Gold bugs, 2013: Bitcoin is a bubble, there is no technological innovation there, buy gold or watch your nerd money go to 0. Bitcoiners, 2025: Zcash is a bubble, there is no technological innovation there, stack sats or watch your nerd money go to 0.

It’s nice to see that even the most closed-minded of the toxic Bitcoin conservatives are now paying attention to Zcash They might be negative about it now, but once they figure out how far this project has made it, maybe they’ll want to soft fork the latest version of Zerocash on Bitcoin 🙃

Pick your future: 1/ 21 million bitcoins with no privacy and institutional scaling for the masses. The price goes up against other assets, the store of value narrative works, but holders have no privacy and their government can confiscate the wealth. 2/ 500 million coins on 10 different networks that offer various features with different tradeoffs. Swapping between them is as easy as transferring credit between bank accounts, and the free market decides what the demand for this existing supply is (and therefore the price). Privacy, contracts, scalability are all possible on different chains, but 50% of all capital is still in bitcoin.

Been keeping my Bitcoin Core v30 node online 24/7 just to spite the knotzis who seem to obsess over metrics and stats. Pro tip: if your node is online 24/7 but doesn’t send or receive transactions, it’s useless. The miners, the exchanges & the business accepting BTC run 24/7 nodes already. You’re not adding any value to the network if you just stay online. But if you care about live stats, sure. It looks nice when more nodes are online. The important question is: why?

New favorite meme

There will only ever be 151 pokémons 1 true monotheistic religion 9 planets in the solar system 118 chemical elements in the periodic table 21 million coins for the entire monetary system Further research is a shitcoin and must be stopped at all costs.

If the most zealous of saylorite “there is no second best” toxic bitcoin maximalists actually took the time to study bitcoin history instead of getting “educated” by moronic high priests they would be investing in at least 5 altcoins that advance bitcoin research.

Something that I do when editing my podcasts is to add a noise filter plugin that removes the breathing sounds I can’t stand hearing the sounds of breathing or chewing – not even my own So when you’re listening to the Bitcoin Takeover podcast, breathes sound like pauses.

Last year when I interviewed @Peter Todd I’ve asked him to name 3 cryptocurrencies that are not scams Surprisingly, in spite of his history with Zcash as one of the biggest early critics, he named Zcash Which is why I went home and bought more ZEC at $40 😍

Had a dream about OP_RETURN size in Bitcoin 😂 So I woke up and checked to see if the fighting is over now that Bitcoin Core v30 is out and nothing catastrophic happened My God, these guys just won’t let go. They daydream about their CSAM and extreme situations where people get arrested. Let it go already!

The cover of BitcoinMagazine in July 2013 vs today “Zerocoin: Bitcoin Privacy Perfected” vs Michael Saylor playing chess Cypherpunks vs suits The Bitcoin that went from 0 to $1000 in 4 years vs the Bitcoin that went from $10k to $125k in 5 years Which side are you on?

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!

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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.

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