Vortex | BIP448

I didn’t want to write this. One of the deepest lessons I’ve learned from researching sentiment data is how irrational and angry people get towards the bottom of Bitcoin bear markets. People that are historically aligned often fall into conflicts that wouldn’t exist near tops. The BIP-110 debate increasingly feels like one of those moments. I wanted no part of that. I’ve been publicly cancelled before, and I have no desire to go through that again. I know how painful it is to have an angry crowd criticizing and shaming you, which gives me a strong bias to avoid situations exactly like this one. But I’m pushing against that bias because (for better or worse) I have a novel dataset that offers a unique lens on the BIP-110 debate. I’m going to attempt to keep this unbiased, but before I do, I’m going to lead with what will be my highest-conviction opinion of the entire piece: People like Mechanic and Luke Dashjr understand Bitcoin’s consensus mechanisms better than I do, while Adam Back and Jameson Lopp grasp Bitcoin’s technical nuances more deeply than I ever will. I am not here to pretend I understand these dynamics of this debate better than the people who have spent years studying them. That’s not why I’m writing this. “Then why should I care what you have to say?” Because there is another side of the debate that is also important, and it’s on this side I have a different perspective. The social layer. For those of you new to my work, I’ve been researching the language, narratives, and emotional patterns of different groups throughout Bitcoin. I’ve been (obsessively) studying the emotional regimes and crowd psychology associated with the space. That includes the people now publicly associated with both sides of the BIP-110 debate… and the differences between these groups are striking. I believe I would be doing a disservice by keeping that data to myself simply because publishing it might piss people off. So there will be no paywall on this piece, no call to action halfway through, and I won’t ask you to become a subscriber. I simply want these charts to exist publicly, where anyone can examine them or interpret them differently than I do. I will try to present it as fairly as I can, but I am not neutral, and neither is anyone reading this. People will inevitably see different things in these charts. This data cannot tell us who is technically correct. But it can help us to surface clues about how the debate is evolving, who thinks they are winning, and why I believe one of these groups is currently experiencing an engagement-reinforced narrative environment.

Today we are announcing that OCEAN’s backend will be upgraded to follow multiple chains independently in the event of a BIP 110 chain split. If a split occurs, DATUM miners automatically continue on whichever chain their own node enforces, and OCEAN will credit rewards to a split share log for that chain, subject to the chain’s continued operation and to our Terms of Service. OCEAN will effectively operate as two pools from the split point. Updated Terms of Service addressing split handling will be published before block 961632. We are building all this so our miners can receive rewards based on their own actions without adversely affecting other OCEAN miners.