In 2017, a large part of the bitcoin community rallied behind BIP148 and a User Activated Soft Fork to force a popular upgrade (SegWit) to bitcoin when miners dragged their feet after the New York Agreement (signed while I was in prison) It increased the block size without increasing their profits. The understanding was that an agreement would remove the negative cloud over the development stall in bitcoin during the 2014-2017 bear market. At first just a fringe group of Bitcoin developers and community members, they turned “UASF” into a credible threat: nodes and economic actors could coordinate to orphan non‑compliant miners, flipping the old assumption that hash power alone decides Bitcoin’s future. It was popular because SegWit had broad dev support, strong economic backing, and a clear technical upside in capacity, malleability fixes, and upgradeability. This would trigger a bull market, miners would make more money even if blocks weren’t actually bigger. But the miners wanted to hold out for actual bigger blocks. Bigger blocks = more transaction fees. The issue is that bigger blocks could also lead to centralization and the demise of bitcoin. In 2017 the bluff was called and SegWit was activated. The bitcoin exchanges saved the day by announcing they wouldn’t follow a chain with larger blocks and call it “bitcoin” Checkmate. BIP110 is trying to reuse the same weapon in a very different environment. Instead of activating a long‑planned upgrade, it’s a one‑year soft fork to restrict arbitrary data (inscriptions, images, etc.) to “protect Bitcoin as money.” The problem: the consensus picture is nothing like 2017. Miners aren’t on board in size, exchanges and big custodians are quiet, and a non‑trivial share of users actually want permissionless use of block space, even for things old‑school Bitcoiners call spam. BIP110 looks more like one faction using the UASF playbook to impose its policy preferences on a divided community.

Someone get this message to Mechanic. He seems to think that im under the impression that softforks need consensus. They don't. What they do need is enough support... Segwit most definitely had enough support, which justified UASF RDTS does NOT have anywhere near the support to justify UASF. This is why it's viewed as an attack.

"Very real threat of wiping out" 0.5% of the hashrate is not a real threat though. It just makes you look like you're posturing.

“So the moral of the story is don’t buy Bitcoin because you know it’s going to crash again.”

New SquirrelDisk release. UI closer to DaisyDisk now. git.iris.to/#/npub1xdhnr9mrv…

In 2 months the mandatory signaling for BIP-110 will trigger. Be sure to bookmark bip110.com/ in order to learn more about this Bitcoin soft fork and follow its progress!

“We (Monero) have had our own inflation bugs… it's a natural downside to building out privacy as the default in these systems.” This. Bitcoin's $1.3 trillion market cap is the equivalent of the life savings of 150 million median Americans. So far, all the available on-chain privacy technologies that provide good k-anonymity sets, other than coinjoin, have had serious inflation exploits that could have destroyed the entire value of the privacy protected coins they were used on. It's good that these options exist for those who want to use them. But Bitcoin's #1 goal needs to be maintaining value. Privacy is important. But it is our #2 priority. Not #1. Besides, Bitcoin in practice has very good payment privacy the way people actually use it: Lightning. For many threat models we got the rough equivalent of Zcash style on-chain privacy without the inflation risk, and with nearly instant transactions. The main work to be done there is to get more people on ecash and self-hosted lightning, and get more Lightning wallets integrated with coinjoin.

Silver bullets and the Computer Security AIpocalypse, by @zooko x.com/i/status/2038457064851…

Tips de alguien que vivió mas de 4 Bear Markets y sigue acá: 1) Aprovechar el ayuno intermitente comiendo una buena ensalada de lechugas de tu propia huerta cada 3 días. 2) Dejar de usar el auto, y aprovechar para caminar unos 20.000 pasos diarios, de paso mejora la circulación y fortalece los musculos. 3) Comprar una agujereadora de cueros para bajar dos tallas al cinturón. 4) Organizar vacaciones en la plaza y amigate con el vecino con pelopincho. 5) Dejar de usar anteojos, ya no sirve ver el precio. Recordá: no estás perdiendo dinero, estás ganando carácter y es solo por un par de añitos!

learnmeabitcoin .com is goated amongst educational bitcoin resources it's got the best explainers and it's packed with utilities was a pleasure chatting with @in3rsha diving into everything: from the genesis story to how Tachyons is his preferred CSS framework, and much more

Bitcoin is already money. Stop gaslighting.

If there is a minority of miners signaling for bip110 (let's say under 20%) then the rest of the miners will be happy. When those 20% fork off the network there would be a lot more revenue for those remaining. The incentives are to NOT mine a fork that did not reach consensus.

On this day in history, 10 years ago, the Opendime was released. The USB can be passed by hand, checked by plugging in, and spent only after removing the resistor off the circuit board to reveal the private key, turning the bitcoin into the object itself.

> “Core is moving forward with more and more versions.” Yes, in case you hadn’t noticed, Bitcoin Core follows a release schedule: new major versions come out every six months, in April and October. Maintenance releases (bump in Minor version) come out as needed.

this was all done last year. now it's a waste of everyones time. there's comprehensive FAQs massive scrollbacks, 100 of sunk hours explaining the same basics again and again. enough. they can FAFO.

Tick tock. Congrats, miner!

No idea. I'd probably disappear too

In Cuba, people pay one dollar for a USB stick. What is on it: all of Wikipedia. Every article. Every image. 7 million entries. In North Korea, the same kind of stick is smuggled across the border in plastic bottles. In US and European prisons, inmates use it because they cannot touch the open internet. The software that makes those sticks work is called Kiwix. A Swiss developer named Emmanuel Engelhart wrote it in 2007 in Lausanne because four billion people on Earth cannot read Wikipedia. Nineteen years later he is still shipping. Mostly unpaid. The repo: → 5,613 stars across the org → GPL-3.0 licensed → 100 languages → 4 million users worldwide How it compares: ChatGPT Plus → $240/yr, online only, blocked Britannica → $74.95/yr, online only, blocked Kiwix → $0, offline, works anywhere You download one file. 109 gigabytes. It fits on a $12 USB stick. That stick now contains roughly a thousand years of human knowledge. Here is the wildest part: The Wikimedia Foundation reported in 2018 that 80% of Kiwix users were in emerging countries. North Korea bans the internet but they cannot ban a USB stick already inside the country. In Cuba, vendors sell weekly Wikipedia updates for one dollar. The Foundation called it "connecting the unconnected." Engelhart's mission, written in a 2014 email: "Our users are sailors on the oceans, poor students thirsty for knowledge, world's citizens suffering from censorship or free minded prisoners." The honest part: 109 GB of disk space. UI looks like 2010. Updates every few months, not real time. And every byte is Creative Commons or public domain. Zero piracy. Zero DMCA risk. Lausanne, Switzerland. One Swiss developer. Every human library, in your pocket, even when the lights go out.

BIP54: “Consensus Cleanup” was just advanced to Complete: github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob… Let’s do this!

16 years ago today, Laszlo Hanyecz had tens of thousands of bitcoin he had mined just burning a hole in his pocket. He also had a hankering for pizza. The rest... was history. Fun fact: he kept his pizza offer open for a while and in total purchased 8 pizzas for 40,000 BTC!