Quantify "broad support among the community"
These views do not reflect the views of @ocean_mining and are mine exclusively:
Saturday 8/8 saw the rejection of BIP110 by the Bitcoin industry despite broad support among the community.
This shattered a long-standing belief that Bitcoin's anti-fragility and hard-monetary properties would continue thanks to its decentralized network of nodes who were run by people who understood Bitcoin and would fight to preserve it.
I have been confident in Bitcoin's future and championed it as a tool for freedom.
My reasons for doing so both required that it maintain and treat as a mission-critical priority the decentralization and ultimate authority of the network of nodes determining and enforcing its rules.
They are no longer relevant.
The degree to which this undermines Bitcoin's future cannot be overstated. Proof of Work is completely pointless if the criteria for what constitutes validity is decided by the ones doing the work.
Pools have said "Our blocks are still valid, even if they violate rules we were told to respect."
They did so within a small cartel of centralized pool operators clearly acting on behalf of industry players who operated behind closed doors ensuring that their public, breathtakingly arrogant, and nonsensically premature dismissal of BIP110 as a failure would not ultimately turn out any other way.
They were not bluffing, they knew.
By contrast, BIP110 supporters operated in public.
We used neutral metrics that everyone had access to, and made the basis of our confidence publicly known. Sincere attempts were made to gauge community sentiment and engagement was public on all venues where discussion was permitted.
Public engagement with influential Bitcoiners who opposed BIP110 demonstrated clearly that their opposition was not in good faith. This led to questions about their characters and intentions which were promptly corroborated by timely Epstein leaks. This meant that it was no longer frivolous dismissal of "the other side" out of pure tribal instinct as is standard within any conflict, and instead it would become laughably naive to continue assuming good faith on their part.
Regardless, the spectacular, resolute dismissal of BIP110 necessarily reveals an equivalent stark and chilling reality with regard to decision-making about Bitcoin's consensus rules.
No one, not even BIP110's most staunch critics can dismiss the implications of this.
When Bitcoin is under attack, spontaneous defense that can withstand whatever onslaught it faces will simply be dismissed as "not economic", "a Sybil attack", "non technical", "censorship" or some other attempt to discredit and undermine it by the attackers.
My expectation for the future is that for Bitcoin, reverse-Trojan horse theory continues to play out: The dollarization of the ecosystem will continue, and Bitcoin's ultimate goal - the separation of money and state, will be forgotten, while its captured players work towards the exact opposite end - its unification.
Bitcoin is not the first protocol to become captured. It needed to become the exception, not the rule. The mechanism by which it did that is decentralization.
Work is being done to hard fork Bitcoin with a new Proof-of-Work algorithm.
I have said repeatedly in the past that in certain scenarios, should mining become captured and centralized to too great of a degree then the only defense the network would have would be to hard-fork to a new Proof-of-Work algorithm.
I stand by this perspective as a truth fundamental to Bitcoin and everyone must agree with this stance if they are to believe Bitcoin is not whatever a necessarily few mining pools say it is.
If you believe the miners acted on behalf of a silent community who secretly opposed BIP110 then I will respectfully disagree but agree that your conclusion about a PoW change being unwarranted must follow.
You have misjudged the BIP itself and are simultaneously oblivious to the mechanisms that were abused to deny it, along with the intentions of the people working them. You also did not indicate your dislike of the BIP via discernable metrics (i.e not running a URSF and committing to its rejection) - instead you relied on a few pools to decide on your behalf.
So what am I going to do?
Wait with a stalled out Knots node. Another block will be along later rather than sooner, but I'll take it. That is what my entire Bitcoin stack sees as the state of the network. If a PoW change HF comes along with the next update to @BitcoinKnots that makes blocks start showing up faster I will upgrade to it and enjoy the benefit.
I have no desire to attempt to call this new chain "Bitcoin" - Bitcoin is a case study in protocol capture and instead of dying, becomes a tool for the sickest of purposes. I can think of nothing more evil than centralized Bitcoin. It is whatever tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist told you Bitcoin was.
But for all my day-to-day activities, all the software I use, Bitcoin is simply stuck at block 931,633. At current hashrate the next block will take ~32 hours. I sincerely doubt that anyone wants to find another 2000 blocks at this pace so HF is the only practical option.
A couple ideas I think would help:
Setup DCA reserve. Sell highest cost BTC to fund it asserting the bottom of the bear is hear.
Commit to a % of STRC into USD reserve, part to DCA and part to other
Set a short volume threshhold for pausing atm.
Adding cash reserves is great on paper but $STRC is not where it is because of reserves. Adding cash is not going to bring it back to par…
Only trust will do that
The market lost a lot of trust from watching something that was marketed to be stable, drop ~20% in a matter of days, wiping every gain that anyone had in the vehicle back from its inception.
I don’t think STRC will be back trading at par until that trust is restored or they just buy it back to par and set aside a methodology to use the reserves to keep it at par… within reason
I do own some STRC and can still be critical. No shame. This is a new financial frontier. Not everything is going to go right the first try
If you bought the Smart Thermostat the State has already adjusted it for you!
New York: it's hot out there, and the power grid is working overtime to keep us cool.
Set your AC to 78 degrees, turn off lights/electronics you're not using, and unplug what you can.
Our City is doing its part too: maintaining the 78 degrees rule in our buildings, dimming/turning off our lights during peak electricity demand, asking private partners to do the same, and powering down non-essential equipment.
A stable grid means the AC stays on, and lives are saved. Let's ease demand — and get through the heat — together.
There's nothing these tyrants wouldn't tax. Including the CO2 in your exhale.
Literally wants to gut the goose laying the golden eggs.
Musk is worth more than South Africa’s GDP. @BernieSanders and I proposed a 5% tax on people like him.
In one year, it could fund:
- free public college & trade school
-$10/day childcare
- Special-needs education nationwide
Wealth inequality is the moral failure of our time.
It's more likely regulatory capture. Something Congress can fix, although she'd prefer to monetize it than prevent it.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: You can't earn a billion dollars.
Ilana Glazer: That's right.
AOC: You just can't earn that.
Glazer: That's exactly correct.
AOC: You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws.
Glazer: Yup.
AOC: You can pay people less than what they're worth.
Glazer: Yup.
AOC: But you can't earn that, right?
Glazer: That's right.
AOC: And so you have to create a myth that -- since you didn't earn that, you have to create a myth of earning it.
Universal rocket funding is better than reducing cost per payload to orbit.
The law goes too far. Just disclose what you're doing.
BREAKING:
The Trump administration just SUED Michigan over its cage-free egg law.
This is not MAHA.
MAHA means better food and more humane farming—not protecting caged-egg factory farms built for corporate profit.
Michigan’s law requires eggs sold in the state come from cage-free hens.
The administration claims the law goes too far.
Put a caged egg factory next to cage-free hens and the difference is obvious.
This lawsuit threatens markets for independent farmers and would deepen the strain farmers are feeling all across the country—and it goes against everything that Trump, RFK Jr. and USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins have laid out in their MAHA agenda.
The Trump administration should be putting farmers first, not corporations.
A small generator is worth a thousand other measures. It's too late when the storm comes, but when things settle, prepare for next time.
❄️ Heavy snow & freezing rain can cause power outages that last several days. There are some low-cost tips you can use to keep your house as warm as possible if the heat goes out:
🚪Close the vents & shut the doors in rooms you’re not using.
💨Place a rolled towel at the bottom of all doors to keep drafts out.
🪟Keep window coverings like blinds or curtains open during the day to take advantage of the sun’s heat. Close them at night to keep heat from escaping.
Follow local emergency management for the latest winter storm updates and guidance.