FrickFracck

I’m starting to believe that all the VC money that went into Bitcoin development was wasted on purpose to demoralize the community, normalize custodians, replace the cypherpunk spirit with compliance & greed the conferences that promised us upgrades, from Scaling Bitcoin to BTC++, turned out to be a reassurance drug that keeps us hopeful for new stuff for which there is never consensus the goalposts to activate a soft fork have moved to the same level as hard forks… even if the upgrades are backwards-compatible and optional other chains that use Bitcoin’s tech (ZEC, LTC, BCH) were able to accomplish more with fewer resources and without copying Bitcoin’s homework: if anything, it’s the BTC devs who look at Zcash and BCH asking themselves how to bring those features home with soft forks that never get consensus Blockstream, in spite of all the puritan virtue signaling, was beaten by the free market. Their research is behind anything happening in Ethereum or Zcash right now The Lightning network, the totem of Bitcoin maximalism, is better optimized and more reliable on Decred (another Bitcoin codebase fork) And next month, the Drivechains (BIP300) hard fork will mark the departure of another group of developers who truly followed the Bitcoin maximalist thesis of bringing everything to one network On top of this stagnation, the BIP 444/110 debate has pushed even more developers away from Bitcoin. Rusty Russel, the champion of the Great Script Restoration, has left Bitcoin development. Others have pivoted to AI because their work is more appreciated in that field. And of course, we lost Gloria Zhao to one of the dumbest psyops in the project’s history The looming Epstein taint is also taking its toll, with some users feeling disgusted by the people and ideas they have supported over the years. Top Bitcoin Core developers received Epstein money via MIT affiliation. Lightning Labs received grants from MIT too. But in the meantime, MIT is shipping their CBDC pilot (Project Hamilton) which uses Bitcoin research. With or without Epstein, the authoritarians are advancing with their agenda to control & surveil. Bitcoin cannot fight back because it’s neutered. At this point, it’s nothing but a tech stock that makes boomer investors feel trendy. The freedom money use cases went somewhere else. Without a healthy dev culture, nothing will change. But now the gatekeeping isn’t enforced only by a bunch of devs who dislike any idea from outside of their circle. Now even the average pleb who runs a Raspberry Pi node will act as if every dev must explain to them the utility of everything: and if they don’t understand it, then it’s frowned upon and rejected. This is no longer decentralization, it’s the most degenerate form of democracy where the dumbest and the poorest feel empowered to decide on matters they will never understand. SegWit and Taproot didn’t receive the same amount of scrutiny because they came from the right team. But people still wear “don’t trust, verify” t-shirts and LARP about sovereignty. The best part about Bitcoin is that it’s still around and can change course sometime. But not while the gatekeepers and their dumber supporters are still around. Not while Saylorism is the dominant ideology. Maybe that only a painful bear market with sub $10k prices will save Bitcoin.