okay I read "Hijacking Bitcoin"
I never paid much attention to Roger or BCH, he always seemed whiny to me.
and he is kinda whiny, there's a fair amount of rehashing of Twitter and bitcointalk drama in the book, but not without good reason.
I'm ultimately sympathetic to his case. essentially he provides an early 2010s viewpoint and rationale for the development of the problems on Bitcoin that I complain about anyway.
Bitcoin was designed for L1 financial transactions. reserving L1 for "settlement" and moving actual user's financial transactions to higher layers is a change in spec. It isn't necessary to be anal about Satoshi's original intent, but there's *no reason* to not pursue it. nobody's needs to run a full node on an RPI and ultimately, it isn't necessary for EVERY user to run their own node at all.
it's ridiculous people are now arguing we CAN have trusted banks for scaling with custodial ecash, but we CAN'T have SPV nodes for light wallets and good UX for self-custody L1 transactions.
IOW, Roger is right. Bitcoin was always intended to have a block size increase to do *some* scaling on L1, but was captured by small blockers pushing a fringe view that actually doesn't make sense in the light of day. a block size limit that was meant to be temporary became enshrined as gospel.
the proponents of SOV have zero vision for Bitcoin beyond ossification and the fiat enrichment of early adopters. refusing to do ANY scaling on L1 combined with the domination of the SOV and gold 2.0 narrative is a guarantee of regulatory capture of the Bitcoin network. pointing this out is simply hand waved away with " Bitcoin is inevitable " "the hardest money always wins" cope.
theyve succeeded in making this view seem normal and sane.
it isn't. they've just been loud enough to make it seem normal.
Roger makes a decent case for thinking that this capture was coordinated.
it's curious that he is talking about possible links to intelligence agencies who want to subvert Bitcoin (remember Peter Todds leaked emails and John Dillon?) and here we are today with another link between Bitcoin and Epstein as a proxy for the legacy financial system.
It seems undeniable theres wan agenda to keep blocks small and to prevent zero-conf transactions from happening with RBF.
so if you're looking into connections between Epstein and Bitcoin, you would be looking for ways that his money supported this "small blocks forever" argument that enables regulatory capture.
I'm a bad conspiracy theorist because I remain agnostic when there isn't good data.
but whether it's a coordinated conspiracy among three letter agencies, or just a social media push by a minority group of zealous small blockers, the result has been the same. Bitcoin has been captured by the SOV/Gold 2.0 people and there is no open governance so any change is ultimately decided upon by a small group behind closed doors.
if you think Bitcoin doesn't have governance, you're wrong. I don't necessarily agree with how Roger thinks it has gone, but anybody who has experience with open systems knows that governence happens anyway. basically there is either 1)a dictatorship or theres 2)a federation or there are 3)endless meetings for people to air their "concerns" and then the people with actual power make the decisions themselves.
no, your home node does not matter.
and since Bitcoin has the third style of governance the only recourse is a hard fork.
I don't think BCH is going anywhere, as he obviously seems to be hoping. It seems clear to me that Monero has become the preferred silver to bitcoin's gold. I do think we will have a multicoin future, but it's hard for me to see what chains like BCH and LTC have to offer.
although I also exist in my own echo chamber.
so to sum up, Roger does a pretty good job of putting all this information together in one place. its presented through the lens of somebody who is sentimental about bitcoins " original purpose", so there's that.
it should be required reading for Bitcoin maxis. it's also a natural compliment to "The Blocksize War" and good for anyone like me, who didn't get involved in the *social aspect* of Bitcoin until 2016.
#RogerWasRight
#bitcoin
Replies (64)
Is this the same Francis that via his state licensed BITCOIN BULL company sells KYC fiat loans to BTC maxi hodlers as using Bitcoin?
Lol.
there were plenty of shady people everywhere and everybody was being as terrible as they possibly could be.
Roger has been super cringe but I have yet to see any evidence of him being a bad actor.
unless you just consider supporting a blocksize increase is being a bad actor.
in which case, I think you should reread Satoshi's original posts.
Interesting, very interesting!
okay maybe he's ALSO compromised by financial incentive 😆
I recommend it. it's a side of the story that has been overwhelmed by the SOV, maxi perspective.
Good to read even if you don't agree with the idea of a blocksize increase.
I think the winner is the chain which is used by people to transact with each other in a censorship resistant way.
NOT fiat-denominated price.
and I think that's a very important distinction.
Noted. Sadly I just don't have much appetite for that sort of thing atm. I'd love to hear someone I stole my opinions from argue against some of these points though. There's some confusion and doubts I've always had about SPV nodes and that sort of thing, even though I've read several long form posts about the whole thing in the past. And the RBF/zero-conf stuff is murky to me as well.
Let you know if I end up picking it up though
the winner has the most fee revenue (and the answer is really funny)
oh that's a good metric
Oh yeah, one of the things I remember now regarding smaller blocks was bandwidth more than processor being an issue. There's a name (similar to how we have Moore's Law for processing) for a similar thing on transmission speed trajectory, and it's far slower a growth than Moore's Law (which is obviously not even a real law of nature itself). I remember that tidbit also being quite convincing. No need to reply, just wanted to get that off my chest.
ETH
shhh don't scare them
Nielsen's law. Which also is holding up quite well.
x200 since the introduction of the 1M "safety" limit.
Average household bandwidth in 2010: 5.4 Mbit/s
Average projected household bandwidth for 2026: 1 Gbit/s (which equals 1000 Mbit/s)
Are you blind to the fact that the one thing that set Bitcoin apart from all other forms of electronic money ("peer to peer electronic cash") has been buried in the flurry of centralized financial instruments?
Hanshan
okay I read "Hijacking Bitcoin"
I never paid much attention to Roger or BCH, he always seemed whiny to me.
and he is kinda whiny, there's a fair amount of rehashing of Twitter and bitcointalk drama in the book, but not without good reason.
I'm ultimately sympathetic to his case. essentially he provides an early 2010s viewpoint and rationale for the development of the problems on Bitcoin that I complain about anyway.
Bitcoin was designed for L1 financial transactions. reserving L1 for "settlement" and moving actual user's financial transactions to higher layers is a change in spec. It isn't necessary to be anal about Satoshi's original intent, but there's *no reason* to not pursue it. nobody's needs to run a full node on an RPI and ultimately, it isn't necessary for EVERY user to run their own node at all.
it's ridiculous people are now arguing we CAN have trusted banks for scaling with custodial ecash, but we CAN'T have SPV nodes for light wallets and good UX for self-custody L1 transactions.
IOW, Roger is right. Bitcoin was always intended to have a block size increase to do *some* scaling on L1, but was captured by small blockers pushing a fringe view that actually doesn't make sense in the light of day. a block size limit that was meant to be temporary became enshrined as gospel.
the proponents of SOV have zero vision for Bitcoin beyond ossification and the fiat enrichment of early adopters. refusing to do ANY scaling on L1 combined with the domination of the SOV and gold 2.0 narrative is a guarantee of regulatory capture of the Bitcoin network. pointing this out is simply hand waved away with " Bitcoin is inevitable " "the hardest money always wins" cope.
theyve succeeded in making this view seem normal and sane.
it isn't. they've just been loud enough to make it seem normal.
Roger makes a decent case for thinking that this capture was coordinated.
it's curious that he is talking about possible links to intelligence agencies who want to subvert Bitcoin (remember Peter Todds leaked emails and John Dillon?) and here we are today with another link between Bitcoin and Epstein as a proxy for the legacy financial system.
It seems undeniable theres wan agenda to keep blocks small and to prevent zero-conf transactions from happening with RBF.
so if you're looking into connections between Epstein and Bitcoin, you would be looking for ways that his money supported this "small blocks forever" argument that enables regulatory capture.
I'm a bad conspiracy theorist because I remain agnostic when there isn't good data.
but whether it's a coordinated conspiracy among three letter agencies, or just a social media push by a minority group of zealous small blockers, the result has been the same. Bitcoin has been captured by the SOV/Gold 2.0 people and there is no open governance so any change is ultimately decided upon by a small group behind closed doors.
if you think Bitcoin doesn't have governance, you're wrong. I don't necessarily agree with how Roger thinks it has gone, but anybody who has experience with open systems knows that governence happens anyway. basically there is either 1)a dictatorship or theres 2)a federation or there are 3)endless meetings for people to air their "concerns" and then the people with actual power make the decisions themselves.
no, your home node does not matter.
and since Bitcoin has the third style of governance the only recourse is a hard fork.
I don't think BCH is going anywhere, as he obviously seems to be hoping. It seems clear to me that Monero has become the preferred silver to bitcoin's gold. I do think we will have a multicoin future, but it's hard for me to see what chains like BCH and LTC have to offer.
although I also exist in my own echo chamber.
so to sum up, Roger does a pretty good job of putting all this information together in one place. its presented through the lens of somebody who is sentimental about bitcoins " original purpose", so there's that.
it should be required reading for Bitcoin maxis. it's also a natural compliment to "The Blocksize War" and good for anyone like me, who didn't get involved in the *social aspect* of Bitcoin until 2016.
#RogerWasRight
#bitcoin
View quoted note →
Knowing that the 1M limit was first reached in 2017, we could assume that 20-40M blocks would be just fine for today's bandwidth infrastructure.
BCH has 32M and from there a dynamic growth algo, but is still utilised under 1M and never has been attacked in the way feared by Hal (and Satoshi).
Does bull bitcoin do fiat loans? Pretty sure your confusing with strike
Bull bitcoin is pretty based from everything I have heard or seen. Wish it was available in the US…
that's fine
but the point is you can do exactly the same thing on L1 with bigger blocks.
just instead of running an ecash mint you run a node.
the main difference being you actually have basic L1 assurances instead of a Rube Goldberg machine you have to maintain built on top of L1.
I told you what was inaccurate. You're just not responding to what I said.
Hanshan
this is an "all or nothing" argument and its a false dichotomy.
we should have had a real blocksize increase already.
it's clear that the block size limit was temporary and Satoshi talked about raising it.
this doesn't mean that "the base layer has to be for micropayments for the rest of time"
it's true Satoshi also talked about payment channels.
that doesn't mean "L1 has to only be a settlement layer for central banks for the rest of time"
The big blockers aren't any more retarded than the now-dominant small blocker arguments.
they are both illogical ideological arguments which are not rooted in reality and pragmatism.
and maybe it's just hindsight
but Roger was right that we could have had a block size increase and it would not have caused centralization.
View quoted note →
You are right. I should have referenced that they started heavily marketing as a no KYC buying place but since caved to regulator demands.
There will always be zealots who actually use the tools. I use them too.
Our personal anecdotal stories don't mean that we can disregard the greater incentive structure.
Bitcoin has design flaws that are not being addressed. They will prevent widespread sovereign usage.
Monero fixes some of those flaws. It's just a fact.
Each of us are welcome to have our stupid ideas and root for our favorite team without having all the data. Nobody can be an expert in everything after all.
I have my own LN node and use it almost every day.
Bitcoin is still broken and on course for regulatory capture. Capture will destroy it's fundamental value proposition (of censorship p2p value transfer) and it will be useless to sovereign users.
You just need to calculate how many people can open a $1000-10000 lightning channel to see that lightning doesn't scale without L1 block size increase.
Its in the whitepaper ain't it?
we dont need to abruptly scale to onboard everyone on the planet.
but its pretty fucking stupid to deliberately constrain L1 and then develop custodial solutions on the higher layers,
just to fix our design choices on the base layer.
He genuinely believed that BCH was the legitimate version of Bitcoin.
Scaling via second layers is a bigger design change than incremental increases of the block size.
Average where? US? Seems high for Uganda or El Salvador.
Will have to check the source again.
In many cities you get 10 Gbit/s and even in the countryside 300 MBit/s outside of rural areas is normal. So the estimate seems quite okay.
Most nodes are in highly poulated aras of US, Europe and Asia and that really didn't change over the last 17 years.
Weird, I don't see your reply on Damus, but I do on jumble.
Yes, that's the one (I think). It's a good argument for keeping blocks small iirc.
he's saying that average bandwidth is 200x greater than it was when the blocksize limit was set.
Keys are the peer in 'peer to peer.'
People are cheering ecash banks as a scaling solution and completely ignoring the fact you can get the better tradeoffs by just having bigger blocks.
Its a question of narrative and expressed design. The expressed design goal right now is "Artificially constrict L1 throughput and build Rube Goldberg machines on top to deal with the design limitations".
Which is dumb considering the increase in bandwidth and storage in the last 10 years.
>> Block may grow at some point.
Do you see a lot of indication that might be a possibility? anywhere?
Cause all I see is complete paralysis and failure of any system to make change at all.
The only option is to move to another chain or fork.
It's just bad design choices.
Then maybe I'm thinking of something else. Will have to go check in morning and get back to you. I know where I read it, just too late to go fishing
arguably because The Narrative for the last 9 years has been to move actual financial transactions to L2. That's where all the real effort of the industry and 90% of the social narrative in Bitcoin has been.
if there had just been a block size increase and no huge push to make lightning The Answer, things would look appreciably different.
I don't think it's plausible to argue that normies trusting a node run by Uncle Jim or a paid service is a huge problem, but that trusted L2 and L3 solutions are NOT a problem.
Storage, CPU, latency and bandwidth are limiting factors.
In general people thought of bandwidth as the biggest limiting factor, because a real P2P node is not just receiving.
Latency and CPU can be fixed through software upgrades with a huge margin. Latency (block propagation) has been fixed in BCH through I believe it's called Xthinner tech. CPU parallisation has not yet been a problem in any coin, but it essentially gives huge headroom for expansion.
Storage expansion is happening as envisioned. It's much more a problem in Monero as Bitcoun can be pruned very efficiently.
Back in the day some vocal people thougt or proposed that laws could break and erroring on the "safe" side seemed smart as no one can project the future.
12 years later we know new tech/ways have been discovered and laws held up.
We killed MoE, because some believers beliefed the trend will break while other believers believed that this time won't be different.
What do we do with this information?
Personally I am happen about this, as I believe transparent blockchains to be a (at the beginnnijg neccessary) design flaw, that never should have been rising to the size they are now.
Oh, hosted lightning's a problem too. But that's being addressed quite well with Zeus, Blixt, and Phoenix. Adoption's not there yet, but Zeus only added the embedded node in the last year.
And then there's Spark, which is seeing rapid adoption through WoS. Still has tradeoffs but I'd call it more accptable than use of a third party node.
What the masses do with their coins isn't much my concern anyway. The scaling debates usually seem to suggest we need to get broad adoption so Bitcoin can be used as money to enrich the community using it. Experiments like Lugano, El Salvador, Bitcoin Jungle, and local circular economies beg to differ. As long as there is a remnant, as
@Alekandar Svetski wrote about, able to maintain a liquid market, Bitcoin will work just fine. Those who don't adopt it will continue to be impoverished and likely gradually move over, or die off as breeding is beyond their economic means.
Most people aren't using lightning because there isn't space on chain -- there is, cheaper than ever (or at least, the Satoshi era when 0 was an acceptable fee). They're using it because it's faster, more private, and arguably easier to handle addressing (though lightning addresses are arguably only about equal with BTCPay in terms of infrastructure requirements).
this seems like a reasonable view, but it seems like a "Bitcoin isn't going to be used by a large number of people anyway" view.
and as long as a large number of people aren't using Bitcoin anyway, those people can run their own nodes
what exactly do you think the positive trade-offs are, of using something like Spark as opposed to trusting a L1 node I mean?
I'd suggest that people are using lightning because zero conf transactions were taken out behind the woodshed and shot.
Anon was right, it was Neilson's law. It grows slower than Moores is one consideration. But I could swear there was one more thing about time to verify large blocks leading to centralization, but not finding details.
I've seen some calculations on attacks of this nature, but not sure enough to say much more.
My block size war knowledge leaves a bit to be desired :/
There aren't any arguments for keeping blocks as small as possible left standing.
It's just everybody has collectively shrugged their shoulders and decided to try to cobble something together on LN.
You are thinking of latency, which was mainly about mining coordination. Meaning less orphans and proper block header propagation, so you don't need to send the whole block at first but have time to download the real block data. This especially ba problem if one block follows fast after another.
I don't know if or how BTC fixed it as 4 M propagates almost immediatley, ,but BCH has something called like Xthinner that theoretically enabled Gigabit transaction 5 years ago.
Correct, that's the thing, thought maybe there was more to it than that, but maybe it is just a miner concern outside extreme cases/delays which would make nodes incapable of catching up. Lopp wrote a good little study on it, which I think I corrected some math on (but never got him to look at it, though I'm pretty sure my correction is accurate).
Post is too old for me to find on mobile atm, sadly. It's interesting and will come back to share it later. It shows advantage one gets as function of delay time they can bake in.
I wanna return to this topic when I have more time. Maybe I'll finally understand a little bit better the complex issue(s) underlying that I've sorta glossed over for a while 😬
its almost like alienating all the people who wanted to make Bitcoin a p2p payment system in 2018 was a mistake....
Price IS a signal
its a signal of how much speculative Wall Street and VC money feels Bitcoin is a better safe haven than the other options.
this is not a metric I particularly care about.
Wait
Spark is fine because it's a trusted 3rd party that can't steal your coins but provides a better UX.
so what's the problem with trusting someone elses node then?
It sure looks to me like you've just replaced the trust assumptions on a higher layer. the only advantage being that companies like Spark and Blockstream now have a business model of selling solutions to artificially constrained L1 throughput.
anecdotal evidence aside,
I don't think it's debatable that Bitcoin adoption for payments has stalled and is actively discouraged.
before there was hash attacks on Monero, zero-conf transactions were normal and worked fine.
No.
Measuring against fiat is a mistake. Bitcoin's success or failure is in giving people the opportunity to *opt out of fiat* and transact directly with each other.
Looking to fiat price to measure purchasing power is A metric, but it's not THE metric.
My best hope for Bitcoin banks that don't give up privacy or rug risk so far is Fedimint. I don't know if they've quite neutralized rug risk but they seem like they may be getting there with some creative methods of blinded federation.
While our territory of freedom remains entirely and completely dependent on imports from the fiat dominion there is no need to scale bitcoin because it's simply a financial asset within the fiat economy.
There's no technical problem with a linear increase in block size if Moore's law remains exponential.
This hasn't been my impression. Especially amid Square, HoneyBadger, and PlebQR making it very easy to either accept bitcoin as a merchant, or for users to pay in bitcoin to another user who pays in fiat for the good being purchased, building in p2p exchange functionality and payment all in one step.
I think the big companies jumping into Bitcoin pre-blocksize war were adopting a shiny new thing but not in a particularly sustainable way to begin with, and they were never prepared for the continued volatility.
At the end of the day I don't want to spend Bitcoin at Amazon -- they can have the fiat. If I only have Bitcoin I can buy gift cards, but as someone who uses both in a spend and replace manner, the people I'm buying stuff from with Bitcoin are those who I legitimately want to support. If I resent that I'm buying from you in the first place but need what you're selling, you're getting the fiat.
If anything really killed bitcoin payments though it wasn't blocksize considerations. It was the rise of stablecoins.
If there had been a movement to use Bitcoin as a MoE 8 years ago
rather than constraining throughput and making it about increased purchasing power,
maybe we would need scaling solutions by now...
They're going back to L1 now. But ethereum is not solving the same problem as bitcoin. It has never and will never adopt a security model where the State is the adversary. So it can safely centralize without breaking the model whereas we cannot.
well, and bandwidth right?
A lot of work was done by a lot of people to get merchants and net producers to request payment in bitcoin but it all failed.
I usually include chips and the connections between them in my calculation.
my first thought is
"how do I know this is actually federated, and not just one entity that spun up a bunch of keys?"
There's some stuff I don't fully agree with here, but this is a good note regardless and you raise important points.
easy repost
cheers man, I appreciate you taking the time to say so.
"Yo, but if ETH ain't trippin' on the same vibes as BTC, how you think that affects their long-term game? 🤔💭 #CryptoTalk"
That's a question I haven't delved reply enough to answer. Probably a better question for Obi Nwosu (or maybe
@Jeff Booth).
I just know that as it's ecash it comes with much better privacy than Spark or conventional custodians. But beating that rug risk is indeed the holy grail...
Tested and ran early builds of fedi, the app guides you through a signing ceremony for your federation guardians and then connects LN infra to your instance. The federation is only in terms of who is the mint custodians, not the infra below it.
The app then developed a lot more, worth trying out and checking their integrated app ecosystem
