PakoVM

My wife and I, with the help of some community members, have started a crowdfunding campaign to buy supplies to donate to Venezuela. We are two Venezuelans living in Spain, and it breaks our hearts to see the tragedy that has unfolded in our country and to feel completely helpless. We wanted to donate, but since we have been living exclusively on Bitcoin for quite some time now, it has been impossible to find an NGO that accepts Bitcoin donations. Because of this, we decided to take matters into our own hands. All the funds raised will be used to buy the items that are needed right now: Non-perishable food Medicine and first-aid supplies Hygiene products Flashlights and batteries Everything we manage to buy will be taken to a collection center, where they will handle delivering it directly to those affected. Here is the link for anyone who wants to lend a hand: pagos.dinerosinreglas.com/apps/3nQLRzkUU…

@Vladcostea You were right like everyone else who is not a cult follower.

Since last year, I’ve been saying on my podcast that Ocean has a mining pool, a separate node client, and a different development agenda Which appears to be a hard fork in the making to push their own “pure” coin Been called a dumb shitcoiner who doesn’t understand Luke’s game and Nakamoto consensus But I was so right 🤷🏻‍♂️

That's better

@coinjoined @Excellion Where's Samson Moo?

Samson Meow

Imagine a decentralized system billed as censorship/sybil resistant with 360 million people relying on it, but its protocol rules can be forcibly changed if just 0.0014% of them run a different software version. This is what BIP-110ers genuinely believe, many without realizing it

BIP110 causing a chainsplit? Who could have predicted it?

@MrHodl Didn't he lie about selling all his Bitcoin because of Core 30?

I've spoken to Jason on numerous occasions and I can promise you this.. He cares about bitcoin and he's the only sane person at Ocean.

You won't believe who made it onto the big screen! It's a small role but that's how legendary careers have started. They always say Bitcoin is "money for enemies," so it's only fitting our debut is in Michał Krzywicki’s film, "Nieprzyjaciel" (The Enemy).

"Nicolás Maduro is being kept in solitary confinement, locked in a 6ft by 10ft room for more than 23 hours a day"

If you try to attack Bitcoin and don't claim that Core has captured it and they are the culprits of why your attack wasn't successful, are you even attacking Bitcoin?

"Users" are not in charge Devs are not in charge Miners are not in charge Pool operators are not in charge "Plebs" are most definitely not in charge There is no one behind the wheel. Feature, not a bug

@notgrubles Sats

Bits. (Testing mutual follow visibility)

@Vladcostea @stutxo This is exactly why Square is implementing Litecoin and not Bitcoin on Lightning on their POS devices.

@stutxo Litecoin is doing much better than Lightning because more ATMs and merchants support it Ask around, there are only a handful of companies that do payments processing. They all like Litecoin and feel reluctant towards supporting LN

You know that Lighting is not very good tech When it was built since day 1 to be blockchain agnostic With atomic swaps between chains being heavily advertised in the beginning And a year of scrutiny & testing on Litecoin Only for Litecoin to stop maintaining it Decred is the only other chain that still supports Lightning And Lightning on Bitcoin, in spite of all the hype and heavy marketing, has less than 0.023% of supply locked in channels and only works decently when heavily centralized (though there are failed transactions even between custodial wallets) What a waste of time and resources! If only we didn’t put all eggs in this basket and encouraged the market participants to come up with the best designs for scaling solutions where self custody + unilateral exit are non-negotiable But then again, I’m pretty sure that the companies supporting Bitcoin developed secretly hope nothing ever gets achieved so CBDCs and other centralized solutions can get adopted within this short window of opportunity Tether on Tron is the best example of such a product. So successful even the most hardcore maxis are afraid to criticize it due to various conflicts of interest

@Otoya_Coinjoin @bamskki @_pretyflaco Nothing prevents it other than one of the operators deleting their keyshare after a state update, that's why the assumption is 1-of-N.

@PakoVM @bamskki @_pretyflaco The timelock doesn't prevent Spark from stealing from you; This it's not a user protection, it's server protection, to avoid double spending and fraudulent outflows that could harm the server.

Spark might actually be worse than custodial services because users believe they have sovereignty they don’t have. This marketing reduces user vigilance. At least with Coinbase you know exactly what you’re signing up for.

That is very fair, and I get the point as learning this information got me into a rabbit hole and opened my eyes to some trade-off that I was not able to see before. The problem is that **externally** this makes Second look like you guys are desperate for wallet providers to ditch Spark and integrate Bark rather than informing people about the issues with Spark, I know this is not the case, but what I know and the it looks like are different things. Would recommend taking a step back and picturing me going around telling people that some of our competor's hardware wallets shouldn't be trusted because they are closed source, which is a very than fair point, but feels like FUD specially when coming from a competitor. I know you guys are one of the smartest teams in Bitcoin, you don't just do amazing work but also work incredibly fast, but I have to be fair here, Spark is offering a better product (emphasis in product) than anything else in the market for wallet makers, and calling it out in this way won't change that reality, in fack it might do more damage to you in this early stage that it will do to them as everyone is aware of the trade-off the system presents.

At the risk of somebody replying to me with a Carly Simon song, I'll extend an olive branch here. We experiment with many different systems to understand the tradeoffs and better inform the decisions we make with our product. Spark was one of the projects we investigated and experimented with. We sat on the unilateral exit discussion for months. We watched for months and months as all the marketing for spark professes a completely different trust model to what it actually has for users today. I was hoping an independent person would raise attention to this but time just keeps moving forward, users are no better off after a year of unilateral exits being "live" on spark and eventually after we try to talk about it, people respond with insults, misdirection, hand waving and sometimes straight up lies. When I got into bitcoin honesty was important. People were held to their values. I'm not engaging in any of these conversations to try and push our product as an alternative, I just think that users deserve to know what they're signing up to. I use the same guiding principles to discuss our own product.

If Bitcoiners spent half as much time building as they do tearing down other projects or builders in the space, we’d have a hell of a lot better ecosystem today. Everyone loses when infighting consumes so much of our time.

@phil_geiger @ODELLXYZ No number as long as they all are at least an hour long and talk about your preferred fork non-stop. Add in some articles by your favourite independent journalist to the mix if you can.

@PakoVM @ODELLXYZ How many podcasts do I need?

theoretically possible to freeze bitcoin with a soft fork there could be a soft fork attempt that tries to freeze iran’s bitcoin or blackrock’s in practice its not likely, forks require overwhelming support to succeed bitcoin is incredibly hard to change by design

@phil_geiger @ODELLXYZ All you need is for the other side of the fork to not run a URSF client and make sure your fork is a soft-fork, that way it doesn't split the chain after you start rejecting all blocks produced by the 99% of the network's hashrate. Amazing how wrong everyone was about Bitcoin.

@ODELLXYZ From discussions I've had over the past few days, I've learned that you don't need a majority of miner support, node support, developer support, or to have any bitcoin, and you can force the entire network to do what you want.

@ozsats256 @sethforprivacy The protocol is but the software running inside the SSP isn't. Maybe Lightspark Open Sources it or somebody reverse-engineers it, then everyone will be able to either confirm how ti works, or just use another Spark-based statechain. Whatever happens first.

@sethforprivacy Isn’t the protocol OS?

Of course I did my due diligence before we ever integrated Spark, found the same thing Matthew did below and hit the panic button internally. But unlike him I didn’t take to X to attack competitors and potential integrators, but instead was able to quickly confirm in private that it had nothing to do with Spark (the L2) in any way. Wasn’t difficult at all and was resolved with a few conversations with Spark/Lightspark and others in the space. Lightspark (not Spark) offer custodial services and this is only related to those and isn’t even an ongoing partnership of Lightsparks. I have been EXTREMELY vocal for years now about the tradeoffs with Spark (and both Ark implementations at the same time), and am all for digging into tradeoffs, but this is going far beyond that. Very frustrating that someone I know well and who works for a team I’ve been constantly shouting out, praising, and pushing people towards would stoop to completely fake news to try and win over users. I love the tech that @secondhq have built, but it’s a terrible look to be rampaging with falsehoods for weeks on end and not disclosing or sharing any of their own systems tradeoffs. I’m tempted to dive into the mudslinging and call out the major tradeoffs in Bark, but I’ll leave that off for now unless forced or unless someone reasonable wants to learn more.

@sethforprivacy Interesting. I get their points but sincerely I don't believe this strategy will work out well, fearmongering even when justified doesn't scale. Hope it changes soon, these guys are incredible people but they are focusing on the wrong thing right now.

@PakoVM Unfortunately the people in question here are paid to work on Bitcoin, but spend much of their working hours on X yapping instead 🫠

On the filter fork topic. I don't usually have time, but this morning listened to one of the twitter spaces from earlier in the week, with some well meaning relative bitcoin newcomers, that humanized them, and their concerns and thoughts for why they thought that made it logical to support 110. My feeling after listening, is if these are the people with #110 in their handles, I'm sad to see them about to fork off and get disillusioned without understanding why bitcoin rejected 110 robustly. So here's a more empathetic, constructive higher level version of explaining why not. I hope it's high-level and first-principles enough that everyone can follow. They seem to want to understand what makes people tick, and are suspicious of intent. So, if someone asked me why is Bitcoin important and what is it, I'd say my (personal) mission and hope for bitcoin is to build the cypherpunk future, that "Snow Crash" was a blueprint, and work backwards from there. Bitcoin I hope leads to fully free markets via bearer unseizable, hard mathematically dependable money. Not everyone is comfortable with that level of freedom, but that's my view. And at this point, I believe that surprisingly, even now many governments have come to understand and value bitcoin's gold-like mathematical assurance, a positive development. Others may have milder views than myself, but still like hard censorship resistant money. Because of motive suspicion, if it's not obvious: I hate spam with a passion, that's how I came to design hashcash while researching decentralized bearer money with others, and running nodes in privacy related cypherpunk p2p networks nearly three decades ago. People seem upset about the default op return policy change in bitcoin. I will just assert, there are extremely robust and simple reasons for bitcoin changing default relay policy, and most just didn't do their research, so don't know what those are, or maybe not technical enough to fully understand though there have been 1000s of posts trying to explain in various simplified ways. So that lack of understanding lends itself to shared build-up of false narratives. So here's my back-to-basics higher level explanation. The decentralization needed to create cypherpunk money has implications a: side effect of decentralization is that you can't impose your views on others. The very decentralization mechanism that helps that, is working against what BIP 110 wants, which at it's most basic is a quest to police other people. I understand supporters don't see their intent like that, but introspect deeper. You can modify your software, but not anyone else's. Another critical and incredibly robust technical bitcoin immune system is bitcoin can't have people who don't understand technology basics insist on eroding security, decentralization robustness and core properties. That would end badly, fast, and so people will fight you on that. So the message is Bitcoin respectfully says "no" to what you want. Sorry, and bitcoiners do genuinely understand and empathize that you mean well, have high level thoughts that make emotional sense, and articulate sensible bitcoin-defensive high level ideas, but they are not grounded and without you seeing it, the way you propose to achieve your ideas, hard-conflict with free cypherpunk permissionless money. My advice is to listen to more experienced people who understand the system and why it works the way it does, to whatever detail you want to understand the grounded reasons for why this is the implication of decentralization and cypherpunk money. I guarantee you the developer and protocol ecosystem shares and exceeds your views on bearer hard money (and dislike of spam). You may not agree with individual developers choices, views, way of expressing themselves etc, BUT you also need to understand the IETF-like decentralized technical consensus process creates a protective change resistance, that is highly effective at protecting bitcoin mission. The implication of which is no developer can change anything without technical consensus from hundreds of other developers and protocol observers who are pedantic and extremely knowledgeable clever people who won't let any unaddressed technical question past. The protective change resistance is robust and decentralized in an amplifying way because of this technical consensus. And the many highly technical mainline developers' cypherpunk mission mindsets are probably far more determined than you can even handle on clarity of understanding and views about freedoms on permissionless networks, as many of you are probably still subconsciously inured by the matrix, where they have transcended that, and grew up immersed in it decades ago. They think natively in this space, while you are just grappling with the surface. Many wont have internalized or have the experience to know how this internet physics works, where there is no policeman, no policy authority, just mathematics, free market and hard money. That has implications for your views also, unfortunately. Now the tough pill, which is unfortunately true: If you won't listen to reason, educate yourself, learn, the same radical freedom applies to you: your permissionless recourse is to club together and create a fork. But bitcoin won't be joining it. (With respect and no sleight intended.) Please rejoin bitcoin now, or later if you're not convinced and need to experience 110 forking off and fizzling for yourself to start that journey of introspecting and learning. It would be sad if bitcoin lost people disillusioned due to simple lack of understanding of what's going on there, we're all trying to defend bitcoin and keep it on mission. Including btw the 110 technical promoters, just they wandered off plot somehow. Join the cypherpunks on bitcoin, come cypherpunk summer🌞 in a few weeks.