…and some stuff about full nodes Introduction This became much longer than I originally planned. It’s all loosely strung together but there’s a lot of information here that is definitely worth reading, especially if you’re new to the community. Whether you already agree with me or not, I recommend reading this so you can pass it on to future members of the community. They are the most important ones that need to see everything I’ve referenced below. Not us. Because this won’t end. #NO2X “I don’t post on Reddit” was my unofficial motto while browsing Reddit, until one day I was compelled into lecturing some person over why our grandmas won’t be securing their own private keys. “I don’t post on Medium” wasn’t even a motto of mine. post on Medium…right? People ‘ in this space post on Medium, and I’m nobody…right? I don’t code, I don’t have a name, I don’t have a following, and I constantly make mistakes attempting to understand or explain the protocol to other people. Developers involved’ I’m just a … user “Wait, hold on, what is he talking about? What is ‘posting on Medium’ even supposed to mean?” -Everyone You’re right. The fact that I’m posting on means nothing. It’s just the name of a website, with features that allow me to represent myself in the way I wish to be represented . Therein lies the underlying topic at hand. I “Medium” but what I was the avenue that Medium happens to provide for me Medium in this moment said meant at this moment. “Why is this significant? -Probably Everyone Allow me to reiterate: I Bitcoin, but what I was the avenue that the current state of the protocol many of us as Bitcoin happens to provide for me… said meant refer to as a user. We’ll get back to that later. Anyway… Bitcoin maximalists will say It’s a great endeavor, and I wish them the best of luck, but I personally don’t see our grandmas running full-nodes. What percent of the total population are grandmas? By the time they’re all running full-nodes we’ll all be assimilated into the singularity running our spinal-tapped full-nodes over a wireless decentralized global Internet. Sounds like fun. “Bitcoin only works if most people run full-nodes.” Can personally envision a world where most people run a full-node? Elaborate on the intricacies of your mother’s day-to-day life while she runs a full-node. Tell me she did in a single day, and where was the full-node in these situations? Did she bring it with her to go shopping? What is ? 51% of 7 billion? 90%? Are we including children in the total percent? Does this, or does this count all the automated robots that will be walking around with their own full-nodes built into their [bio?]mechanical bodies? The most plausible scenario for the near future circa the “mass-adoption tipping-point” is one on every persons phone. Is that really secure? Who’s building those clients? Will Apple have their own built-in-walled-garden hardware version? Will they point all those built in clients to a seed node on server? What implications would that have? Is it really even plausible? you everything “most people” not their All of those questions are questions, but while they are legitimate, , because and focusing on the completely misses that point. legitimate they are a distraction having as many full-nodes is imperative to Bitcoin, as possible numbers Well, actually…no it’s not. it’s imperative to most of community, and it’s imperative to most of the developers paving the way for this technology right now. Bitcoin doesn’t care. It’s imperative to me, The Clearly it’s imperative to some people. Not to a select few developers, or to some of the people who invested early and already got rich, or those who happen to be successful at marketing themselves out to be important. It’s also not imperative to the community, but let’s hold off on that until later… not Ethereum See how they attempt to differentiate between full-nodes that mine and those that don’t? Through misinformation, and use of the tactics I used in the earlier paragraph (asking legitimate, but redirecting questions), they’ve been successful at garnering a following, and full-nodes are not imperative to that group that follows them either. We’ve all heard the Satoshi datacenter quote ad-nauseam. Have you heard it yet? I’m sorry, but Satoshi isn’t a god, and nobody is perfect. It’s easy to quote an individual for your cause when you know they can’t clarify their opinions in an . Satoshi didn’t predict turning all nodes into a payment channel network ( ). , but you still see these propaganda pushers try to knock down the technology in the name of Bitcoin: updated context although he touched on the subject in correspondence with Mike Hearn Every major cryptocurrency is adopting payment channel technology The Can anyone source this? I tried, I can’t. Maybe it was paraphrased to fit 140 characters, maybe Vitalik said something else and Ver molded it into something he never even meant. Maybe Vitalik deleted it. Even if he did, maybe he changed his mind: Notice the dates on those posts? knows full well about the Raiden Network (Ethereum’s Lightning Network) and Vitalik’s support for it, yet he still uses quotes older than (presumably) 1.5 years ago, to instill this nonsense into the minds of the constantly growing set of new & uninformed people joining this community. This type of propaganda isn’t going to go away. Did you notice the ‘Pro Bitcoin Unlimited’ tag I have for the user in the old Bitcoin- subreddit? Same campaign, different flag: Roger Ver XT Take control of the network. Take control of the name Bitcoin. This is an ongoing propaganda campaign that needs to constantly be shot down. New people coming into the community don’t know the history, they don’t know the ideology, and they don’t know about the reoccurring tactics these groups use. Here’s a great one from the famous “I’m Satoshi” fraud: Like the caption says, he made that picture. He went on a Twitter spree that day with screenshots of random arbitrary charts, Here’s his , and here’s an actual image of the Satellite coverage Blockstream’s satellite network has, you can go look for yourself. Twitter current that they just launched: Much different, specifically: to make it look like China was exclusively “blocked”, and permanently for that matter… This one wasn’t hand drawn by a fraud If they wanted no block-size they could’ve went to Ethereum, if they don’t care about the average users ability to run a node diminishing over time, they could go to Ethereum. **Or they could go to Bitcoin Cash…**but somehow they still push SegWit2X after already getting their fork. ProTip: It’s because they don’t really want Bitcoin to succeed. They are dividing, and attempting to conquer. If you still for some reason want no limit to the block size, here’s a real world example of a chain that doesn’t have one. The Ethereum for them because of the absent cap, but they just don’t care, data directory size is growing exponentially and that’s totally fine because they aren’t trying to hijack system: our For reference, here’s the two links /u/senzheng provided: , . 1 2 The issue is mentalities like these bleed over into the Bitcoin community and cause divides that lead to an obvious fallout: Chain splits, and the fight over the title of Bitcoin. The So what happens when there’s an ideological split among the community? Other protocol implementations that are used to muddy the waters and sway public opinion are well known: block-size cap, total supply cap, miner version-bit signaling. What happens when a group of people decide that they want Bitcoin to (not just increase) the limitation on block size? Is anyone removing the 21 million coin cap? No? Don’t be surprised when that becomes a target too. Ethereum already took both of those away… The remove “arbitrary” for How much weight do your ideologies really hold against the 7 billion people who have no idea what we’re even talking about right now? 7 billion people who are easily influenced by misinformation. Are you prepared to publicly make the claim that 7 billion people don’t know what they’re talking about, and that they should be listening to ? you So what exactly does the name ‘Bitcoin’ mean? What does it mean to be an American? — Scholastic “It is great to be an American. We get to play sports and eat lots of food. We get lots of toys, all because we are free — the best thing of all.” , 11, Wisconsin -Austin B. Do you think Austin knew about the USA Patriot Act that Congress signed into law less than a year from when children to send their opinions in? Scholastic asked Also notice how Austin “America”, but what he was the avenue that the current state of his country provides for him to play sports and eat lots of food? Not really, but do you get ? said meant as a citizen the point Sparing any 1984 analogies, what happens to the definition of America should sports and excess food no longer be an option for Austin? What happens to the his ideology currently goes by? What will represent freedom in 500 years? What does it mean to be a ? title Roman This is what really drove me to Medium, because a Reddit response isn’t sufficient enough to address these reoccurring debates that meddle with my ideology, in the name of Bitcoin, which props up in a variety of ways from many different perspectives. Here’s one: The First and foremost let’s actually address the technicalities of the above argument: Chain reorganizations are not protocol changes , and the phrase “longest valid chain” refers to the former, not the latter. Even then, the size of the of all blocks in a chain determines validity in re-orgs, : ‘difficulty sum’ not block height Using the ‘ argument to try and justify why the fork you’re backing should/will hold the title of Bitcoin is a fallacy akin to justifying why you skipped out on school today with the excuse “I couldn’t find my schoolbag”, as if breaking your normal morning protocol somehow renders school itself useless: LVC’ The Bitcoin = [wake up→shower→ grab schoolbag →walk to school] * Queue the analogy Nazis.* “I’m glad we cleared all of that up, now I finally get it. So that’s all, right? The longest chain measured by the sum of the difficulty of all the blocks is Bitcoin, correct?” -BTC-101 Student / GMTH-203 Student Nope. See what I did there? I mirrored the response of someone who either didn’t get the point (don’t worry, we’ll get there), for the fork of their choice with arbitrary technical merit. Yes, I could name some Core developers who wouldn’t be too happy with that statement, despite the fact that I’m on their side, but I don’t care because it arbitrary, given the overarching point. or is ignoring it and just trying to leverage their argument arbitrary technical merit . is Let me make this clear: It doesn’t matter what stance you take on proposal, if you do this you either don’t get it or you are . any being deceptive In other words: , because language is an inherently social construct. Furthermore, my ideology doesn’t define Bitcoin either, because social consensus may not always align with what I currently want out of all of this, or my ideology might change in the future. Technicalities don’t define Bitcoin. Social consensus does The The This a blatant admission of my point about deceptive tactics. Using the block size to spur division among the community when the reality is they want to take control away from the developers. On top of all of this, Vinny is a proponent of Ethereum and the CEO & co-founder of a company with a token on the Ethereum network. Can you guess where his incentives align? Don’t you think he would be better off if Ethereum was successful and the Bitcoin community was divided? To be fair, Vinny’s response to that leaked email was to share more emails, here’s an excerpt: So basically, he’s still (or was in August) in support of SegWit2X going ahead with it’s chain split, because if Bitcoin works as planned, it won’t matter…While of the agreement they signed with the intent to keep everyone together, but now because of Bitcoin Cash, dead in the water other companies continue to back out originally the whole agreement is moot. Tangentially, 1 CPU / 1 Vote was a phrase used when everyone actually mined with CPUs Another famous Satoshi quote that can’t be defended because he’s effectively out of the equation. The entire environment is different now. How you can even justify using that line is beyond me when a single entity controls (conservative estimates) ~20+% of all the hashing power, continues to mine empty blocks and forced the network to fork once already… while running their nodes. but complain about not enough space, created Bitcoin Cash …Moving on… The following is an example of a person who , but tries to leverage the technicalities of the protocol while ignoring the broader scope of the argument with Charlie. Deceptively conflating client reorganization with protocol change/upgrades, and claiming UASF’s have no effect on Network (see what I did there?) by using technicalities as leverage for their argument: gets it The Other Realities: Civil war, peaceful secession. Much further down this thread, after some work, this person admitted to not caring what the masses eventually called Bitcoin, claiming it doesn’t matter. It was the only thing we agreed on, and renders the whole conversation they had with Charlie moot, if they don’t follow through with the entire dialogue. The initial top level comment is all that matters because The but readers don’t know that it gets the most visibility. To reiterate, chain reorganizations are not protocol changes, conflating the two for argumentative benefits is deceptive, and if you still don’t get it here’s a few examples: When Bitcoin activated SegWit, it was a protocol change, not a re-org. Bitcoin Cash was a protocol change, not a re-org. If Jeff Garzik’s baby-child SegWit2x actually gets off the ground and forks away, it will be a protocol change, not a re-org. was a protocol change (that happened to involve creating an entirely new transaction database)… …not a re-org. Ethereum “Re-org-shme-org! SEMANTICS!” , Boy Genius / Not Satoshi -Craig Wright No, not really. Re-orgs happen all the time without any change to the protocol. It’s a built in client mechanism that has nothing to do with upgrades, or claim to the title of Bitcoin. The key is understanding that some protocol upgrades try to re-orgs (soft-forks), while other protocol upgrades attempt to re-orgs (hard-forks), and that neither of them are intrinsically bad for Bitcoin, they just have their own use cases. The leverage supersede le Hopefully by now you’re starting to catch on here. Protocol upgrades are inherently in nature. Re-orgs are inherently social in nature, or whatever the silly term is for network logic. I look it up, but not doing so helps drive the point even closer to home, . and a billion re-orgs wouldn’t change a single line of code, so using it to justify your fork is a fallacy. social The naming conventions assigned to those changes are also inherently social in nature. not could it doesn’t matter Protocols don’t evolve on their own, So where am I really going with this all of this? Well, for starters, if you share my ideology, The community will keep growing until is the community. Education will never end. You can’t get frustrated, you need to learn how to properly source, reference posts & quotes, and ask the same basic thought provoking questions and saying/thinking “not this again”. Everybody is new to the community at some point, and this won’t end. Ever. Period. Will you tell your kids “not this again, just look at the github”? No. you need to share this post. everyone without being rude I don’t expect everyone to do this. I don’t expect everyone to have the time or the energy. That’s one of the reasons I put this post together and sourced a bunch of quotes from various members of the community. The you could do is reference this when someone asks you “what do you mean” by misinformation and lies. least Equally important, and the original underlying theme this post was to have, is understanding that If these misinformation tactics prove to be successful, they’ll own the name Bitcoin. The developers are gone if that happens, they’ve all been pretty vocal about it too, either by moving on to a different projecting or continuing to support the chain that wasn’t stolen from us by the corporations, whatever name it winds up getting called ( be calling it Bitcoin). supposed at some point, Bitcoin might not represent itself in a way that aligns with your ideology. I’ll Screenshots courtesy of John Newbery, Bitcoin Dev: Reddit thread. Twitter chain. Bitcoin Core Blog Post. I don’t know what’s going to happen if the network splits again, but I know that (because that’s what this whole propaganda campaign is about) Maybe I’m over concerned, maybe not. The only thing I can suggest is you take a look at what Bitcoin Cash’s most prominent said about the recent chain BCash split: if we lose the name Bitcoin it won’t be good. miner Bitcoin Cash is not BitcoinEngland = BitcoinAmerica = Bitcoin Cash Now take a look at what Bitcoin Cash’s most vocal said about the recent chain split: user Bitcoin Cash is BitcoinEngland = Bitcoin CashAmerica = ??? Did that help clear things up for you? They can’t even agree between themselves, because all they care about is stealing the name or dividing the community. #NO2X Addendum: I may try to format this article in the future for better flow. This was my first attempt to write something and I rushed it. It’s become the beginning of what I hope to be a long series of articles related to Bitcoin politics and conceptual discussion. Craig Wright is a fraud. Twitter plug: https://twitter.com/StopAndDecrypt
