Oddbean

Yes, I am making a lot of assumptions about you. Feel free to correct me when I’m wrong. Anti-fragile doesn’t mean invulnerable, right? I don’t get where all this magical thinking comes from. We don’t need to defend the protocol because nothing can hurt it? I hear this a lot. It feels like some people are stuck in a fantasy game. No, our lord Satoshi did not speak the magic words and did not imbue the protocol with a magical shield. It’s up to you, me, and the rest of the community to defend it. Yes, I want payments too. I want many things. Keep in mind that we’re playing the long game here. We have a low time preference. Who said that we should have payments by now? Maybe your children or grandchildren will finally implement payments on bitcoin. People need to stop imposing they mental schedule on bitcoin. Let it develop and take over the world as it will. Just protect what matters so it has that chance.

If you’re going to make assumptions and expect me to correct you, then you’re just wasting my time and I’ll mute you. I defend bitcoin by running my own node and opting out of the soft forks that I don’t want. Simple as that. Maybe you need to reread the blocksize war because you seemed to have learned something different from what I did when I read it. Neither the devs nor the miners/corporations were able to change bitcoin during the war. It came down to the nodes.

“I defend bitcoin by running my own node and opting out of the soft forks that I don’t want.” 😂 No you don’t. You never have opted out of any soft fork. NAME ONE that you opted out of. You run core like everyone else. You trust them and run the soft forks they choose, like everyone else. You don’t even know how to permanently opt out. All you know how to do is delay the inevitable. Yeah, mute me. Then we’ll all know I was right, that I caught you in another false statement. When you couldn’t prove me wrong, you just ran and hid. “Maybe you need to reread the blocksize war because you seemed to have learned something different from what I did when I read it. Neither the devs nor the miners/corporations were able to change bitcoin during the war. It came down to the nodes.” But the core devs DID change bitcoin during the war, right? They enabled segwit. The war was a power struggle between core and the other large holders. Core proposed a soft fork while the large holders proposed hard forks. The lesson that the nodes made a choice and won the war is another little lie we tell ourselves. If you go back and carefully look at the blocksize war chronology, you’ll see that the “user activated soft fork” was threatened but never enforced. There was definite visible support for the UASF but we don’t know whether a sufficient number of nodes would have enforced to win a contentious split. The issue was moot by the time the UASF was to activate. The nodes didn’t need to enforce because the miners had already capitulated to core’s segwit change. The lesson I learned is that core devs are powerful and that in a war between a soft and hard fork, the soft fork will probably win. Why? Because the soft fork is compatible with all nodes while the hard fork is compatible with only the nodes which decide to upgrade. Many node operators are lazy, busy, or don’t care enough to bother upgrading. We can’t ignore the part that core’s software won. This supports why I believe we must be extremely careful with what goes into core.

Good advice. I’m also hoping people save their attack memes for people outside the community. In here, we should discuss and respectfully debate ideas recognizing that we’re all trying to push bitcoin forward.