Because of the fixed supply of Bitcoin we can not fix the scales at a convenient level. Sooner or later a sat will be worth more than a cent. What will you do then? Redefine again? Therefore redefining Bitcoin as Satoshi is a futile endeavor.

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Increasing the OP_RETURN limit is besides cooperate interest a desperate attempt to get off the hook quickly for having ignored the problems with the UTXO set for too long. The arsonists however will do what is in their nature and that is trying to burn down the system. They will not play in a "safe environment" that is provided for them. Trying to be nice to arsonists is just naive and will lead to your own demise. Literature recommendations: The Arsonists by Max Frisch, Getting Libertarianism Right by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Don't be fooled in thinking the whole discussion is about technical details as for instance how the term database has to be defined (UTXO set vs. blockchain) etc. It’s about control again as it was in the blocksize war eight years ago. Some people want to dictate how bitcoin should evolve and their technics are perfidious by intentionally removing elements in the code that could be used by disagreeing folks. The saddest thing about this is that some previous freedom fighters are now cooperatized and are helping to gaslight and confuse bitcoiners.

@Jeff Booth is right that Bitcoin only wins if it stays decentralized. The current fatal pull request when merged will probably not kill Bitcoin, but it sets a bad precedence. It represents a centralized decision taking that takes away configurability from sovereign node runners. Unfortunately many of the Bitcoin educators are involved in the gaslighting of the community as well. So the question is: How many of such blows will Bitcoin survive?

Has @npub1r8l0...x5dk been corrupted by some (hidden) interest conflict as well? This is certainly not a Austrian argument

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Stephan Livera (@stephanlivera) on X

Picture a city with a strict limit on how much graffiti can be painted on a designated public art wall. Because the space is so restricted, some ar...

Who owns the houses being distorted? That's communist ideology. The house owners are free to use spam filters if they like to do so to prevent their houses to be distorted would be the correct analogy.

This liberal point that there is no such thing as a spam transaction has already been made in the early days by Andreas Antonopoulos. Well, he is not really active here anymore. Maybe real maxis have more endurance than talking heads.

Some Bitcoin core developer are attempting to negotiate with terrorists thinking they are somehow the representatives of the Bitcoin community. Well, it does not work that way.

There are alternative scenarios out there to the fee pressure (funded by spam) that must increase in order to finance big miners. A gold holder is responsible for the safekeeping himself. Therefore it is in the interest of Bitcoin hodlers to run their mining in the future as well and take responsibility for safekeeping of the time chain. With Bitaxe, DATUM etc. the community is slowly shifting towards that. Big miners listed on the stock exchange sounds quite fiat to me. This may be just an intermediate thing that may disappear again.

"The Big Print" by @Lawrence Lepard is enriched with amusing anecdotes and expressive charts. Definitely a nice reading.

High time preference behavior over decades accumulated so much technical debt in the software systems of many banks that there is only one migration strategy left for society: Turn it off without a replacement and switch to Bitcoin.

Do we really need Don Quixote's schwarmerei (excessive enthusiasm) for chivalry in the Bitcoin social layer? The knights followed their own unholy business and if they did so with virtue in their circles doesn't make it just for society.

Nostr is to Bitcoin what git is to the Linux kernel. It started as a necessary tool to develop the latter and now it is a thing of its own.

Not only are Github etc. centralized platforms but they also violate the UNIX philosophy of doing one thing and do it well. These platforms suffer from feature creep and nowadays they have become issue tracker, continues integration/deployment (CI/CD) platform etc as well. Therefore it is refreshing that there are activities with ngit to combine and connect existing simple tools (git, nostr) to work together seamlessly.

"Perhaps it’s no surprise that Switzerland remained one of the freest countries throughout Covid because of this more localized governance model. There was much less room and tolerance for central government decree" from "Parallel: The Bitcoin Social Layer" by Brian De Mint. Unfortunately this was not true at the end of the Covid scam. The mandates were centrally planned and applied to all cantons and one could say that the federal system died with Covid. The states in the US have far more freedom in such concerns than the cantons in Switzerland nowadays.

As euphemism has to be considered clownish as well (aka disguise ugly things in nice words) you consequently find some some explicit language in "Bitcoin: The Inverse of Clown World" by @knutsvanholm and @Luke de Wolf

Inconsistency in the user interface on GNU/Linux is my daily visual reminder that there is a trade-off between privacy & security versus beauty & convenience.

The progression from "Auctoritas, non veritas facit legem" into "Veritas, non auctoritas facit legem" as mentioned in Cryptosovereignty by Erik Cason is quite a profound idea.

Unfortunately upgrading an existing Ubuntu installation to 24.04 has been rather a bumpy road and ended up for me several times in a rescue shell. The UI improvements on the other hand are quite nice.

Each shortcut introduced in your application to save some development time today has to be repaid manifold in the future during the maintenance phase.