Running Bitcoin Core v30

In 2018, Bitcoin maximalism was truly punk rock All about sticking it to the man, telling nation states and VCs that they can’t invent a better Bitcoin We have this immaculately conceived money network and we’re gonna turn it into the default currency of the internet The cool features from altcoins? We’ll take them and make them work with the 21 million BTC. Your experiments can’t hold value and there’s nothing you can do about it The forks? You can make 1000 of them and most of us will stick with the original chain, with the largest amount of Proof of Work! But somewhere along the line, the movement got diluted and lost its meaning or legitimacy. The big influencers sold out and now they’re wearing suits to talk to the bankers, heads of state, and the VCs they used to pretend to hate. The educators focus on propaganda and go as far as telling their students to invest in bitcoin reserve companies – a far cry from the “not your keys, not your coins culture”, but a safe proxy for the culturally taboo “shitcoining”. The Lightning network, which was supposed to be the scaling solution that enables the medium of exchange function, took too long to build and still doesn’t live up to the hype or expectations. Low volume, a diminishing number of user nodes, a reliance on central services and custodians made it “efficient” but ultimately pointless. If you’re gonna have trust, might as well reinvent banking. We never got the sidechains we were promised. Blockstream delivered a federation, and drivechains were always discouraged by the devs. In theory, Bitcoin could have every altcoin’s features on dedicated sidechains that offer scaling, privacy & contracts. In practice, every time we came close to activating something significant we ended up not taking any action. The community, which used to be smart and well read, became a lazy cult which worships a select clique of people while reciting the “don’t trust, verify” mantra. The only upgrades came from Blockstream and the same handful of devs. Stuff like CTV and CAT was regarded with skepticism because the builders didn’t pass all the purity test – the arguments against activation were never about the quality of code. The same people who used to tell politicians and Silicon Valley investors to go fuck themselves are now celebrating when Microstrategy, Black Rock and the Trump family acquire amounts of bitcoin. Talks about ossification are more serious than ever, with folks who act as if Bitcoin is perfect and will never need any more improvements. It’s a depressing landscape, really. But the silver lining is that the shitcoins, that around 2017 were mostly modified forks of Bitcoin, have gotten incredibly good and not all of them are scams. Today, shitcoining is the new Bitcoin maximalism. Because in principle, even though you admit defeat in regards to the 21 million coins for the entire world utopia, you go back to sticking it to the man and supporting subversive tech. In the end, it all comes down to the question “why are you here?”. If you want to change the world, you won’t accomplish it with Bitcoin in its current state. It needs privacy, scaling, contracts & quantum resistance. It will probably only get the latter two, while the former will happen on suboptimal layers. The good news is that Ethereum, Zcash, Monero, Litecoin, and a dozen others are still keeping the spirit alive. They still experiment with new tech, they push the limits of existing assumptions, and they make cypherpunk literature come to life. Shitcoins are the new Bitcoin. Shitcoining is the new Bitcoin maximalism. The sooner you realize it, the quicker you will adapt to this paradigm.

Bitcoiners like to talk about persistence, proof of work and low-time preference Zcash has been building for 12 years: first as a soft fork to improve Bitcoin’s privacy, then as an altcoin in 2016 The devs stuck around all this time making the protocol more scalable: they started from the state of the art privacy, then refined it to remove the trusted setup and make the protocol work on mobile phones The devs are all OG bitcoiners who, instead of virtue signaling about HODLing and never spending a single sat, built the tech stack that can fix many of Bitcoin’s problems. You can find the Zcashers on the Bitcoin dot org page in 2009, in Blockstream’s 2015 sidechains paper, and in lots of old Bitcoin Talk threads Today, Zcash exceeds all initial expectations and it’s only gonna get better with Tachyon (scaling to billions of users), shielded assets, and more! If anything, every bitcoiner should love Zcash and buy at least 1 ZEC to support the effort of the team. After all, this is still the Zerocoin protocol that Bitcoin can add as a soft fork any time privacy gets taken more seriously. Going back to persistence, proof of work and low-time preference: don’t you think these guys could have made more money if they gave up on Zcash and invented a new altcoin for every iteration which improved upon the limitations of the old protocol? They’re already at version 2 or 3, about to enter a new era once again. Heck, if they just held their bitcoins instead of building anything they could have been much richer. But Zcash is playing the long game – and the beautiful part is that today, 9 years after the mainnet launch, it’s finally getting the recognition it deserves. Low time preference and persistence aren’t only about HODLing through a beat market only to get richer 4 years later. They’re not about creating silly narratives about utopian lifestyles. No siree, low time preference and persistence are about showing up even when you’re getting your ass kicked by the market and you become the laughing stock of the industry for discovering an inflation bug. They’re about shipping better code even when the incentives don’t align and you could make more money working on another project. They’re about following a vision for nearly a decade and never settling for something mediocre. Zcash delivered the moon math – and now deserves to board the spaceship to the moon! I recommend to all my friends to skip a bitcoin DCA and buy at least 1 ZEC. Not only for the USD gains, not just for your personal education about this tech,but to show support to Bitcoin’s unspoken heroes who have been building the ark that will one day save the Bitcoin network from censorship and surveillance. To those about to ZEC, I salute you 🫡

I’m refreshing the Bitcoin Core download page waiting for v30 to get released Like a kid checking the Christmas tree all night to see when Santa drops the gifts. I wanna run Bitcoin Core v30, WHERE IS IT?!

Bitcoin Takeover Podcast downloads since season 16 started in January of this year: 370k Thank you all for listening! Let's get to half a million by the end of the year!

Bitcoin Takeover Podcast

On the Bitcoin Takeover podcast you

Bitcoin maximalists embracing shitcoin experimentation is just like Dylan going electric in 1965 Blasphemous in the eyes of puritans who only want to hear unplugged music Courageous in the context of existing social pressures and the uncertainty involved Visionary in retrospect. Just pick your shitcoins right. It’s what makes the difference between “Blonde on Blonde” and “Empire Burlesque”.

3 reasons why I prefer Zcash over Monero: 1/ Zcash is encrypted Bitcoin. Started out as the Zerocash soft fork proposal for Bitcoin in 2013. Launched as an altcoin in 2016. Constantly improved, but always remained 100% compatible with Bitcoin. Meanwhile, Monero uses a completely different codebase, started out as a reaction to address Bitcoin’s limitations, the tech stack cannot get soft forked on Bitcoin. 2/ Zcash produces research beyond its initial scope Thanks to Zcash, we’re witnessing a cryptography revolution with Zero Knowledge proofs. Bitcoin is gonna get ZK rollups from Citrea & Alpen. Full blocks can be synced in less than a second by only verifying a ZK proof. Drivechains also chose Zside as the fungibility solution. And last but not least, Shielded Client Side Validation & ZK Coins are attempts to bring Zcash to Bitcoin. Ethereum also got Tornado Cash, Railgun, and a bunch of ZK rollups such as Starkware. An entire industry evolves with Zcash tech. Meanwhile, Monero’s tech isn’t used for as many revolutionary projects. 3/ Zcash is just getting started Tachyon will make shielded transactions scale to billions – coming to mainnet next year. Shielded assets will revolutionize the whole token economy, giving other user-generated assets the same privacy guarantees as ZEC. Zcash aims to improve the privacy of every popular use case in crypto. Meanwhile, Monero is reactionary and only tries to keep up with Zcash (see FCMP++, which tries to offer the same sender privacy as ZEC). Bonus: Satoshi expressed his interest in ZK proofs, but didn’t have the right cryptographic libraries to build something like Zcash. Hal Finney followed the Zerocoin/Zerocash initiative. CoinJoins on Bitcoin were proposed as a reaction to the lack of a ZK soft fork. Even Luke Dashjr agrees today that Bitcoin needs a ZK verifier. Zcash is building the future of Bitcoin. And if you love Bitcoin, you gotta support Zcash too.

Gloria Zhao is doing a great job. Look at her code, notice her persistence. Don’t resort to a 30-second clip from a podcast. The comments I’ve been reading are borderline misogynistic, and they came from people who never even wrote a “Hello World!” program in C.

We’re live! View quoted note →

Will go live with @Max in 2 hours to discuss his new project: White Noise A Nostr-based privacy messaging platform which comes at the right time to counter Chat Control in Europe. Join us if you would like to learn more! https://youtube.com/live/amNaZ35KIo8?feature=share

Multisig was instrumental in boosting security and bringing institutional adoption But if Gavin didn’t implement it in the early 2010s and some random Core dev pitched multisig today The plebs would go full “nooo, Bitcoin doesn’t need contracts go away with your shitcoin tech” and make up stupid narratives about potentially using multisigs to insert CSAM into the holy timechain. So happy that some innovations happened before the radicalization took place.

The most interesting part of this thought exercise is that they act like communists they hate free markets, competition, and ideas that challenge their worldview they establish cults in which the main virtue isn’t merit, but obedience to the ideology they hate anyone who makes money and expect to receive everything for free, especially the work of others they’d rather ask government authorities to regulate against the competition than compete themselves and they shamelessly work with governments, but pretend that somehow they’re the good guys not a single bone in their bodies challenges the status quo, they even brag about paying with credit cards Nothing right wing about them.

The slippery slope of filters & legal concerns: 1/ By increasing the size of OP_RETURN, we enable criminals to insert illegal data. User nodes become illegal in some jurisdictions! 2/ By routing all transactions, we enable criminals to send money. Apply this blacklist from OFAC or else your node is an illegal money transmitter. 3/ By adding this upgrade to Bitcoin, you enable criminals to have more economic freedom. Anyone running the activation client is a criminal. 4/ Register your node, we need to know your full name and address to be able to enforce existing laws and regulations. If you use Tor or a VPN, we will ask for logs from your ISP and the compliant VPN companies. 5/ Why are you even running a node? It’s redundant, there are too many copies of the blockchain already. There’s this cool SPV feature in the whitepaper that Mike Hearn built. Here, use our wallet instead. Why do you need a node, got something to hide?

Ok fam we’re ossified. It was fun dreaming about the one coin to rule them all, but it ain’t happening 🫡 The bad news: Bitcoin won’t be getting any more significant upgrades The good news: we have great alternatives that didn’t get compromised by legal concerns and remain cypherpunk AF

I am NOT content with Bitcoin the way it is today. Mostly because I am NOT a sellout suit, a banker, a treasury company shareholder, or just an enjoyer of paper money. I very much need new features and more programability. Privacy too.

Can’t wait for the Knots guys to try Citrea and have their minds blown.

“Bitcoin doesn’t need smart contracts, they’re shitcoin tech” So how is a company supposed to automate payments to employees? So that every worker, on a specific day of the month, in a moment when the transaction fees are reasonably low, receives a variable amount of bitcoin that’s denominated in the local fiat currency to their wallet. It’s been almost 17 years and we still can’t do something as basic as this. Or multisigs/timelocks that can’t be spent until the price reaches $1 million on one of the exchanges. It’s ridiculous. And some guys will argue that none of this is necessary.

What Bitcoin needs: privacy, contracts, quantum resistance, scaling What Bitcoin doesn’t need: infighting, censorship, drama, attacks on the devs who are trying to make privacy, contracts, quantum resistance & scaling happen

Bitcoin Core vs Knots is just a proxy What we’re witnessing is a separation between cypherpunks/anarchists and authoritarians/statists. This conflict has been brewing for many years, since the toxic maximalist meme somehow degenerated into the average Alex Jones supporter stereotype. Started out with eating steaks and praying to God, then grew into loving monarchies and praising authoritarian politicians who best embody the description of a 19th century monarch. Meanwhile, the nerds who want Bitcoin to be a neutral, censorship resistant & permissionless network became uncool and were left behind. So now the radicalized faction is really fighting against its roots, trying to bring down the establishment that taught them everything they know about Bitcoin before the politics got involved. There’s no way for the two camps to coexist, as their goals & vision are completely opposite. Just like the libertarians left in 2017 to support Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum, the authoritarians will also build their own safe space. It’s unfortunate, but inevitable at this point.

The same guys who went to great lengths to destroy my reputation & get me banned from conferences last year after interviewing Roger Ver are now on team Knots It’s funny, really. Literally all of them. Almost as if they were mentally and ideologically inclined to side with the censorship camp.