Is Bitcoin a Captured Project? Reflections After the BIP-110 Fiasco The most important question in Bitcoin right now is whether it is a captured project. The short answer is: we do not know yet. On the one hand, miners managed to ignore a change proposal that did not undergo URSF. Whether they colluded or not does not matter. The crucial point is that three mining pools could decide the fate of the network. That is scary as fuck. On the other hand, BIP-110 was a minority soft fork supported by approximately 20% of nodes. Would miners have behaved differently if BIP-110 had managed to convince a majority of the network? We do not know, but that is also scary. At this moment, I think a hard fork is a premature idea. Before unleashing this demon, we should figure out how to test the network and answer the question above: do nodes control the network? Would it matter, for example, if a majority of them supported BIP-110? To do this, we need a BIP that can convince more users. Apart from this, we should focus on: 1. Supporting the development of competitive and conservative node implementations. We have Knots. We have the Production Ready idea. That is a start. 2. Supporting the decentralisation of mining. We should also thank the Roughnecks. They have fallen in battle, but they will remain legends. For now, we should all return to the legacy chain and work on putting it to a new test. One that will allow us to find out whether node runners are at the wheel or not.

Bootstrapping Vicious Circle 💀 No one offers products/services for sats → because no one accepts sats for products/services → because no one offers products/services for sats. The goal is to break it. Start offering your products or services for sats even if: • there seems to be no market yet • it costs you something • it feels inconvenient right now Play the long game. Bitcoin is here to stay. Those who build the Bitcoin economy early will be rewarded later. ⚡

⚡ To all Bitcoin book authors Too many of your books are only available for fiat on Amazon. This is disappointing. You expect people to adopt Bitcoin, yet you don’t make it easy for them to pay you directly in sats. Keep Amazon for no-coiners. That’s fine. But why not offer both? Your Bitcoin readers want to pay you in sats without feeding the big tech behemoths. Make it possible. Practice what you preach. ⚠️ Please SHARE this post with a Bitcoin book author if you happen to know one.

Bottom of the bear and Warsaw still walking. Great talk as always. @BitcoinWalk #proofofwalk

Writing is a form of thinking. If you want to learn to write, start by learning to think with a pen in your hand.

The Network Theory of Ethics Here is the thesis I’ve been working on for some time. It deserves a treatise, and I am currently working on one. Still, I am posting it here on NOSTR because I know many of you will challenge it. And that is exactly what I need. I’ve dubbed it "The Network Theory of Ethics". It claims the following: 1. Morality can be derived from physics. 2. More specifically, it is an emergent property of the social network structures that exist within a reality governed by the laws of thermodynamics. 3. Moral values arise when individuals (nodes within a social network) create and maintain the social fabric in a reality in which energy dissipates and in which the expenditure of energy is required to temporarily reduce entropy within the network. More to come. Please share this with anyone you think may contribute to the discussion.

Our CWO is on leave, but the show must go on… @BitcoinWalk Warsaw keeps walking #proofofwalk