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It’s incredibly bullish for Bitcoin that the hostile takeover attempt known as BIP-110 failed.
This attack was a multi-year campaign of information warfare led by Bitcoin’s most eccentric developer. It involved launching a mining pool, a competing Bitcoin client, a coercive UASF, an unprecedented 55% activation threshold, a network-level Sybil attack to manufacture the appearance of node consensus, anonymous sock puppet accounts, brigading official Core communication channels like the mailing list and GitHub, vicious and libelous attacks on industry figures, selectively edited videos used for character assassination, cancel culture, fabricated Epstein/Rothschild conspiracies, boycotts, legal threats, CP allegations, and an especially disgusting targeted campaign against Core developers that resulted in at least one Core developer resigning and several others stepping back.
Even with such an intense coup effort, the attackers have yet to gather even 1% of the hashrate.
While BIP148 proved that miners cannot diverge from social consensus, BIP-110 proves that economic weight shapes social consensus and that Bitcoin governance isn’t determined by “plebs,” but by an agglomeration of all users: individuals, miners, industry, developers, and everyone else with a stake in the network.
While it’s comforting to know that consensus is not easily manufactured, the attack also revealed that Bitcoin Core’s coordination layer is very vulnerable and in need of better solutions than Twitter. This was the first attack on Bitcoin that was also widely powered by AI slop, and to be honest, it’s extremely difficult to combat. It creates confirmation bias, hallucinates away essential nuance, and a single low-effort prompt can consume 100x more effort and time to refute. I don’t know how we address that long term.
Beyond demonstrating Bitcoin’s resilience, the BIP-110 attack was also a massive drain on the community’s time, energy, attention, and cohesion. I’d wager that more than a million human hours have been wasted on this.
Once BIP-110 forks off, that resource drain ends. The 1% of users (if that) who align with BIP-110 will have destroyed their credibility and effectively filtered themselves out of the network. It leaves Core positioned to be more effective and reminds a new generation of Core developers that technical merit always trumps virtue signaling.
I also think the industry needs to wake up to its role in consensus and become more engaged with Bitcoin Improvement Proposals going forward. All stakeholders need to tango, or we default to ossification.
There’s more to be said on the topic, but this is already too long.
Keep doing your thing, Bitcoin.
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