Oh Nick Szabo’s back 👀
It seems like core thinks that if Luke just goes away everything will be fine, but I don’t think people really are following Luke as much as they’re reacting to how core was moving.
The nice part is that it’s much easier to smooth things over with your users than to make someone disappear
Idk I think people should be free to have bad ideas in private
I moved to NH with the free state project in 2013.
That has a certain connotation to it now, because a lot of people who moved really sort of just flailed their arms around and made a performative scene. Still do.
What made me come back, and stay, were the people who got in deep and changed things. A lot of freedoms here the loud ones talk about that were unlocked by the quiet ones.
As a poor startup founder I’ve been using desktop Linux and the worst part is manually updating discord every day
My most controversial bitcoin opinion is Dennis Porter made the best use of the Bitcoin engagement farm by flexing it into state level advocacy that’s led to more state level legislation than dedicated Bitcoin think tanks
And most of the influencer hate against him is jealousy / envy. It’s a countersignal.
There are people out there engagement farming as much as him and ending up on the wrong side of many bitcoin “issues” du jour
Gotta hang on to the freedom tech
The miner previously famous for announcing they were only going to mine ofac compliant blocks has launched a private txn submission product whose main feature is easily bypassing mempool policy.
Pieter Wuille in an interview with optech said “[Out of band payments and private mempools are] our biggest enemy. Among the top contenders of the biggest threats to Bitcoin in the short to medium term”
If private mempools become more attractive than the p2p mempool built into core, Bitcoin will have a serious centralization problem. Now imagine the company running that private mempool also has a press release out that they only mine ofac compliant blocks. See where this is going?
So much of this conversation has been caught up in jpeg this and censorship that, when in reality this is the real problem.
Literally the ofac block company is standing up the service that could actually seriously harm Bitcoin. Knowingly? I don’t know, and honestly I’m sure the core devs had something to say about it, but I’m surprised the social media hornets nest did not.
Instead of hearing this very compelling message in support of core’s actions, I’ve been reading all this shit about this core dev actually isn’t very smart and mempool policies are censorship Actually.
It is such a missed opportunity to align actual significant efforts to maintain bitcoin’s decentralization and neutrality with the social immune system of the Bitcoin community. I wish I had put it together sooner.
Core is supposed to write good code, but there’s this secret other thing that needs to be done, and that’s making sure people run it. I don’t think it’s entirely the Core devs’ jobs, but I think the bit would have helped a lot. Code is law but it’s nothing if no one runs it.
I feel like no one wanted to stir the pot? But every core dev is adjacent to a professional pot stirrer. What are the influencers good for if not this?
And now, instead of being a little mean to one of the literal worst miners, core has to deal with people questioning whether they’ll even run their code. It’s a shame because I think the threat is real, and the actions are justified. Being a little clearer about the reasons why would do a lot.