Oddbean

A bit before that, it was Amir that brought in the BIP system. Gavin then moved more towards Craig (who he thought was Satoshi), and the group that wanted to fork bitcoin. I actually liked Gavin quite, Satoshi gave him the keys because he wrote the first faucet, and seemed a nice person at the time. But believing Criag was Satoshi was not going to fly. We did incredibly well that he was removed from the project gracefully. 2nd war was also hard fought, but you could see it coming a long way off, similar characters. It was a war around governance, of course, not block size. Unfortunate naming. I suspect there's another war on the horizon in the medium term with influencers that want to fork bitcoin, and those they persuade. This is again not about the feature, it's about governance, and whether there wiil be a chain split, which could be fatal to either side, and devestating for investors.

I've read the blocksize wars book several times. I bought the paperback, but couldn't pinch to zoom, so had to buy the kindle version as well 😂 It's deeply fascinating seeing an emerging technology / protocol and the path it leads. I was deeply involved in the Internet in the 1980 thu 2000's, which had its own share of issues, but Bitcoin being money and an asset is fighting harder battles than the Internet ever had to. A friend told me about Bitcoin in 2012, I dismissed it until 2016 to my chagrin 😞

Awesome! It's well researched, and wll written. There's a lot of things that are not in the book. And I wish it had not become mythologized about block size, more about fork and control. Some of the major battles took place on the mailing. There were off-list emails that were critical, perhaps I'll fish them out one day, but I think no one really cares. I managed to help talk down Eric Voorhees though some number crunching, and in the end he listened to reason, and to his wallet, as the futures market indicated they would make a big loss. Danger was averted, then Roger Ver and co., who would not listen to reason, saw his chance to pounce, and "flip" bitcoin. It may have worked if he had not been so incompetent, then bitcoin would have had a chain death as the minority chain. 1-2 people joining him would have created a "flippening". It was a remarkable and unlikely victory for open source, against billions of dollars in VCs and millions of users. The community really banded together. A first in history. https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-segwit2x/

One thing that was very clear from the book, was it was NOT about blocksize. I understood that pretty much straight away. His current fiat tax issues aside, you could argue that Roger WAS successful. He forked BTC to BCH and had control of his own blockchain which still has a market cap of $6B. Same, but less so for Craig. Success comes in many forms. Thanks for the link, I'll look through it when I have some more time.

Successful for the narcissist that he is, but dont forget Bcash was 10% for ages, then went down to 1%. If they had hit 50% bitcoin had no recourse because miners would move to the longest most profitable chain and they had all (except slush) signalled they would move too. Revisionist Ver claims it was about tech. The issue was his giant ego. The argument for large blocks had a point, but a hostile fork of code you didnt write, to destroy upstream, is the lowest of the low. Imagine giving your spare time to give something to the world for free, then having someine take it and try to destroy you with your own work. It's like going to a food back and throwing boiling soup at the chef, then trying to pick his wallet as he burns.

I don't disagree with you in any way, but granular detail aside and tax affairs aside, he still has a large personal wealth, his own blockchain and many, diminishing, numbers of followers. He is not going to fail because of BCH, but ironically our frens at the US government may be his downfall and the large amount of undeclared BTC he took with him when he left the US 😂

Indeed. If you ever saw his interview with John Carvalho he boasted about how he was a multi millionaire before bitcoin. He likely bought several 1000, maybe even from martti (who makes iris, and was bitcoin's second developer for that whole first year) who gave 10s of thousands away at cost, to kickstart the bitcoin economy. I think bear whale (vinny) bought alot and started ripple, possibly Jed, and possibly Roger. Back in the early days btc was only a few cents. So he could easily have bought up to 100k, from altruistic actors.

This thread is interesting from a nostr perspective in terms of which direction the nostr 'community' of developers will take. I am not yet dissuaded from the view that decentralisation leads to fragmentation and a gradual loss of energy. i.e. a gradual decline in nostr users and usage beyond being a system for a small niche community. The 'wars' you describe in bitcoin, despite the negative connotation, are possibly a source of energy which actually helped bitcoin to survive. It's my contention that some centralising 'turf wars' may be need within nostr to help it achieve the same but I don't see anything like that happening yet despite some frustration that nostr is not growing its user numbers much. The idea of some centralising function and/or conflict being in any away positive seems to be anathema to most nostr/bitcoiners, but I wonder whether they are missing the point and projecting a personal internal preference onto a wider project?

Agreed, if we ignore the "wars" going on IRL right now. Conflict frequently brings vigor and drive and can bring new life into failing projects. Also competition. The problem with competition in social media is that users can and often do use multiple platforms, so providing you are in the top 5, for example, your platform doesn't have to win. Like Bitcoin, NOSTR only solves a problem that many people are unaware of or don't care about. Bitcoin is gaining most ground in third world countries where traditional financial services struggle. So it is for NOSTR, it is most powerful in highly censored regions due to its inability to be shutdown or censored. The interesting situation with this is that first world countries are becoming the most aggressive at censorship.

Another beauty from Roger Ver to Adam Back: Roger really believed that Bitcoin had an ICO: "Adam, you had a personal invitation from Satoshi to participate in Bitcoin’s ICO before it even launched. You ignored the invite and didn’t get involved in any way until after bitcoin was around $1,000 many years later. I think this is firm evidence that you have no idea why Bitcoin became used as money, and you have no clue as to what the users of Bitcoin want today" -- Roger Ver https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-segwit2x/2017-June/000024.html

I know, I watch Adam troll Roger on Xitter 😂 I tend not be to as black and white as history would wish me to be, so I'm afraid I can't follow you on a journey of belittling Roger. That doesn't mean I don't agree with the arguments or even the conclusions, just the additional emotional baggage that inevitably comes from those directly involved. I wrote about this in a different form yesterday, here: nostr:naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzp6pmv65w6tfhcp73404xuxcqpg24f8rf2z86f3v824td22c9ymptqqxnzdejxumnzwfj8yenqwpj2ghvn2 External link: https://habla.news/u/mhardcastle@nostrplebs.com/1727719293082

Notice the final email (when we thought it was over) signed by Bitgo, who I think still hold all of El Salvador BTC! https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-segwit2x/2017-November/000685.html