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