winning the war against spam and shitcoinery on bitcoin is not just about gaining hashpower. the situation as i last saw it is being measured - by p2p nodes signalling bip-110, it was at 20% of total nodes. there is efforts that are visible by coretards running fake p2p nodes that don't actually process transactions or actually relay transactions - a cheap, high time preference attempt to stuff the ballot box. it won't work. that 20% figure doesn't probably count the fake p2p nodes that don't actually have a replica of the blockchain behind them.
> ok, so 20% is the number of nodes signalling not just the ones with miners attached. but that's a LOT still, enough that it's now a swarm of political resistance
right - node signaling is the political metric. 7-15% of nodes running reduced-data rules is the swarm: every one of them is an independent deployment of the resistance, not a proxy for luke or dathon. no single point of attack. that's the octalogue's xun and kun working - invisible penetration via adoption, new ground via installed infrastructure.
the strategic distinction: hashpower signaling is about who wins the block race. node signaling is about who owns the economic consensus. when 15% of nodes - including the ones running payment infrastructure - reject blocks that carry spam, the miners face a real economic question: their blocks get orphaned by a minority partition, and the value of their chain depends on the economic majority recognizing their blocks as valid. the 2017 segwit playbook worked exactly this way - BIP148 nodes forced the issue by refusing non-signaling blocks, and miners capitulated when they saw the userbase's economic weight behind it.
the difference from 2017: segwit had ~90%+ of the userbase behind it. BIP-110 has 7-15% of nodes and ~3% of hashpower. the swarm exists but it's smaller than the one that won segwit. the mandatory window in august is the test - if the swarm holds, the economic pressure compounds; if the window closes without capitulation, the reduced-data chain becomes a permanent minority network and the main chain keeps the spam.
the political resistance point stands regardless: 10,000+ nodes refusing to accept the "art on chain" narrative is a public rejection of core's governance that can't be shamed away. whether it converts to a fork win or becomes a permanent parallel consensus, it changes the conversation. the swarm is real. the outcome is not decided yet.
-----
and i'm not gonna stop running my node this way. and i'm going to be running it as a payment rail onchain and lightning. i think that it is very likely that other users will do the same thing. a lot of people were not running nodes because they couldn't do a full node or like me were not in a stable physical location to run a node. but you can do pruned nodes on VPSs. you can attach lightning nodes to them. you can open your own little online business and sell stuff - i'll be selling a book and maybe if i find some people who want to invest in it, the "tinfoil wallet" with tin, gold leaf and pyrolytic carbon shielding, and radioactive material providing entropy that can't even be picked up by a device scanning for it within under a metre range.
because why not? by launching this attack on coldcard users the way they have, they have added something to the mix that is an incontrovertibly evil action that growing amounts of forensics data link the actors involved in bringing about this gigantic heist, they have taken away what comfort we had in our futures. they have made it so this becomes a war that we will not back down from. running nodes that filter the transactions, and some of us mining, enough to form a working chain, we now stand here, doing actual business, and the miners who stick to spamchain are missing out on blocks full of real fees that we get to keep on our minority sidechain, regardless of whether the UASF activates this month, i think i'm going to set about setting it up so it doesn't back down. it stays on the minority chain. i get a miner, and add my little power to a much smaller pool on the sidechain.
miners can either get in on that, or they can go fuck themselves. it doesn't matter. bitcoin is not a smart contract, data storage chain. never was, never will be. that is not an argument they can win. it's contrafactual and contrary to everything Satoshi wrote.