Is It Safe To Run Bitcoin Core?
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I love being able to zap these, rather than supporting through fiat
The premise Roger Verr's book is Core devs going rogue. Verr argued that people were unable or unwilling to go against them, so they hijacked Bitcoin. Note operators switching implementations now disproves they premise.
Since core devs are for sale, it would be great to have a market place where competing PRs can be bid on. The one that gets merged wins, and the dev who made it gets paid. Why should Citrea be the only ones with this kind of access? Open it up to everyone.
Love that you're on NOSTR. I used to listen to you on YT.
A recap of the OP_RETURN "debate"
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Core: Filters don't work.
Bitcoiners: They obviously do, otherwise you wouldn't need to remove them.
Core: We don't have the technical means, so we're removing the limit.
Bitcoiners: We gave you the technical means in a PR two years ago, Core rejected it, it was implemented in Knots and it works.
Core: We can't stop all spam reliably, so why bother?
Bitcoiners: Because life is not black or white, and fastening your seatbelt when driving a car is safer even though some people die in car crashes.
Core: Here's 7 transactions that even your precious filters didn't catch.
Bitcoiners: Here's 2 million transactions that were caught.
Core: You can't censor valid transactions just because you don't like them. They paid a fee!
Bitcoiners: There's millions of Nigerian princes contacting people through email every day. These are "valid transactions" too, yet you send those to spam. This is obviously not censorship, so that argument is deceitful and intellectually dishonest.
Core: What is spam objectively anyway?
Bitcoiners: The receiver - not the sender - gets to decide what's useful to them. You're removing the ability of nodes to decide that, implying you know best.
Core: These transactions will end up in blocks anyway, and we can't incentivize profit-seeking miners to go out-of-band.
Bitcoiners: It's not your job to incentivize or deter miners. Your job is to work on the Bitcoin client while prioritizing the one thing that makes Bitcoin unique and truly decentralized: nodes.
Core: But we want better fee estimation and block propagation.
Bitcoiners: So do we, but never at the expense of decentralization and self-sovereignty. Nodes run the show.
Core: This is a technical discussion. Stop philosophying and using analogies, you plebs!
Bitcoiners: We gave you a technical solution that works, the philosophic rationale and the logical arguments. Stop turning Bitcoin into a shitcoin.
Am I missing anything here?
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If you're seeing bias here, it's because you're too stubborn to admit that one side is clearly more informed, rational and morally calibrated than the other.
This is why there's distrust in Core. It's got nothing to do with technical competency and rational discourse. It's just pure and simple political shenanigans, whataboutisms, strawman arguments and in some cases sheer lies.
- Hodling like i mean it
View quoted note →
Thanks for sharing your videos on Nostr, Matthew.
Yes we definitely need more transparency (which I thought it was our imperative as Bitcoiners): who did what? What was the vote count? How are decision taken?
On one side I can understand that devs don’t want every move they make be scrutinized as this might “slow down” their technical job, but if you want to be a bitcoin dev you have to be accountable to the people and have a open and transparent approach
I also got banned from making comments on PRs
Gaslighter at work
My node will knot be used to perpetuate the fiat system
Crypto stores JPEGs for fiat incentives
Bitcoin empowers billions—and ushers in a higher timeline
The plebs are voting with their nodes
View quoted note →
Yes I do. What do you think?
Craig Wright sued a dozen bitcoin developers, claiming damages because they owed him fiduciary responsibility. He wanted to force them to hardfork bitcoin to assign 111k bitcoin to him.
You're going down a ridiculous road. Nobody would write open source software if it entailed fiduciary responsibility. If you succeed, bitcoin dies.
Very good!
GitHib PRs are for technical discussions, not political or strategic or anything else that is not actually part of solvong the issue at hand. It just gets too complicated to mix those discussions in a forum that doesn't handle large discussions well.
Wait a second, my bad maybe I should have looked better up the accurate definition of fiduciary responsibility.
Of course I don’t think btc devs can be legally sued, but what I believe is that they are morally responsible to the users for their work (this because in the last debate core/knots it was said “we don’t own anything to users”). Yes you contribute to open software, but this doesn’t mean that you have no responsibility whatsoever to the users (like informing them of your decision process and openly communicate with users).
What I don’t like is the core devs narrative of “we don’t own anything, we don’t have to explain anything to anybody, and if we you dont like what we are doing change software”. Good god man what happened to open and clear discussion? I get that devs wanna cater to the technical aspects of things, but how btc is too important to too many people not to engage in the “let’s explain to the public what we are attempting to do and let’s see what they think”
And what are the practical implications of their supposed "moral responsibility"? How do you want to sanction them if you think they neglect it?
Bitcoin is the epitome of individual responsibility. You can't go crying to some stranger on the internet who wrote code that you chose to run. You can't complain that you're not being communicated to in a way you prefer – getting information is your own responsibility. The mailing list is there, Delving is there, the GitHub project is open, and if you don't have time for all that, a bunch of busy contributors set aside time to produce a weekly newsletter to summarize everything for you, and if you don't even have time for that, they make a podcast version of the newsletter.
If you just don't want to try to understand the technical aspects, your opinions on technical aspects don't weigh particularly much. I'm sorry that's harsh, but bitcoin doesn't let us ignore harsh realities.
To be clear, I am all for the debates to rage about changes to Bitcoin! I am still making up my mind on the current issues, and I want the points discussed! Nostr seems to me to be the ideal place for open and free discourse.
I summarised your questions in an X thread here, and tagged all the Core Devs I know 
X (formerly Twitter)
Kurtis Stirling 🇳🇿 (@Kurtis_NZ) on X
👇Here's what Core should be doing:
Tell us all what actually happened:
1. What actually happened why all the funny business around the PR?
2. Re...
Yes, because designing solutions without being clear on what problem you are trying to solve, who your stakeholders are and what they require, is a good way to build a great product. /sarcasm
No, but you can tell them what software you want to run, and centralisation should be targeted everywhere with bitcoin, so we should complain of not being communicated to by the node software monopoly holder. Breaking down centralisation accumulation is how bitcoin survives/thrives
that's fine if we want to keep github strictly technical, but then what is the forum to have the larger discussion that includes other aspects? is there one already?
I thought we were on it already?! But yes, I get what you mean. Screaming on twitter does not seem to be sustainable either...
You have a point... I think we can all agree that the communication around this has been less than stellar...
lol you are right, nostr should be the place for the larger discussion
1) I found it here (paragraph “how the decision was reached”. The exact wording is “….broad, though not perhaps, unanimous support). 
2) the vote tally it’s more about “as an external I’d like to have a better view how decisions are achieved, just to know, not to interfere”. It’s mostly a demand for openness and transparency. I get that devs want to be left alone to do their job, but more transparency can’t hurt? Again, simply to witness, not to interfere
3) yes how the decision was achieved was shared, but I feel only after strong opposition was voiced (might be wrong here)
4) I do find the discussion valuable, and I am simply asking for more of it. Perhaps I got defensive cause I got the perception that mind was made up and my viewpoint was dismissed as dumb. I’m sorry if I fell in that, I’m here to exchange ideas not to fight or insult
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5) you are right, I’m definitely more comfortable in the ideological than the technical. I guess that like most in this debate I got scared as it seems like the technical is the only thing that matters and the ideological is not involved anymore. I think this is the main thing that got people up. But granted, I might be an idiot who is panicking over nothing because does not get the technical 100%, but I guess what worried some of us is a closeness and non-ideological approach.
Lastly, btc cannot not be messy and confusionary (because it is open to everyone), and I hope we all get through this together. Sometimes I see the point that we should open the gate and let the market decide, that’s the way we should achieve consensus together, organically and without barriers. But then I get scared if the market decides for btc being a not monetary network, and if this happen I’ll lose faith forever in finally having a world of sound money and cooperation. Maybe I’m too emotionally involved in this and my feelings cloud my judgement.
Anyway thanks a lot for the engagement man, much appreciated, and much love to you!