional *and necessary* hostility towards other uses cases that can only degrade its decentralization, corrupt its developers, turn its conferences and cultural events into the humiliating scam fests we spent years distancing ourselves from. Let's get moving.