Everyone has their own take on the block size war. I was there. Watching as a noob. My take has always been that this was at its core a philosophical fight. Yes there was skullduggery and subterfuge. Yes the battlefield was over a technical parameter. Yes there was fraud and backroom dealing. All that’s true. But what everyone was really fighting about was the chicken/egg problem that is bootstrapping a new global currency. Gold was monetized in pre history so we have no record of how it transpired, fiat is literally decreed by governments so that doesn’t help us understand reality any better either. Basically money has three functions. Store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account. Everyone knew that unit of account came last. The ideological divide was over which of the others came first. Big blockers believed that medium of exchange unequivocally came first, small blockers believed store of value did and the block size became the flashpoint because it was a lever you could use to enforce your view. I rarely talk about the block size war because I was brand new to bitcoin. It happened during my first two years and I spent most of it confused. Flipping back and forth from side to side. Thus I have a pretty good vantage point on both sides arguments and motivations. What eventually snapped into focus for me wasn’t who was “right” on the forums, but what each side was actually optimizing for. Big blockers were optimizing for use now. They feared ossification, irrelevance, and a future where Bitcoin was technically elegant but socially dead. If people couldn’t use it as money today, it would never get the chance to become money tomorrow. Small blockers were optimizing for survival. They feared capture, centralization, and a future where Bitcoin worked… until it didn’t, because it had quietly turned into something that required permission, scale, and trust. If Bitcoin couldn’t be a credible store of value first, nothing else mattered. You also have to remember at the time the small blockers were the rag tag band of outsiders, which is why it’s funny now when u hear people talk about it in conspiracy terms like a takeover of bitcoin. All of the corporate/legal/financial power was on the big block side. From the outside it looked like a war over an esoteric technical parameter. From the inside it was a war over what Bitcoin was allowed to become. In hindsight, the block size war wasn’t a failure of discourse or coordination. It wasn’t about one side being evil and one side being good (though I have my own thoughts on that) it was the cost of discovering what Bitcoin actually is. And like most growing pains, it only makes sense once you’re on the other side of it.

Japan and the U.S. are like two bros who had a bar fight over some dumb shit and became best friends because real recognize real. 😂

Truly amazing that Alliance Bernstein is more bullish than some OG’s I know

Btw the ideal halftime show is obviously a medley of blink 182, fall out boy, MCR and panic at the disco.

Bitcoin critics think we are weak pussy cowards with no balls, no vision, no sense of destiny. Who will sell at the first sign of trouble. They think this because they are weak pussy cowards with no balls, no vision, no sense of destiny. Who would sell at the first sign of trouble.

I used to think the Super Bowl was an essential part of American culture. Super Bowl Sunday practically a national holiday. Now I have zero interest in watching it.

“No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown allies will come and seek you.” -Carl Jung Often you won’t be alone but surrounded by people trying to sabotage you. Put your head down and work and the path will appear before you.

It be like dat

Idk who needs to hear this but it doesn’t matter if satan himself, the Easter bunny, the CIA, Epstein, Weinstein, the mossad, the ghost of Tupac, timothy mcveigh and Thomas the tank engine all got together and sacrificed 1,000 kittens in the NSA’s office parking lot in order to create bitcoin. Bitcoin exists and it’s awesome. So deal with it.

💀 Mars has been putting out some absolute bangers lately 😂

One of my favorite pop psychology trends of the last few years was “Love Languages”. For those who don’t know the various love languages were 1. Words of affirmation 2. Quality time 3. Receiving gifts 4. Acts of service 5. Physical touch It was funny because every girl would be like I think my favorite love language is all of them and they switch rapidly based on my mood and every guy would be like uhhh my love language is sex, I mean “physical touch”. 😂 😂 😂

Hmmmmm

I’m either one of the new wealthy elite or an idiot who rode bitcoin to zero. There is no in between.

I think the stupidest idea I heard repeated ad nauseam during the woke era was that certain foods, hairstyles, speech patterns, music, clothing, symbols, culture etc… belonged to certain people and not others. As a human being you should be constantly stealing good ideas, copying what works trying things out, exploring, playing, remixing etc… Like is rock n roll black music? Is it white music? Is it American? Is it British? It’s a fusion created by all those groups and they all have partial ownership of it, but no one gets to lay claim to an idea. You can’t own an idea.

This is the best explanation I’ve seen so far. From @Parker on twitter… “This was the highest volume day on $IBIT, ever, by a factor of nearly 2x, trading $10.7B today. Additionally, roughly $900M in options premiums were traded today, also the highest ever for IBIT. Given these facts and the way $BTC and $SOL traded down in lockstep today (normally SOL trades with beta) + the relatively lower liquidations on CeFi exchanges, this leads me to believe that the nexus of the problem lies with a large IBIT holder. IBIT has become the #1 venue for BTC options trading, so my guess is that a hedge fund trading IBIT options is the culprit. If you look at the 13F filings for IBIT (I like whalewisdom dot com), you'll find a number of interesting names that have the majority of their fund in IBIT. In fact, there are a few in there (not naming names) that have 100% of their fund in IBIT, which likely means no cross margin. In fact, the biggest reason to set up a fund to hold a single asset would be to isolate margin, so that if the trade blew up, the brokers wouldn't have claim to any other assets. Interestingly, most of these giant, single asset funds are based in HK. We know that Asian traders, particularly in China, have been deeply involved in the Silver and Gold trade. Silver was down 20% today, which was the 2nd largest 1 day move in a very long time (largest on Jan 30). We also know that the JPY carry trade has been unwinding at an increasingly rapid pace. This leads me to think that the culprit for the IBIT blowup today was 1 or more HK-based non-crypto hedge funds. As @FranklinBi pointed out, the fund(s) being non-crypto would explain why no one sniffed them out. They would likely have few/no crypto counterparties, meaning complete isolation from CT. The last small piece of evidence I have is that I personally know a number of HK-based hedge funds that are holders of $DFDV, which had the worst single down day ever, with a meaningful mNAV decline. The mNAV had been holding steady surprisingly well throughout this pull back until today. One of these fund(s) could have been connected to the IBIT culprit, as I highly doubt a fund taking that large of a position in IBIT and using a single entity structure would only have the one fund. Now, I could easily see how the fund(s) could have been running a levered options trade on IBIT (think way OTM calls = ultra high gamma) with borrowed capital in JPY. Oct 10th could very well have blown a hole in their balance sheet, that they tried to win back by adding leverage waiting for the "obvious" rebound. As that led to increased losses, coupled with increased funding costs in JPY, I could see how the fund(s) would have gotten more desperate and hopped on the Silver trade. When that blew up, things got dire and this last push in BTC finished them off. I have no hard evidence here, just some hunches and bread crumbs, but it does seem very plausible. Let's see if some more concrete evidence floats to the surface here soon. The smoking gun will be a large fund fitting this profile filing a 13F showing a giant IBIT holding going to zero. Unfortunately, if a fund had their IBIT position liquidated today, they wouldn't have to disclose the position change until 45 days after the quarter end, so we'd be looking at mid May for the smoking gun from 13F filings most likely. Hopefully some of you out there with too much time on your hands this weekend can snoop around more. My guess is that word will start to get out, because something of this size is just too hard to hide. Additionally, if the broker was not able to liquidate the fund in time, the broker may have a hole in their balance sheet, which would be even more difficult to hide.”