UNITS OF #BITCOIN 21 MILLION #BITCOIN = 2,1 QUADRILLION SATOSHIS = 210 SEXTILLION NAKAMOTOS

You're anti-semitic if you like this post! ⚡️

Network notice · Knots 29.4.2 soft fork From block 973440 (~22 Sep) to 979920 (~5 Nov) every newly mined coinbase must wait 45 days before it can be spent, instead of 100 blocks. It is temporary, and it exists to make hit-and-run mining unprofitable and give miners who stay an edge. Payouts, shares and the split do not change; coins from those blocks just unlock at block 979920 (make-goods too). Lazarus supports it and our nodes switch at block 973400. DATUM gateway operators run their own node, so the choice is yours: to support it, run Knots 29.4.2 before block 973440. github.com/bitcoinknots/bitc…

Nodes rules, miners obey. We are going to reinforce that old knowledge today. 🤙

Coincidence?

🦠Neutrality Is the Pathogen People who cannot see the problem cannot understand the solution. What used to separate Bitcoiners from everyone else was not price, jargon, or tribal loyalty. It was an adversarial frame of mind. Bitcoin was designed for a world in which some actors will try to capture, dilute, or redirect the system while calling the capture progress. That habit of mind is no longer shared across the community. The population calling itself “Bitcoiners” now includes people with almost no adversarial thinking at all. Treat Bitcoin as an organism and the point becomes clearer. From an adversarial view, pathogens are not an anomaly. They are a normal pressure on any living system. The immune function of such a system is the ability to tell self from non-self. In Bitcoin, that function never stopped. It is not an optional social attitude. It is already inside the protocol: validity rules, standardness rules, relay policy, resource limits, and the node’s right to refuse what it will not carry. Core failed as steward of that function. ‼️ The public story is that Core stayed open-minded, non-judgmental, and neutral, that it refused to “decide what Bitcoin is” and let the fee market sort the rest. Retrospective evidence says the opposite. Neutrality was the branding. The practice was a slow refusal to defend the monetary definition of the base layer. Look at the record in order. In 2014, Bitcoin Core 0.9.0 made OP_RETURN a standard, prunable output. The release notes were explicit: “This change is not an endorsement of storing data in the blockchain.” “Storing arbitrary data in the blockchain is still a bad idea.” The concession was framed as harm reduction: stop people from stuffing images into fake outputs that bloated the UTXO set forever. It was not written as a new purpose for Bitcoin. Later, the project’s own description of Bitcoin drifted. The README that once called Bitcoin an experimental digital currency was rewritten so that developers would no longer say what Bitcoin is. Wladimir van der Laan’s line captured the posture: it is not appropriate for developers to decide what Bitcoin is. That sounds humble. In practice it became a way to abandon stewardship while still controlling the reference implementation. Twelve years after the 0.9.0 notes, the same concession is read as a specification: Bitcoin always allowed any use that pays a fee. A warning became a warrant. A limit became a market. A steward’s refusal to endorse data storage became the claim that judging data storage is illegitimate. That is the mortal sin. “Let the free market decide” and “we will not judge what the protocol is for” are not neutrality. They are a decision to stop distinguishing self from non-self. ‼️ They dress abdication as virtue. Normalizing alternative use-cases on the base layer is the pathogen. Leaving that pathogen unchallenged is autoimmune deficiency. Core was supposed to fight exploitations of the ledger as a general-purpose database. A protocol is discriminatory by nature. That is not a bug. It is the definition of a protocol. A protocol is a deliberate set of rules that distinguishes acceptable states from unacceptable ones. It sorts, filters, prioritizes, and excludes. Without that discrimination it is not a protocol. It is noise. Pretending that fees magically make abuse legitimate is not technical sophistication. It is a failure of leadership, and it should be named as one.

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What a crazy time to be alive.