The Sat Stacker Show 🔶

You're living through one of those 10-15 days a year where Bitcoin makes most of its gains. Enjoy.

Some people (like @adam3us) disagreed with my point that the BIP-110 ordeal could have been avoided if OP_RETURN was left alone for a while. Some also pointed out that Core doesn't need to do anything the users/plebs want. That is true! Bitcoin Core is not Bitcoin, and the Core team/project can do what they choose. Only it's a bit more complicated than that. Let's address the first point. The following was my reply to @ToneVays: -- It was at a time when there were so many suspicious looking missteps on the Core side. - Banning people from GitHub - Locking thread and unlocking to ninja ACK (still no good explanation of this) - Citrea being cited as a reason for change - Antoine asking Peter to open the PR for him (sure he had a reason but optics looked bad in light of the situation) - Distributed Authoritarianism - Questions over the legitimacy of an appointed maintainer (and the already prevalent confusion about how maintainer roles work and IETF-like process) List goes on. It was a pile of tinder waiting to go up in flames. -- The next point is that most people did use Core, so they viewed it as theirs. Core is and isn't theirs at the same time - if that makes sense. There's actually a parallel in game dev. When balancing a game (RTS or MMO), you have to be very careful because everyone gets attached to the various unit stats and abilities. There were times working on COH and DOW that we would buff almost everything else rather than nerf one thing, because we knew how passionate and angry the players could be when they perceive something to be "taken away" from them. Interestingly enough there's a direct example from @VitalikButerin: "One day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit. In 2011, searching for a new purpose in life, I discovered Bitcoin." Also, as I have said before, Bitcoiners do not like being told what to do or forced to just accept things. For the average non-technical user, the OP_RETURN change was tantamount to a consensus change or an attack on Bitcoin because they didn't understand how it all worked exactly, didn't know how to change their config, and were angry at the amount of spam on the chain. So Core has no obligation to listen to the users, and that's fine, but they should not expect the users to not get angry when they perceive their Bitcoin/money to be under attack. Worth repeating my view that devs should probably operate under nyms and be more low-key like Satoshi.

If you don't take responsibility for your own hand in directly spawning the BIP-110 movement, it will just happen again. Maybe you can't see it, but your "side" was just as nasty in its attacks, especially given you and other Core devs' close association with angry vitriol-spewing people like Brian from Bitcoin Magazine. Did you really not expect that anger and vitriol to be returned tenfold? All of it amplified by the Zhao/Newberry improprieties and a long list of other clumsy, guilty-looking missteps. All I did was hint at structural problems within Core, problems Jon Atack later discussed openly. Nothing I said was inaccurate, much less libel. This entire mess could have been avoided if you had just left OP_RETURN alone for a year or two until things cooled off. Everyone knew it was only a default, which is exactly the point: changing it or not changing it made no practical difference. BIP-110 supporters were largely not technical. They were ordinary people, artists, podcasters, musicians, your average Bitcoiner, and they perceived a threat to Bitcoin, which is to say a threat to their money. You don't need a deep understanding of human psychology to grok why that was going to cause an uproar. You may be a great coder, but you have no self-awareness and no EQ. Also, if I just went whichever way the wind blows, the Big Blockers likely would have won the Blocksize War.