I’ve been mining on my own node for the past month using rented hashpower from Braiins and directing it to Ocean with around 2 PH/s. I was fully prepared to lose a bit while supporting decentralization, but funnily I actually ended up making around $50. To all the power seekers in Bitcoin: the plebs are coming. And on top of that, we’re even making money while doing it.

Actually, the fact that mining pools are so large may make it easier to carry out a UASF in practice. If around 30% of the hashrate is controlled by a single pool, then even a relatively small shift can change the dynamics very quickly. For example, if at the beginning 20% of the hashrate is mining on the BIP110 side and Foundry mines two blocks in a row on the opposing chain, then Antpool switching its 30% to the BIP110 side could suddenly push the situation close to 50/50. At that point, Foundry would face a real risk that the blocks it just mined could become invalid on the chain that eventually wins. Because miners are economically incentivized to avoid that risk, large pools may switch sides faster than many people expect. So ironically, mining centralization may actually make a UASF easier to activate, because only a few large pools need to change behavior for pressure on the rest of the network to increase dramatically.

I do not think that BIP110 changes Bitcoin’s censorship resistance in any meaningful way, and I believe it is needed to close a form of misuse of Bitcoin that was not previously possible. Because of the increasingly centralized block creation within mining, it is possible to route data around the node network entirely. You can have all nodes running strict policies, but if a single mining pool finds a large share of blocks and there is a direct way to send data to them, then those policies cannot effectively stop the data from entering the blockchain. This is exactly why BIP110 tries to introduce limitations that make abuse harder. In Bitcoin’s early days, this attack surface barely existed because nobody knew who would find the next block. Transactions had to propagate through the node network first, which meant node policy actually had strong influence. Today, with large mining pools, private transaction submission, and centralized block template creation, that dynamic has changed significantly. Once there is a reliable way to regularly store data on Bitcoin, projects begin forming around it and attract investors who increasingly fill Bitcoin with spam-like usage. Core’s policy changes contributed to a situation where nearly every block become completely filled with this type of data usage. If an individual miner refuses to include it, they put themselves at a financial disadvantage compared to other mining pools that continue accepting the fees.

Credit is the ability to outbid a saver today by sacrificing future freedom. lose-lose

Bitcoin was originally designed so that the network remains decentralized as long as all participants act in their own self-interest. But what happens when the perception of many users no longer reflects reality? In my view, the biggest attack vector against Bitcoin is misinformation directed at the different actors within the network, influencing whether changes are pushed through, or intentionally prevented. It is interesting to observe how nearly every large Bitcoin influencers end up holding the exact same position against the BIP. In many cases, I believe this is driven by fear of losing influence, reputation, or important relationships within the ecosystem. If we want Bitcoin to succeed, we need more large influencers with different views on important topics within Bitcoin.

The reason the financial system is the way it is comes down to greed. Satoshi showed a fairer system is possible. Many voices in Bitcoin lost that vision. Even if it stays small but decentralized, the vision survives. Anyone centralizing it to accumulate more is acting in self-interest. Don’t trust them.

UPS-backed node and internet router. Running self-sovereign Bitcoin with my own Lightning node, managing channels, and ~1 PH of rented hashrate pointed to my node. That’s how Bitcoin stays decentralized.

Renting hashrate and pointing it to your own node feels right. Glad to contribute to more decentralized mining.

In my opinion, Adam Back has lost a lot of credibility. First, he was involved with Epstein, and now I’m hearing more and more about Blockstream actively working on smart contracts on sidechains, with long-term plans to potentially expand this technology to Bitcoin Onchain. This makes me question his motivations. I no longer trust that his opinions are purely based on what is best for Bitcoin. It increasingly seems that his views may be influenced by business interests, pushing additional use cases on Bitcoin through Blockstream and promoting his treasury company, even if those use cases may not actually benefit Bitcoin as money.

Many of the possibilities that are now used for spam were introduced with Taproot, with the promise that they would improve Bitcoin as a payment network. For a long time the argument was that these use cases simply needed time to develop. Now more than four years have passed and Taproot is still barely used for payments. It had enough time to prove its value. What we see instead is that a significant portion of blockspace is used for things that have little to do with Bitcoin as money, or a payment network. The issue is that Bitcoin evolves through consensus. Bitcoin ultimately becomes what its users use it for. If more activity revolves around NFTs, smart contracts, DeFi, or similar applications, the incentives around Bitcoin will inevitably shift in that direction. Bitcoin is built on trade-offs. Decentralization and scaling cannot both be maximized. Other applications have very different trade-offs than Bitcoin as decentralized money and a store of value. Once those use cases become large within the network, they also gain influence over its future direction. At that point it becomes much harder to steer Bitcoin back toward its role as money. If a large share of blockspace is already used for other purposes, that shift has already begun. That is the risk I see, and why I support moving Bitcoin back toward being primarily a store of value and payment network.

I see the problem that v30 is trying to address, but I completely disagree with the solution they chose. The concern is understandable: if users can bypass node relay rules by sending large OP_RETURN transactions directly to miners, that creates centralization pressure. Miners could start offering private submission channels for large data transactions. Over time, that weakens the public mempool and gives mining pools more gatekeeping power. After recognizing this issue, Core likely looked at different ways to handle it. In the end, they decided to align relay policy with consensus and completely remove the OP_RETURN size limit at the policy level. The idea was straightforward: if the standard relay path allows what consensus already allows, there is no incentive to route transactions around the network. Up to that point, I can follow the reasoning. But that is not the only possible solution. Why not go in the opposite direction? Instead of loosening relay rules, why not tighten consensus to 80 bytes? That would have: • Closed the bypass vector completely • Removed the incentive for direct miner submission • Kept the attack surface smaller • Avoided normalizing larger data embedding • Reduced legal and reputational risks • Made large-scale spam more expensive, since it would need to be split into multiple transactions In short, instead of expanding what is permitted at the policy layer, consensus could have been made stricter. So the real question is: Why was this option not seriously debated? Were there strong technical reasons against it, or was it simply not the direction they wanted to take?