As someone who has advocated for Bitcoin since I started mining it in 2011, I never thought I would have to write this. But here we are. Bitcoin is not just a program. It's not just a network. It's not just people trusting it to preserve their life savings in a world of things that want to destroy them. It's a carefully engineered system of publicly-disclosed incentives, such that all participants can predict how all the other selfish actors in the system will behave, and that the incentives are aligned such that consensus is preserved and the system can continue. Bitcoin is not built on promises. Bitcoin is not built on bureaucrats, or forms, or procedures. Bitcoin isn't even built on very many special cases. Bitcoin is built on rules. Technical rules about data formats, length of various datafields and what opcodes may be used to compose a transaction. Things that comply with the rules are valid, and things that do not comply with the rules are not. This neutrality, censorship-resistance, and immutability are key properties of Bitcoin, so long as the system is in balance. If nobody's transactions are being censored or their money being stolen, your transactions will not be censored and your money will not be stolen. A cancer has been consuming Bitcoin for several years now, and events on August 8th 2026 at block 961632 have pulled off a bandaid and exposed that Bitcoin is dead, and a frankensteinian monster is now inhabiting it's skin. At this block, a software upgrade (RDTS - Reduced Data Temporary Softfork) demanded by 20% of the network was not even rejected, it was just *ignored* by Bitcoin Core and the 5 big mining pools. This event is unprecedented. All past precedent indicated this upgrade would be successful. Game theory pertaining to miner incentives suggested that miners would support the upgrade in order to screw over their competitors who failed to do so, and that a network with all it's participants would be more valuable than a network that is diminished. The miners ignored their incentives and colluded in a cartel-like manner to completely starve the upgraded network of blocks. As of this writing, the upgraded network is in a coma, having only minted 4 blocks in the last 5 days. The network just threw out 20% of it's participants without even blinking an eye. If the miners did not behave as their publicly expected incentives suggested they would behave, one would have to ask - what incentive were they responding to? If you have any portion of your net worth secured by Bitcoin, this event should fill you with terror. Bitcoin Core doesn't give a rats ass what the users want, and the mining pools will happily run whatever the person on the other end of the telephone tells them to. Bitcoin nodes are rapidly becoming more difficult and expensive to operate, as massive blocks filled with vandalism consume vast quantities of disk space while utxo-set bloat causes memory requirements to skyrocket, at the exact same time as AI mania is making decent hardware increasingly unaffordable. I'm going to make a set of predictions: * Demurrage is coming. Bitcoin Core will say it's a necessary upgrade for some imagined emergency, and all the miners will follow it, and if you don't upgrade your node you'll be starved of blocks. Like RDTS was. * Satoshi's coins will be stolen. This will probably be dressed up a Quantum emergency. If you don't go along, you'll be starved of blocks. Like RDTS was. * Bitcoin's 21 million cap and issuance budget will be relaxed. The money printer is too strong to ignore, and they can dress this up with "But the miners need to get paid for the security budget!". If you don't go along, you will be starved of blocks. Like RDTS was. * Someone is going to vandalize the blockchain with some kiddie porn. There's lots of doors wide open for anyone to do it, in a manner that anyone can very easily extract and view the data. One or possibly both of two things will happen in response to this: a) The miners will collude to exclude the transaction, permanently. If it ever gets mined into a block, the miners will collude to orphan that block. This will publicly demonstrate that censorship-resistance and immutability are dead and gone. b) If this makes it into a block, whether that block is orphaned or not, every single Bitcoin node must download that block. Every full node must store that block for the rest of eternity. And every time a new node starts up, a full node must send that block to the new node as part of the initial block download. Every single pruned node will be downloading kiddie porn. Every single full node will be downloading, storing, and transmitting kiddie porn. Bitcoiners are going to start being dragged through courts and branded as kiddie diddlers. I don't know when these events will happen. Probably not in the coming days. Possibly not even in the coming year. But I don't think any of these is very far away. There is no path to fix this. The rot is too deep, the incentives too broken. I still refuse to make short-term predictions about Bitcoin's price, but my long-term prediction is now upside-down from where it's been for the last 15 years. A glimmer of hope The team behind RDTS, mostly centered around the alternative Bitcoin Knots client program, is still active, and still intending to maintain that chain. They are tentatively expecting to launch a hard-fork network upgrade with proof-of-work change on Sept 1st 2026, to get their Bitcoin beating again. I am following their efforts, and trying to help in any way my dumb ass can. Contentious Bitcoin forks are highly confusing business. Many users of RDTS will rightly refer to their chain as "Bitcoin", while referring to the Core chain with a variety of derogatory names. All Core users will also rightly claim the name, while lobbing insults at the RDTS chain. If widely available markets allow trading between the two tokens, expect violent price swings as the Core users liquidate their RDTS tokens, and vice-versa. If you have balances on Bitcoin right now, you need to pay attention to how to manage them to avoid having them stolen on whichever fork you're not transacting on. If you do not move your balances before the hard-fork launches they will be safe and you will have your balances on both forks. If your balances are not in your custody, you are at the mercy of your custodian, and will probably only receive the Core side of the fork. Even after the hard-fork, replay protection is limited which may make splitting your coins from each other on both chains complicated. Proceed with caution, and reach out for help (Carefully! Lots of scammers will try to trick you into sending all your money to them) if you need it. While I wish to see this fork succeed and thrive, it does no service to ignore history. Past precedent suggests this fork will be just another dead shitcoin on the side of the road within a few years, just like all the previous contentious Bitcoin forks. Even if they are successful, structural challenges remain and they will continue to face a never-ending battle of Bitcoin's enemies seeking to subvert and destroy it, as it has always been. If this chain survives, hopefully someone will keep a closer watch on Bitcoin's pulse this time around, so that it doesn't die and turn into a rampaging zombie before anyone notices. If you've skipped to the bottom, here's a quick summary for you: Bitcoin is Dead. May Bitcoin rise from it's ashes. By @Skyhawk in discord #bitcoin knots #bitcoin B2B #nostr

GDP have no sense with 38T debt. Money printer extract value from rest of the world and fiat economics work hard to convince peoples that progress #bitcoin B2B #nostr View quoted note →

The bad things you listed are the causes that make land here in the first place. View quoted note →

They throw away the shield Now they will face the hell. #bitcoin B2B is the #bitcoin #nostr View quoted note →

How many blocks before you admit you're relaying on the wrong side. #bitcoin B2B #Nostr

I don't think so View quoted note →

Bpedo will remove the hard cap sooner than you think. #bitcoin blake2b

Your getting weaker by the spammer until one central node run the whole network. I will call it the node of the federal reserve. View quoted note →

He don't now yet that he is in the wrong side of the hard fork. Just wait and see View quoted note →

The Trojan Horse Was Always Inside the Gates BIP-110 is not a proposal. It is a scream. A scream from the people who remember what #Bitcoin was before it became a platform for JPEGs, token casinos, and blockchain bloatware. A scream from the node operators who bear the eternal cost of storage while miners pocket a one-time fee. A scream from those who watched the establishment walk right through the front door, not with tanks and bans, but with inscriptions and incentives. And the most terrifying part? We should have seen it coming from day one. From Zero to Unstoppable Think about what Bitcoin actually is. In 2009, it was nothing. Literally nothing. A white paper. A few lines of code. A Genesis Block with a message burned into it about bank bailouts. No army. No treasury. No marketing budget. No CEO. Just a set of rules, a proof-of-work mechanism, and a dream that money could be separated from the state. And from that nothing, it bootstrapped itself into the most resilient monetary network in human history. How? Network effects. One person ran a node. Then ten. Then a thousand. Then millions. Each new participant made the network more valuable, more secure, more undeniable. #Bitcoin didn't need permission. It didn't need a marketing team. It just needed to keep producing blocks, every ten minutes, without asking anyone. That is the miracle. That is the magic. That is why we are here. But here is what we forgot: network effects are a double-edged sword. What makes Bitcoin unstoppable also makes it a target. And not the kind of target we were all watching for. We Were Looking the Wrong Way For fifteen years, the narrative was always the same: "The government will ban #Bitcoin." "The banks will lobby against it." "The establishment will attack from the outside." We imagined tanks rolling up to mining farms. We imagined executive orders criminalizing private keys. We imagined the SWIFT network cutting off exchanges. We built our defenses for an external siege. And while we were watching the horizon, the enemy walked through the gates disguised as a user. They didn't ban #Bitcoin. They used it. They didn't attack the protocol. They inflated it. They didn't try to shut down nodes. They made running a node so expensive that only data centers could afford it. They didn't censor transactions. They filled the block space with arbitrary data , images, tokens, metadata .until the fee market became a bidding war that priced out the very people #Bitcoin was built for. This is the inside job. This is capture by incentives, not by force. And it is far more elegant than any ban could ever be. Because here is the dirty secret: the establishment is smarter than we gave them credit for. They learned from Napster. They learned from WikiLeaks. They learned that direct confrontation with decentralized technology is futile. So they pivoted. They infiltrated. They turned #Bitcoin's own strengths against it. They made Bitcoin useful for everything except money. And in doing so, they are slowly, predictably, grinding down the one thing that made Bitcoin special: the ability for an ordinary person to validate the entire chain. The Spam Chain and the Slow Death of Decentralization Every full node is a declaration of independence. Every node operator says: "I do not trust. I verify." But verification has a cost. Bandwidth. Storage. RAM. Synchronization time. And when you fill every block with multi-megabyte inscriptions, with token protocols that bloat the UTXO set, with data that has nothing to do with peer-to-peer electronic cash , you are not "using" #Bitcoin. You are spamming the chain that other people have to carry forever. Miners don't care. They get paid once. Node operators pay forever. This is not a free market. This is an externality. And BIP-110 is the attempt to say: enough. BIP-110 :the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork is a one-year consensus-level restriction on arbitrary data storage. It limits scriptPubKeys. It caps witness elements. It blocks the annexes and undefined Tapleaf versions that have become the highways for blockchain spam. It doesn't kill innovation. It doesn't censor payments. It simply says: if you want to store your JPEG, use IPFS. Use Nostr. Use BitTorrent. Use literally anything else. #Bitcoin block space is for Bitcoin transactions. And the critics scream "censorship!" But they are wrong. Dead wrong. This is not about censoring users. This is about defining the protocol. Bitcoin has always made choices. It chose 21 million. It chose ten-minute blocks. It chose a 1MB block weight limit. Those were not "censorship." Those were design decisions that made Bitcoin Bitcoin. And choosing to prioritize monetary transactions over arbitrary data storage is no different. The critics say: "But the fees are valid!" Yes. And the fees for a DDoS attack are also "valid" in some sense. The fact that you can pay to harm the network does not mean the network must accept your harm. #Bitcoin is not a public dumping ground. It is a monetary system ,and monetary systems require scarcity, not just of coins, but of block space purpose. The Inevitability of Capture Here is the hardest pill to swallow: #Bitcoin was always going to be captured. It was predictable from the Genesis Block. Not because #Bitcoin is weak. But because Bitcoin is valuable. And anything valuable attracts parasites. Anything that threatens power structures gets infiltrated by those power structures. Not with guns. With grants. With conferences. With developer capture. With narrative warfare. With making the protocol "more useful" until it is useful for everything except its original purpose. The establishment doesn't need to ban Bitcoin. They need to redefine it. They need to turn it from "peer-to-peer electronic cash" into "a settlement layer for JPEGs and tokens." They need to make running a full node so expensive that only institutions can do it. They need to centralize validation. And once validation is centralized, #Bitcoin is no longer decentralized money. It is just another database. Controlled by the same people who control everything else. BIP-110 is the line in the sand. It is the moment where the community says: we remember why we started this. We remember that Bitcoin was not built to be a platform for NFTs. We remember that decentralization is not a buzzword ,it is a technical property that depends on ordinary people being able to run nodes. We remember that the 21 million cap means nothing if the chain is so bloated that only data centers can verify it. The Fork Is the Feature Some people treat forks as failures. They are not. Forks are the immune system of a decentralized protocol. They are how Bitcoin defends itself. They are how the network says: "You can have your chain. But you cannot have ours." BIP-110 is a user-activated soft fork. That means nodes decide. Not miners. Not exchanges. Not VCs. Nodes. The same nodes that have been running since 2009. The same nodes that bootstrapped this network from nothing. The same nodes that make Bitcoin unstoppable , because no one can force a node operator to accept a block they consider invalid. This is the genius of #Bitcoin's design. The miners produce blocks. But the nodes validate them. And validation is where the power truly lies. If the nodes reject your block, your hash power is meaningless. Your ASICs are just expensive space heaters. The miners are not signaling for BIP-110? Of course they are. They make money from the spam. The exchanges are against it? Of course they are. They make money from the tokens. The "influencers" are against it? Of course they are. They are paid to promote the bloat. But the node operators? The people who actually run #Bitcoin? They are the ones who have to store this data forever. They are the ones whose bandwidth gets consumed. They are the ones whose Raspberry Pi's choke on a 700GB chain. And they are the ones who can say: no more. The Establishment Is Already Here Stop waiting for the external attack. It already happened. It happened when we normalized filling blocks with non-monetary data. It happened when we started calling node operators "maximalists" for wanting to preserve the protocol's original purpose. It happened when we let the narrative shift from "Bitcoin is money" to "Bitcoin is whatever you want it to be." That is the capture. Not a ban. Not a hack. A slow, polite, well-funded redefinition of what Bitcoin is for. And it was predictable. It was predictable because this is how power works. Power does not confront decentralized systems head-on. Power co-opts them. Power makes them useful to the existing order. Power turns revolutionaries into consultants. #Bitcoin was built to be money without masters. But masters do not need to own the code. They just need to own the narrative. They just need to convince you that a 700GB blockchain full of JPEGs is "progress." They just need to convince you that making nodes expensive is "inevitable." They just need to convince you that BIP-110 is "censorship" while they fill the chain with data that crowds out the very people who need uncensorable money the most. The Choice We are at a fork in the road. Not just a software fork. A philosophical fork. One path leads to #Bitcoin as a global, decentralized, censorship-resistant monetary network :where anyone, anywhere, can run a node and verify the rules. Where block space is scarce and precious and used for value transfer. Where the 21 million cap is matched by a chain that remains small enough for the individual to validate. The other path leads to $Bitcoin as a bloated, institutionalized data layer : where only corporations and exchanges can afford full nodes. Where "Bitcoin" becomes a brand for token speculation and blockchain tourism. Where decentralization is a historical curiosity, not a living property. BIP-110 is not perfect. No proposal is. But it is a signal. A signal that some of us still remember. Some of us still care. Some of us are still willing to run a node, enforce rules, and say: this far, and no further. #Bitcoin bootstrapped itself from nothing. It can defend itself from within. But only if we have the courage to recognize that the enemy was never outside the gates. The Trojan Horse was always inside. And it is time to burn it down. #bitcoin blake2b is the #bitcoin #bitcoin sha256 is the shitcoin #nostr

The removal of the OP_RETURN data carrier size limit wasn't something the community actually wanted. It was pushed through by certain developers motivated by financial gain or fear of establishment blacklisting. When it mattered, nobody had the courage to oppose it with a BIP. Yet when dedicated individuals finally did take a stand, the community turned against them with familiar hostility. Now, after the entirely predictable hard fork, many are bizarrely attacking ordinary users—having already forgotten that the root cause was stripping away the OP_RETURN data carrier size in the first place. #bitcoin blake2b #nostr

I came of age during the Arab Spring, carrying the same hope millions did: that revolution would deliver freedom and prosperity. Instead, the outcome was the mirror image of that dream. And the tragedy wasn't that the faithful abandoned the cause,it was that they were attacked by those who claimed to share it. Today, I see the #Bitcoin revolution following that same tragic trajectory. #bitcoin #nostr

“SHA-256 is very strong. It's not like the incremental step from MD5 to SHA1. It can last several decades unless there's some massive breakthrough attack. If SHA-256 became completely broken, I think we could come to some agreement about what the honest block chain was before the trouble started, lock that in and continue from there with a new hash function. In our case the attacker was from inside Satoshi nakamoto #bitcoin #nostr View quoted note →

Direct & punchy: "The legacy financial system is colluding to destroy Bitcoin, aided by traitors and useful idiots. The fork wasn't a technical dispute,it was #Bitcoin versus the establishment. I don't get why people are still debating #BIP110 like it's a technical argument when it's really a fight for Bitcoin's survival against the powers that be." #bitcoin View quoted note →

Is not over is just the beginning View quoted note →

I like Simon, but he missed one thing: the incentive to force a consensus change in the case of #bip110 is the guarantee that the nodes still have the ability to resist a consensus change in the future. the defence mechanism, or the wall, that Simon talks about. If the number of nodes shrinks to a couple of enterprise-grade "economic nodes," the so-called fortified wall becomes irrelevant when the Trojan horse get activated at the choosing time. View quoted note →

You flip the bit ? View quoted note →

Not your node not your rule View quoted note →

We have to bootstrap the network one more time. View quoted note →

Absolutely filter out honest, humble and brave peoples. View quoted note →