“As a result of the split and the resulting uncertainty, the value of Bitcoin
Cash compared to Bitcoin continued to decline. Just as the small blockers had
expected, some of the large blockers began to slowly see merit in the idea
that, in the event of a dispute over the rules, the original rule set is a key
schelling point. If one diverts from this philosophy, the risk is that the
coin continues to split into smaller and smaller factions.” 203


“In part due to the difficulties of conducting a hardfork in Bitcoin, the
Bitcoin Cash community opted for a different approach. They conducted a
hardfork every six months, in May and November of each year. In November 2018,
just over one year since Bitcoin Cash had launched, there were tensions in the
Bitcoin Cash community. Craig Wright had wanted the blocksize limit to be
increased to an even more aggressive schedule than many other sections of the
Bitcoin Cash community wanted” 202


“Bitmain invested more than US$888 million into Bitcoin Cash.[182] This was
the majority of the free cash flow the company had generated in the 2017
cryptocurrency bull market. At this point, the price performance of Bitcoin
Cash had been weak and the company had experienced heavy mark-tomarket
losses.” 202


“Over the next few years, Bitcoin Cash underperformed Bitcoin with respect to
price. Not only that, but Bitcoin Cash even had lower on-chain transaction
volume than Bitcoin, when on-chain throughput and a blocksize limit increase
was said to be the primary driver behind the coin. Even worse, by March 2018
it emerged that Bitcoin Cash on-chain volume was even lower than SegWit volume
on Bitcoin.” 202


“Roger Ver must have spent tens of millions of dollars tirelessly promoting
the coin for years.” 201


“Coinbase had listed Bitcoin Cash and, in the excitement, the coin traded as
high as US$8,500. A record in US dollar terms, but not as high as the November
peak in Bitcoin terms.” 201


“On November 15, when the SegWit2x activation point finally came around, it
emerged that the client was full of critical bugs. […] Due to these
catastrophic bugs, the SegWit2x chain never existed and no blocks on the chain
were ever produced.” 201


“The idea of "chain death" was that, at some point, the Bitcoin Cash price
would increase, due perhaps to its superior utility as a medium of exchange.
This would then make Bitcoin Cash more profitable to mine, driving miners away
from Bitcoin and towards Bitcoin Cash. At this point, the Bitcoin chain would
grind to a halt and not be extended. Bitcoin would then die and Bitcoin Cash
would reign supreme. Of course, Bitcoin had a difficultyadjustment mechanism
to defend against this, however that took two weeks to adjust. In the minds of
the large blockers, it was possible to kill the Bitcoin chain before this
difficulty adjustment occurred. In the minds of small blockers, this hope from
the large blockers was sheer idiocy. After all, the small blockers were the
patient ones; they would just wait for the difficulty to adjust, no matter how
long it took. There was also the matter of the Bitcoin Cash difficulty
adjustment, which is much faster than the two weeks in Bitcoin. If the Bitcoin
Cash price increased and more miners joined, the Bitcoin Cash difficulty would
increase, thereby driving miners back to Bitcoin before the Bitcoin difficulty
ever adjusted downwards. The large blockers never seemed to appreciate this
aspect of the difficulty adjustment, at least not in this period.” 200


“During the Bitcoin Cash price boom of November 2017, the large blockers were
incredibly excited about their massive gains. Some of those I spoke to had
purchased more Bitcoin Cash at the height of the bubble, hoping it would
overtake Bitcoin. There was a large block Telegram group at the time called
"Chain Death", referring to the potential death of the Bitcoin chain and rise
of Bitcoin Cash as the dominant coin.” 200


“When news of SegWit2x's abandonment was released, it caused a tremendous
increase in the value of Bitcoin Cash, which was now the last coin standing as
far as the large blockers were concerned.” 199


“With Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic and Bitcoin Unlimited all falling, and now
BTC1 being formally withdrawn by the proponents, the war was over. The large
blockers were exhausted; they could see their methodologies did not work and
there was no way they were going to launch another contentious hardfork
proposal. After more than two years of intense war, this was a sensational
victory for the smaller blockers. They finally had their way, not only with
respect to the blocksize limit itself, but crucially with respect to how to
change the protocol rules. It was now, finally, widely accepted that arranging
meetings with large corporates in the space and trying to decide on changes to
the protocol rules would not work. The majority of miners also did not have
the ability to relax protocol rules. If one wants to change the protocol
rules, one has to persuade and campaign for the support of end users and
investors, who need to opt-in to the new rules. It was ordinary users who had
the final decision-making power, and this was the financial sovereignty that
made Bitcoin unique and compelling.” 199


“On Wednesday, November 8, at 4.58pm UTC, with just one week to go until
activation of SegWit2x, an email was sent to the SegWit2x mailing list from
Mike Belshe, also signed by the other prominent SegWit2x supporters. The email
was essentially an unconditional surrender; phase two of the NYA was
officially abandoned. The SegWit2x supporters had little choice: had they gone
ahead, it would merely have resulted in a new alternative coin that would have
been less popular than Bitcoin Cash.” 197


“Jihan Wu had supposedly said that he would only mine SegWit2x at a loss for
two days, at which point if it was not economical to continue mining SegWit2x,
he would switch back to Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. Bitmain had already spent a
lot of money mining Bitcoin Cash at a loss for some periods and was apparently
keen to avoid wasting more money. The large blockers never really supported
SegWit2x, their hearts went to Bitcoin Cash. SegWit2x did not have support
from the users. It had no node network; with almost everyone running Bitcoin
Core, the exchanges had either rejected SegWit2x or taken a neutral stance.”
195


“On October 23, BitMEX's CEO Arthur Hayes put out a blogpost entitled "Trading
ShitCoin2x".[163] The "ShitCoin2x" meme was celebrated by the smaller
blockers, and the situation looked bleak for the last remaining supporters of
the NYA. If they launched their coin, it looked like it would be another
altcoin trading below 10 percent of the price of Bitcoin. The following day,
Jeff Garzik announced he was launching a new alternative coin called
"Metronome".” 191


“Another tactic of the small blockers was to work on the official list of
SegWit2x supporters based on the NYA document. The plan was to arrange
meetings and calls with the companies and to explain the flaws of the NYA; in
particular, that it was causing a split which, unlike Bitcoin Cash, lacked
mandatory replay protection, which would likely cause loss of funds.” 184


“Finally, there was a third set of characters to defeat, Jeff Garzik and Mike
Belshe. Jeff was the lead developer of the SegWit2x client and Mike, the CEO
of BitGo, had somehow taken up the baton for the large block team. Roger Ver
and Jihan Wu had mostly stepped back from the war at this point, instead
focusing their efforts on promoting Bitcoin Cash.” 182


“small blockers now argued that the large blockers had violated the NYA by
supporting a new spin-off coin, and therefore the NYA was void. […] It appears
as if the large blockers shot themselves in the foot, yet again.” 181


“Messages were going around urging people not to sell Bitcoin Cash for less
than seven percent of the price of Bitcoin. The rationale here appeared to be
that this was a mechanism to make the large blockers pay up. Consider, for
example, if the conversion price between Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin was one
percent; this would mean that, if the large blockers had just 210,000 Bitcoin
prior to the split, they could, in theory, buy up and corner the entire
Bitcoin Cash market, all 21 million coins. Once this was done, the large
blockers could then pump the price up and generate handsome profits, making
them wealthy and keen to take on Bitcoin from a position of strength. In
contrast, if the exchange ratio was 10 percent, this would cost the large
blockers 10 times more Bitcoin to accumulate Bitcoin Cash. Some of the small
blockers were aware of this problem and this is why they encouraged their
fellow small blockers not to sell, at least not below seven percent. "Make
them pay" was a popular phrase that spread privately deep inside some small
block circles at the time.” 180


“Some of the trading funds in the space had then started to see the pattern:
from their point of view, the small blockers were ideological sellers and this
was an opportunity to be exploited. These funds would buy Bitcoin Cash when
the small blockers sold, at the time the new blocks came out, and then sell it
back in the interim, waiting for the next block.” 180


“as the first blocks were mined that enabled users to trade, the price of
Bitcoin Cash instantly plummeted, by almost 20 percent.” 179


“Most small blockers wanted the large blockers to leave Bitcoin and stop
causing trouble by promoting dangerous hardforks, advocating for aggressive
blocksize limit increases and delaying important upgrades such as SegWit. It
was therefore considered important to ensure Bitcoin Cash had sufficient "exit
momentum" to make certain that some of these large blockers left for good.”
177


“The mood inside the large blocker community at this point was one of sheer
elation. They had felt trapped, bullied and imprisoned by the small blockers
for years, and now they finally had their freedom. They finally had a coin to
promote to merchants again and to use freely without the crippling high fees
imposed on them.” 176


“As Bitcoin Cash had expected to be the minority hashrate chain, one of the
concerns was that blocks would be too slow at the start and Bitcoin's twoweek
difficulty adjustment period would then take too long to have an impact.
Bitcoin Cash therefore lowered the difficulty requirement, which had another
inadvertent benefit: it meant the Bitcoin Cash block headers were incompatible
with Bitcoin, and therefore even Bitcoin light clients and mobile wallets
would always know not to follow the Bitcoin Cash chain. This was another key
safety feature which small blockers had been proponents of. However, the new
difficulty adjustment algorithm later proved to be fundamentally flawed, as it
incentivised miners to leave the network and then return when the difficulty
adjusted and profitability improved. The impact of this was that the capacity
of the Bitcoin Cash network oscillated in a volatile way, which proved to be a
major weakness and impacted the reliability of Bitcoin Cash as a payment
network. It also caused blocks to be mined faster, which eventually resulted
in Bitcoin Cash being around 10,000 blocks ahead of Bitcoin, with more block
subsidy coins mined earlier. This was a bad error from Amaury.” 175


“With just six days to go until the coin was created, mandatory two-way replay
protection was added to Bitcoin ABC. We were therefore finally going to have a
clean split, and the two sides in this war could peacefully part company.” 174


“On July 25, 2017, Roger Ver, the CEO of Bitcoin.com stated that: If the 2X
portion of Segwit2x fails to activate, Bitcoin.com will immediately shift all
company resources to supporting Bitcoin Cash exclusively.” 174


“Finally, the large blockers would get what they wanted: a large blocksize
limit chain, without using clients released by Bitcoin Core and without the
inflexible and cautious approach to changing the consensus rules, which large
blockers detested above all else. On July 17, 2017, ViaBTC, now widely
regarded as a proxy for Jihan that would often test the waters before Bitmain
itself announced a new policy, stated that it would start a new mining pool
that would mine the new coin. They named the coin Bitcoin Cash, with the
ticker BCC. This ticker would eventually change to BCH.” 174


“The new alternative coin would also exclude SegWit, something very unpopular
with large blockers, although in reality, when you looked under the hood,
Bitcoin ABC did actually include much of the SegWit upgrade” 173


“a little-known developer called Amaury Sechet […] outlined plans for a new
hardfork, with a blocksize limit increase and optional replay protection […]
announced a new client, Bitcoin ABC, stating that this was an implementation
of the plan Jihan had announced a few weeks ago, the UAHF.” 173


“Jihan was scared of a chain-split, possibly overestimated the power of his
opponents, and gave in to the pressure. […] However, there was still the issue
that many significant companies in the space, in particular US-based and
VCbacked ones, had committed to a hardfork blocksize increase.” 172


“BIP 91 activated right before the BIP 148 deadline of August 1, 2017, leaving
just a tiny, five-day gap between when BIP 91 made flagging for SegWit
mandatory and when the UASF would have done the same. This close proximity
appeared to indicate that the threat of a UASF had worked. The fact that the
UASF succeeded was a miraculous achievement. A modern-day David vs Goliath
victory. The UASF was never implemented in a release of Bitcoin Core, and some
of the most influential Bitcoin Core developers had openly opposed it. In the
true spirit of Bitcoin and its pseudonymous creator, Satoshi, the UASF didn't
emerge from an official, closed-door, roundtable meeting among the big
players. Instead, it was released in the open and promoted by a pseudonymous
developer, Shaolinfry. Somehow, one pseudonymous individual, a few grassroots
hardcore followers and a few hats commissioned by Samson Mow, had gone head-
to-head with a multi-billion dollar enterprise (Bitmain) supported by many
other well capitalised businesses, and won. I remember thinking that something
like that could only happen in Bitcoin.” 171


“BTC1 was attempting to change the consensus rules of Bitcoin in a rushed and
arbitrary schedule and, in this short time, had released multiple clients,
which were already incompatible with themselves due to bugs and other last
minute changes. By early July, around 80 to 95 percent of miners (by hash
power) were including the letters "NYA" in the blocks they mined, and the NYA
looked like it was in a commanding position. However, almost none of the users
were running BTC1 or even Segnet (the first part of the NYA only); adoption
was near zero. At the same time, the major exchanges I spoke to were not
running BTC1, Segnet or the BIP 148 client; they were just running Bitcoin
Core. The outlook therefore seemed highly uncertain.” 169


“Sergio Lerner, upon whose proposal the NYA was based, threw his weight behind
replay protection. By this point, Jeff was under tremendous pressure from all
sides: There are two group of people which have two different visions for
Bitcoin. None of these visions is "wrong". One group values more things like
decentralization, lack of government, censorship resistance, anonymity. This
group thinks that Bitcoin will transform our world in 20-30 years. To reach
this goal, it's of utter importance to stick to those values. There is no
rush. The other group values more things like reaching one billion users in
the next 5 years, or serving real unbanked users today, even if that requires
a political agreement now. Both visions have their merits. But they are
incompatible. Replay protection gives a chance to each of these "bitcoiners"
to fully push their own vision. Both visions can coexists” 167


“the reason it was conducted in private was clear: if this was done in public,
the small blockers would no doubt pick holes in what they were doing, making
their proposal look weak. SegWit was extremely complicated and an alternative
group was trying to roll it out with a very limited understanding of it.” 165


“Many in the Bitcoin community were furious to discover that development and
plans for the NYA client were taking place in secret and not on a public
mailing list. Bitcoin was supposed to be an open system, subject to open
scrutiny.” 165


“The NYA did not even pay lip service to the idea that users should have a
say. It was pitched as the large corporates in the space imposing the rules on
the users in a top-down manner.” 163


“As for the small blockers, there was no representation of them in New York,
and their views were not reflected in the agreement whatsoever. There were no
sentences with double meanings or conflicting statements; it appeared to have
been written entirely by the large blocker side.” 162


“On May 22, 2017, there was a meeting in New York arranged by Barry Silbert,
of Digital Currency Group (DCG), aimed at resolving the conflict. Jihan Wu was
in attendance. This resulted in yet another agreement. The following document
referred to as the New York Agreement (NYA), was published. It read: We agree
to immediately support the following parallel upgrades to the bitcoin
protocol, which will be deployed simultaneously and based on the original
Segwit2Mb[129] proposal: ● Activate Segregated Witness at an 80% threshold,
signaling at bit 4 ● Activate a 2 MB hard fork within six months We are also
committed to the research and development of technical mechanisms to improve
signaling in the bitcoin community, as well as to put in place communication
tools, in order to more closely coordinate with ecosystem participants in the
design, integration, and deployment of safe solutions that increase bitcoin
capacity. […] The idea was to do both SegWit and a non-witness hardfork
blocksize increase to 2 MB. […] The agreement itself was said to have been
drafted by DCG employee Meltem Demirors.” 161


“Although Jihan did not appear to realise it, this plan was actually
incredibly favourable to the UASF cause, because it meant that the UASF chain
was more likely to obtain the proof-of-work lead over the original rules
chain, since Bitmain indicated it had planned to move away to an alternative
hardfork chain. In addition to this, Bitmain planned to mine the new hardfork
chain in secret, for a 72-hour period. This was a very bad move, if the plan
was for the hardforked chain to gain any traction, since nobody would be able
to see the chain, or run a client supporting it, and exchanges would not be
able to support the token. It is unclear what had motivated this blogpost. It
appears as if Jihan was extremely angry and quickly developed a plan designed
to frustrate his opponents, but had not thought it through at all. What Jihan
should have announced, of course, is that, in the event of the UASF, he would
keep mining the original rules chain and meanwhile arranged a counter UASF.
However, this would have left him stuck with 1 MB blocks, so maybe he felt he
did not have much of an option.” 158


“The Bitmain plan was to activate a hardfork at around the same time as the
UASF was due to activate, which would increase the blocksize limit.” 158


“Jihan Wu appeared extremely angered by the UASF campaign. To him, a UASF
undermined the narrative he had built that miners had significant influence
over the protocol rules. On May 28, 2017, Jihan Tweeted with the tag #UASF
alongside a picture of the murder victims of the Jonestown massacre.[126] The
anger and fear he had for the UASF appeared to be strong.” 155


“The large blockers often derided the small blockers as insignificant and
naive. At this point, however, after three failed hardfork attempts - defeats
which took them by surprise - most large blockers now appeared to overestimate
the power and influence of the small blockers. In reality, the smaller
blockers were far less powerful than they thought; the main reason for their
success in defeating the large blockers up until this point was their superior
understanding of Bitcoin, tactical blunders from the large blockers themselves
and Bitcoin's inherent resilience against contentious protocol rule changes.
Due to an incomplete understanding, at least to some extent, the large
blockers instead blamed their defeats on shrewd manoeuvring from the cunning
and powerful small blockers.” 154


“From a tactical point of view, the large blockers were too slow to react and
too slow to understand the UASF. Large blockers should have seen the potential
split in the small block camp” 154


“In early May 2017, I sat down in Hong Kong for a chat with one of the most
significant behind-the-scenes proponents of the UASF. The developer I spoke to
had written code for the UASF client and maintained several of the pro-UASF
campaign websites. I explained to him that the UASF was risky and that it was
important to be patient with the Bitcoin consensus rules. He gave a long and
robust response. "In normal times, you are correct", he asserted, "however,
these are not normal times, we are in war." He continued: "Bitcoin is in a
crisis situation, Bitmain is maliciously exploiting the ASICBoost
vulnerability, SegWit fixes this vulnerability and we need to urgently fix
this. It is an emergency situation and therefore we do not have time for the
normal, patient approach." He went on to explain that, in a war, you do not
always have the luxury of choosing the right time. He appreciated that the
UASF activation was only a few months away, but he explained that the small
blockers were currently in a dominant position in the war and there was no
guarantee this would last. "Now is the time to get the big weapons out," he
proclaimed, "when we are strong." He continued: "We have no other choice, we
need to act now, go nuclear and decisively win this war, for the future of
Bitcoin. If we do not, we risk defeat and Bitcoin will be dead." This
developer appeared to have thought through all the scenarios and was convinced
BIP 148 would work. In his mind, the fact that BIP 148 was a softfork, a
subset of the current consensus rules, was a significant advantage and would
help force miners to switch to the BIP 148 chain. His view was that BIP 148
was a threat and miners would cave from the pressure early, activating SegWit,
such that the softfork in August 2017 would never actually occur. "BIP 148
contains code such that it doesn't apply if SegWit is already activated," he
explained.” 153


“the large blockers had split into several factions: for example, between
those that believed Craig Wright was Satoshi and those that thought he was a
conman; between those that thought Bitcoin Unlimited was a robust idea and
those that thought it was flawed; and between those that had left to launch
new initial coin offerings and those who remained focused on Bitcoin. However,
to their credit, up until this point the small blockers had been mostly
united.” 148


“With a lot of fanfare, Litecoin then activated SegWit in May 2017. The price
of Litecoin then sharply rallied: partly due to excitement over SegWit; partly
due to a strategy from some small blockers to buy Litecoin in order to drive
the price up and build a positive narrative about SegWit; but mostly due to
more funds flowing into the space as the 2017 cryptocurrency bubble began.”
145


“small blockers absolutely intended to use SegWit activation on Litecoin to
help it activate on Bitcoin. The large blockers had detected this and now had
to switch their efforts to stopping SegWit on Litecoin. On the other hand, it
was clear that the actual Litecoin community strongly supported the upgrade,
so perhaps the action of the large blockers here was a little inappropriate.”
143


“Charlie Lee had founded Litecoin and he seemed to identify as a small
blocker. At the same time, the Litecoin community appeared to enthusiastically
support the activation of SegWit, since this was an opportunity for them to
implement new technology before Bitcoin, which was seen as very positive.” 141


“a Slack channel called "dragonsden" […] was a private channel that had 21
members. […] Most of the conversion revolved around social media, public
relations and how best to expose weaknesses in the narratives and arguments
put forward by the large blockers. Many participants in the channel appeared
very committed to the cause. […] This war was also a meme war, and the
"Dragons", as members of the channel were sometimes called, were very involved
in meme production. Many of these memes were humorous, designed to make the
large blockers appear as if they had a weak understanding of some of the
technical issues in Bitcoin, with Roger Ver, Craig Wright and Jihan Wu being
the main focus of attention. Another strategy was linking Roger Ver with Craig
Wright, although, to be fair, Roger did not make their life too difficult
here.” 139


“Gregory Maxwell's allegation was that Bitmain and Jihan's stated reasons for
opposing SegWit were, in fact, lies. Bitmain supposedly had a secret agenda:
the company had discovered a secret mining optimisation, a proof-of-work
shortcut, that would not work if blocks contained SegWit transactions. The
reason for the opposition to SegWit was therefore financial” 130


“On March 17, 2017, yet another important date in this saga, several major
exchanges, including Bitfinex, Kraken and Bitstamp, dealt a major blow to
Bitcoin Unlimited. They issued a joint announcement, indicating that they
would not regard Bitcoin Unlimited as Bitcoin, even if it had a majority of
the hashing power. They also said that "any consensus breaking implementation"
required replay protection.” 125


“Large blockers saw the activation of SegWit as a defeat for their side and
blocking SegWit was one crucial lever of control they had. This was the only
major bargaining chip the large blockers had left, and they would not let it
go.” 124


“This was clearly a change in tone from the large blockers. They had
previously claimed there would be no split and no smaller block chain, while
now they were discussing actively attacking such a chain. In early April, I
had a discussion with one of Jihan's key associates in Hong Kong. He informed
me that the large blockers had allocated a budget of US$100 million to attack
the smaller block chain. The plan was to spend this money on energy, mining
empty blocks on the smaller block chain and orphaning any blocks with
transactions. This would essentially "kill the chain", he proclaimed. I asked
why he wanted to kill the smaller block chain, and he explained that the
smaller blockers had "stalled Bitcoin for years and that this was what they
deserved".” 124


“Much to the delight of the small blockers, they had allowed themselves to be
driven by ego, anger and frustration to support a poorlyconceived client. Once
again, after Bitcoin Unlimited was abandoned, there was almost no contrition
from any of the larger blockers. None of them appeared to take responsibility”
122


“What happened was a critical DoS bug was introduced into the xThin element of
the Bitcoin Unlimited code, which had nothing to do with the blocksize limit.
This had been exploited, causing almost all the Bitcoin Unlimited nodes to
crash.” 121


“false flagging in favour of Bitcoin Unlimited can be considered as an attack
on Bitcoin Unlimited, as it could cause a failed activation. Large blockers
didn't seem to appreciate this and reacted with excitement as the hashrate
support for Bitcoin Unlimited increased. To them, this was building up
considerable momentum. The miner flags were an important political message,
whether the votes were fake or not. On January 30, 2017, a miner running
Bitcoin Unlimited produced a block larger than 1 MB.[93] This may have been
the first block produced, with sufficient proof of work, over 1 MB. This was
probably some kind of error or accident, as there was no apparent coordination
behind this. Bitcoin nodes across the network rejected the block as invalid,
which was an example, according to smaller blockers, of why one needed user
agreement before conducting a hardfork. Large blockers, such as Roger Ver,
tried to brush this incident under the carpet, claiming that stale blocks
occur all the time, without accepting that this block was not just stale, but
invalid. In March 2017, an event occurred which caused significant damage to
the reputation of Bitcoin Unlimited. The number of reachable Bitcoin Unlimited
nodes suddenly took a massive nosedive.” 121


“At the start of 2017, around 15 to 20 percent of the Bitcoin hashrate flagged
support for Bitcoin Unlimited. Bitmain also directly operated pools, such as
Antpool, which started flagging for Bitcoin Unlimited in March 2017. This
increased support for Bitcoin Unlimited among miners to the 45 to 55 percent
range, a level it stayed at for most of 2017.” 120


“despite all of these potential security weaknesses, Bitcoin Unlimited had
support from across the large blocker camp, from Brian Armstrong at Coinbase,
to Gavin, Jihan Wu and Roger Ver.” 120


“It therefore appeared that many of these features and proposals were not
driven by technical expediency at all. Instead, it was about culture, ego and
a desire to be involved in Bitcoin. Most of the large blockers by this point
simply hated the small blockers and Bitcoin Core developers. They hated the
perception they had that the small block group controlled Bitcoin, and they
wanted to be part of Bitcoin. Due to this desire to be more involved, Bitcoin
Unlimited expanded its remit beyond simply a blocksize limit increase and
covered a variety of areas. This eventually proved to be a mistake and would
lead to Bitcoin Unlimited's downfall. After the blocksize war was over, some
in the Bitcoin Unlimited community eventually conceded these errors. Back when
BU had the most momentum of any big block group, there were several of us who
thought that BU should focus on just a simple block size increase on top of
Core first, instead of trying to get the entire community to adopt a
complicated block size algorithm ("Emergent Consensus"). We also wanted BU to
stop trying to implement their own version of weak blocks for the time being.
The critical issue was increasing block size and forking away from Core with
as few distractions as possible. BU's insistence on adding a bunch of complex
code instead of focusing on simplicity backfired, as the BU code had several
bugs causing nodes to crash. This gave the overall Bitcoin community the
impression that BU devs couldn't really be trusted to write solid code or to
appropriately scale their ambitions to their coding/testing skill.” 120


“At this point, Bitcoin was already very successful; the network had been
operating reasonably smoothly for seven years, overcoming any issues. This
appeared to have generated a degree of complacency in the community, with
people having an overly optimistic view of the robustness of the system. When
questioned about some of the potential weaknesses in Bitcoin Unlimited, its
supporters often said that Bitcoin was antifragile and that it would always
work.” 117


“how much of a shame it was that Roger was focusing all his energy on this
internal conflict, rather than promoting the space to outsiders and new
merchants as he had in the past.” 116


“The restlessness and repetitiveness with which Roger could repeat these
messages again and again, all over the world, was remarkable. Roger appeared
to have a very high degree of conviction and he was clearly very effective and
convincing in his messages. Roger was a ruthless and prolific campaigner for
the large block camp.” 116


“With Bitcoin Classic failing to gain traction, in the late summer of 2016 the
large blockers converged on a new hardfork blocksize increase client, called
Bitcoin Unlimited. […] when one looked in more detail at Bitcoin Unlimited,
not only was it highly complex, it was also deeply technically flawed.
Converging on such a complicated and weak proposal was another monumental
strategic error from the large blockers. In small block circles, there was
delight at this development, but also an emphasis on keeping this quiet. […]
Bitcoin Unlimited was not just a client, but also a formal organisation, with
a membership, by-laws, a president and membership voting. The key idea behind
Bitcoin Unlimited was that miners and users add parameters to their clients
related to the blocksize limit.” 114


“The influence that Jihan Wu and Bitmain had over the industry was
significant. Bitmain had mining farms, mining pools and a 75 percent market
share in the production of mining equipment. Any mining farm operators who
wanted to purchase miners in a timely manner were therefore keen to be on
Jihan's good side. This would mean supporting Jihan's side in the blocksize
war and potentially using Bitmain's mining pools and flagging support for
Bitcoin Unlimited. There were also rumours among the small blockers of Bitmain
buying up unnecessarily large quantities of some of the components used in the
mining machinery, such as capacitors, and asking for exclusivity agreements
with suppliers. Bitmain was also using patents to protect its market
dominance, even going as far as suing former employee Yang Zuoxing for
starting a rival firm and allegedly violating one of Bitmain's patents.” 112


“Prior to the Ethereum split, miners were keen to just try something; now the
view seemed to have changed. Bitcoin Classic now looked unlikely to activate
in the short term. Ironically, although most small blockers won't like to
admit this, Ethereum may have saved Bitcoin. However, the war was far from
over. People had short memories in the space, and the lessons from Ethereum
would gradually fade from memory.” 109


“Jihan had agreed to help to try and activate SegWit once it was released, and
that miners were scared by the events in Ethereum and didn't want to try
anything risky.” 108


“There was no danger of Ethereum Classic gaining too much momentum, overtaking
Ethereum in hashrate and then causing all the hardfork nodes to switch over to
the Classic chain. Vitalik was too smart for that. The Ethereum hardfork was
structured such that it had a checkpoint, a clean break, so that both sides of
the split would exist no matter which chain had more work. This is sometimes
called "wipeout protection" and is something I had carefully clarified with
Ethereum developers before the split. Bitcoin Classic's decision not to
include wipeout protection now looked even more naive. Coinbase only added
support for Ethereum on July 21, 2016,[83] ironically just one day after the
split. The company was a supporter of Bitcoin Classic and its CEO, Brian
Armstrong, believed that the Ethereum hardfork would succeed without a split,
presumably because the hardfork had strong support from the miners. As a
result of this belief, Coinbase appeared to fail to take appropriate action to
safeguard customer funds in case this judgement proved to be false. Coinbase
was therefore vulnerable to something called the "replay attack". In the first
few days after the split, when withdrawing Ethereum from Coinbase, there was a
chance that Coinbase would send out two versions of this transaction: one on
Ethereum and one on Ethereum Classic. […] Eventually, Coinbase found out about
the error, implemented some form of replay protection and covered the losses
from its own balance sheet.” 105


“One of the key characters in the space supporting Ethereum Classic was Barry
Silbert. Barry was no small blocker; it appeared he was buying Ethereum
Classic purely to try and make money.” 104


“As the price of Ethereum Classic increased, it gained more and more momentum.
Miners, it appeared, just wanted to follow the money. This is when many people
started to realise that a hardfork and contentious split was not just about
two issues, hashrate and computer science, but financial markets too.” 104


“On June 24, 2016, it was proposed that Ethereum conduct a softfork to freeze
the hackers funds.[77] Around four days later, it was discovered that this
softfork proposal was flawed and would potentially expose the network to
critical DoS attacks. Therefore, the softfork was abandoned and it was decided
the only way to recover the funds was a hardfork. This is quite a remarkable
turn of events, right when Bitcoin was in the midst of a war. With Bitcoin
Classic still looming as a possible contentious hardfork, Ethereum was
planning on a contentious hardfork of its own. Bitcoin's blocksize war was
essentially paused for a few months as everyone focused on Ethereum. To gauge
the level of support for the hardfork, there was a coin vote: people could
vote with their coins on whether or not they supported the hardfork. The vote
was overwhelming, with more than 95 percent support for the hardfork.[78]
However, there were accusations that the poll was not representative, since it
was primarily pushed by those who supported the hardfork and those who opposed
may not have voted. In addition to this, participation from Ethereum holders
was low, perhaps around six percent.[79] Miners were also asked on their views
and more than 90 percent were said to support the hardfork, a strong
majority.” 102


“Additionally, there was no stated mechanism for forcing successful projects
to contribute profits back into The DAO and the code in the smart contract did
not always appear to implement what was described or intended.” 101


“With Ethereum being so young, it was not at all ready for something as
complicated as The DAO. But the Ethereum community liked to experiment and try
new things. This is part of the reason they were attracted to Ethereum in the
first place. They were bored of the conservative Bitcoiners. As it turns out,
The DAO was fundamentally flawed on several levels. The creation of new
investment projects would have ended up creating new classes of DAO tokens,
such that each class was entitled to different risks and rewards. This meant
that DAO tokens would not be fungible and should trade at different prices, an
issue poorly understood by exchanges and the community. The economic incentive
model of the project also made little sense. For example, when it came to
decisions on investments, there was little incentive to vote "no" on
investment proposals” 101


“I cannot stress enough how much the small blockers benefited from this trend.
The alternative coin space grew rapidly during this crisis, with their
proponents focused on raising money in coin offerings and making money from
coin price appreciation. Had this outlet not been available to these people,
they may have stayed in Bitcoin fighting the blocksize war, and the sheer
weight of numbers of large blockers would have been too large to overcome.
During the two-year period of the war, there was a fundamental change in the
ecosystem, from the Bitcoin space to the cryptocurrency space. In that
environment, the argument that Bitcoin had to compromise for everyone made
less sense. There was always a coin to suit people's needs.” 100


“The blocksize war was, in effect, also a key recruiting sergeant for
Ethereum. The Ethereum community could paint Bitcoin as old technology,
inflexible and stuck with small 1 MB blocks. Ethereum, on the other hand, had
a much more flexible approach, a dynamic blocksize limit which miners could
adjust (in Ethereum, this is called the gas limit and the constraint relates
the computational power necessary to process various functions within the
blocks, not the amount of data used). While transaction fees were starting to
increase on Bitcoin, Ethereum fees were very low. This marketing strategy from
Ethereum proved very successful” 99


“It was not until well after the war was over, in November 2018, when the
remnants of the large blockers finally parted way with Craig; well, most of
them anyway.” 98


“There was also plenty of evidence of fraud and deception committed by Mr
Wright for the small blockers to point to. For instance, Mr Wright editing his
blog, dated 2008, seven years later in 2015, to make it look like he was
writing a cryptocurrency paper at the time, even though a 2014 snapshot of the
blog does not include this cryptocurrency comment.[73],[74] By associating
themselves with him, the large blockers damaged their cause tremendously.” 98


“Over the next couple of years, Craig was welcomed as part of the large
blocker community, speaking at their conferences and attending their social
events. To many of the small blockers, Craig appeared to have an extremely
aggressive personality and he appeared to have weak knowledge of the Bitcoin
protocol, to many of them he looked and sounded like a classic conman. Craig
was a larger blocker, aligning himself with some of the most extreme large
blocker views, for instance by calling SegWit "shit" or stating that there
were no such things as non-mining nodes, only miners. This was to the delight
of some in the large block community, while other large blockers saw the
damage to their cause that he was doing. However, there didn't seem to be much
they could do about it, as many leaders in the large block camp had embraced
him.” 97


“In private, some smaller blockers seemed pleased by this development. From
their point of view, the stalling tactics had worked, and now the large
blockers were revealing themselves as the idiots they were.” 97


“Prominent large blocker, Roger Ver, for instance, stated that he thought it
was likely that Craig was Satoshi.” 97


“Craig himself was a large blocker and perhaps this had clouded Gavin's
judgement. Small blockers could not believe their luck. Jokes circulated in
the smaller block community that perhaps Craig was Satoshi and a small
blocker, and had cynically performed this stunt to damage the larger block
side. Personally, I felt a bit sorry for Gavin. The pressure on him by this
point was tremendous, and everyone makes mistakes.” 97


“All Craig appeared to have done was copy and paste a signature from the
public blockchain and add it into a rambling blogpost full of irrelevant
content. The announcement from Gavin coincided with three news stories, on the
BBC,[66] The Economist[67] and Wired,[68] written by journalists claiming to
have seen the same initial proof in London. This bad journalism about Bitcoin
did not surprise me, as it had always seemed quite poor, although, to be fair
to Wired, their initial report did at least display a high degree of
scepticism. A couple of years back in March 2014, Newsweek claimed to have
discovered Satoshi.[69] This story was equally stupid; the journalist appeared
to have merely looked through the phonebook, found someone was called Satoshi
and then asserted it was them, without any additional evidence. On May 6,
2016, Wladimir Van Der Laan explained the decision made to remove Gavin's
commit access and why his access had not been reinstated. So when the question
comes up whether we should make Gavin maintainer again, my answer, and that of
many others is a resounding "no". For one, there is just no point, as he
wasn't acting as a maintainer for Bitcoin Core anymore in the first place, and
in addition to that, many feel that we can be more productive if we separate
our ways.” 96


“Craig Wright released a blogpost.[64] To my surprise, the blogpost was a long
mess of confusing and irrelevant sentences and screenshots.” 95


“Perhaps Gavin had done this due to his frustration at the lack of adoption of
Bitcoin Classic? […] perhaps Gavin had controlled this key for years and was
now choosing Craig as a front man? Satoshi/Craig could then advocate for
Bitcoin Classic.” 95


“many people seemed to jump to the conclusion that Gavin must have been
hacked, as such a claim was clearly incredible and he would never say anything
like this. Due to this concern, Gavin's commit access on the Bitcoin Core
software repository was revoked.[62] Gavin was still free to make
contributions, but he no longer had the authority to merge updates to the main
repository.” 94


“May 2, 2016 […] Gavin […] released a blogpost stating he has been convinced
beyond reasonable doubt that Satoshi Nakamoto was an Australian man called
Craig Steven Wright.” 93


“To small blockers, this war was not about competing teams; it was about
competing network consensus rules and therefore competing coins, with the
potential of market prices and financial flow between the coins, and all the
complexity that a split entails. Bitcoin Classic wasn't even really a
competing team at all. It was largely the same code as Bitcoin Core, with a
few parameters changed. There were already competing teams, with a different
codebase to Bitcoin Core, that implemented Bitcoin. These other Bitcoin
clients were written in different languages, for instance Libbitcoin or BTCD.
The failure to appreciate the distinction between competing coins and
competing teams was a pivotal mistake from the large blockers. From the small
blocker perspective, the large blockers wanted larger blocks but didn't
understand how Bitcoin worked or how to conduct a hardfork, so they let their
frustration out on Bitcoin Core and the development team, a convenient
scapegoat.” 83


“The core team contains some very high IQ people, but there are some things
which I find very concerning about them as a team after spending some time
with them last weekend. Some of them show very poor communication skills or
a lack of maturity — this has hurt bitcoin's ability to bring new protocol
developers into the space. They prefer 'perfect' solutions to 'good enough'.
And if no perfect solution exists they seem ok with inaction, even if that
puts bitcoin at risk. ... We need to form a new team to work on the bitcoin
protocol. A team that is welcoming of new developers to the community,
willing to make reasonable trade offs, and a team that will help the
protocol continue to scale. […] By providing choice in the market you will
get more progress, not less.[” 83


"Brian Armstrong […] wrote a blogpost criticising several Bitcoin Core
developers and proclaiming his support for Bitcoin Classic


“Almost all the Silicon Valley-backed venture companies in San Francisco, such
as Coinbase, backed Classic. The weaknesses in Bitcoin Classic were too
theoretical, too technical and not widely understood or discussed. At this
point, the larger blockers had the momentum and were winning the war. More and
more mining pools, such as Bitfury Group, started to state their intention to
support Bitcoin Classic.[55] At the same time, more ecosystem companies were
announcing their support. However, the number of blocks actually flagging
support for Bitcoin Classic was fairly low, and not many users appeared to be
running Classic nodes.” 81


“there is a distinction between gauging the opinion of miners and flags in the
block header which activate changes to the consensus rules. Small blockers
considered these flags as a critical part of network security and combining
activation with miner voting over proposals was dangerous and inappropriate.”
78


“the small blockers opposed the 75 percent threshold for several reasons. The
flag in the block header was considered a safety signalling mechanism,
indicating that everyone was ready to upgrade. In their minds, the upgrade
itself is not meant to be controversial or voted on. In April 2012, the P2SH
softfork activated with a 55 percent threshold. However, after this upgrade
occurred, the 45 percent of miners who had not upgraded produced invalid
blocks for several months after the activation. This was considered a problem
and therefore a new 95 percent threshold was selected” 78


“He was the co-CEO and co-founder of Bitmain, a Chinese company that produced
mining machines, had its own mining farms and operated mining pools. Jihan was
clearly angry at Mike's ragequit, however the criticism is somewhat ironic as
Jihan would soon establish himself as the leading player in the large block
camp.” 75


“Jihan Wu tweeted the following: Mike Hearn Loser expressed lots of racist and
unfair opinion against China bitcoiners. Explaining why he could not get
enough support.” 75


“On January 14, 2016, Mike Hearn, the primary proponent of Bitcoin XT, was so
frustrated by the lack of progress on the blocksize issue that he declared
Bitcoin a failed experiment and announced he was selling all his coins. […]
appeared to have caused a 10 percent collapse in the Bitcoin price” 75


“It infuriated larger blockers, who believed it was petty, childish and
divisive. On the other hand, smaller blockers proclaimed that Coinbase had
effectively announced its intention to switch from Bitcoin to an altcoin.” 74


“Brian had put out tweets (now deleted) expressing support for Bitcoin XT.
Almost immediately after that, Coinbase was removed as a recommended wallet on
the Bitcoin.org website.” 74


“the popular idea that a 51 percent mining attack could steal user funds, even
without a valid signature being provided by the spender. Miners cannot do
that, at least in the small block world; all miners can do in a 51 percent
attack is double spend transactions where they have a valid signature for two
conflicting transactions.” 72


“Small blockers often said they opposed a blocksize limit increase, as it
would make the cost of running a node too high, which could reduce the full
node count and cause centralisation.” 71


“The larger blocker visions appeared to rely on almost everyone agreeing with
them, while the small blocker vision appeared to require any significant
minority to agree with them. From this perspective, it appeared to me as if
the small blockers were mostly correct. Some people would upgrade their
clients, and some would not, therefore we may have a network split.” 71


“On January 3, 2016, Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase (one of the largest
spot exchanges in the space and the company with the most impressive VC
backing), published a blog in support of larger blocks. Brian also supported
Gavin and had controversial views on how to upgrade Bitcoin. Luckily, bitcoin
has a built in upgrade mechanism with an elegant design. If a majority of
bitcoin miners "vote" for a particular upgrade then by definition this is the
new version of bitcoin. The number of votes each miner gets is proportional to
the amount of computational power they are adding to the network (so votes
can't be faked).[45] The view that whatever chain had the most hashpower
behind it was defined as Bitcoin did not seem to make much sense to the small
blockers. To them, Bitcoin nodes did enforce certain rules; a block had to
comply with these rules or it would be ignored. To the small blockers, this
was a critical part of how Bitcoin worked. If miners just tried to change the
rules like that, it would cause a split in the chain and result in a new coin.
The coin following the original rules would continue to be Bitcoin. Small
blockers tended to see full validating nodes as important in regards to
enforcing protocol rules, while to large blockers this was not the case at
all. To the large blockers, most users did not run fully validating nodes,
they typically ran light nodes. However, even in this large blocker vision,
where users didn't have full nodes, they still had wallets. All user wallets,
even though they don't enforce all the protocol rules, still enforce some of
the rules.” 69


“Towards the end of 2015 […] There were even waves of distributed denial of
service (DDoS) attacks on Bitcoin XT nodes. […] some anonymous small blockers
appeared to defend the action on BitcoinTalk, referring to it as a "counter
attack". The one thing that the attack did bring to light, however, was the
importance of a large, distributed and robust P2P network, something Bitcoin
XT had not developed at this point.” 68


“Large blockers could claim, with some legitimacy, that the small blockers
were highly intelligent computer geeks biased towards complex, technically
elegant, but impractical solutions. Small blockers were said to lack business
acumen and could not see that a simpler solution to these issues was required.
When it comes to lightning, this is one of the areas where, to date, large
blockers have been shown to be mostly correct. At the time of writing,
although the lightning network is gaining traction and the technology is
rapidly improving, merchant adoption of the lightning network is limited.
Merchant adoption of Bitcoin at the end of 2015 appears to have been more
significant than lightning adoption today.” 67


“Blockchain technology simply did not have the characteristics that made it
suitable for this, it didn't scale.” 66


“If Bitcoin focused on being a low-cost payment network, which everyone
recognised was a good thing, then sure it could gain market share in the short
term; however, its advantage would prove to be unsustainable in the long run.
In contrast, becoming a new form of money, capable of unblockable electronic
transactions, was something the traditional financial establishment would be
unable to compete with. This could therefore be the driver of long-term
sustainable value. Again, this all appeared to come down to the same
disagreement about time preferences.” 66


“The blocksize issue was a problem now, while the lightning network was highly
complex, unproven and, in the best-case scenario, many years away from
becoming usable. To the large blockers, Bitcoin was all about merchant
adoption and 2015 had been a period of huge success. In 2015, Expedia,
Overstock, TigerDirect, Newegg, Dell, Rakuten and Microsoft had all started
allowing customers to pay with Bitcoin in one form or another. In April 2016,
the video game store Steam had started accepting Bitcoin payments. These
merchants were not using the lightning network, they were using on-chain
transactions. If Bitcoin went down the lightning path, the payment solution
these merchants had chosen would become unreliable due to high fees and long
confirmation times. This would be a disaster for the network and the merchants
would probably stop accepting Bitcoin and never return due to the bad
experience. Although the lightning network had a technically superior
architecture, this wouldn't matter. Eventually, many of these merchants did
stop accepting Bitcoin and the large blockers were proven largely correct. The
phrase "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" comes to mind. Not
increasing the blocksize was clearly a bad business decision. Losing these
merchants was a huge frustration to the larger blockers.” 65


“To some of the small blockers, this layer-two architecture made much more
sense for a high capacity and cheap global payments system. On-chain,
blockchain-based payment systems typically work in a "broadcast to everyone"
mode, in that when one makes a payment, one needs to broadcast the transaction
to all participants in the network. All participants are then required to
process this transaction to see if it's a payment to them. This system is
considered highly inefficient, especially for small payments. If someone buys
a coffee in France using Bitcoin, why should a merchant selling concert
tickets in Japan need to examine that transaction?” 64


“The lightning network was first published in a paper from Joseph Poon and
Thaddeus Dryja in February 2015. A few months later, a similar paper
describing these layer-two solutions was published by Christian Decker. […]
the idea appears to have originated from Satoshi” 64


“The last three Bitcoin softforks had all activated using this same 95 percent
threshold: BIP 66 (restricting signatures to DER encoding) in July 2015; BIP
65 (Check Lock Time Verify) in December 2015; and BIP 68, BIP 112 and BIP 113,
three different softforks which activated at the same time in July 2016.” 62


“Some large blockers saw this 95 percent activation threshold as a stalling
tactic, and preferred the 75 percent threshold in Bitcoin XT. Large blockers
tended to see the miner flags as a vote, a decision-making process. In this
context, 95 percent did not seem to make much sense. On the other hand,
smaller blockers saw the flags as a signalling mechanism or safety feature. In
their view, users decided on the protocol rules and miner signalling was
necessary to ensure a safe transition to the new rules. It was not considered
a political voting process.” 62


“With SegWit, we could keep the old 1 MB limit for the old buggy transactions
that did not scale well, and at the same time have more space available for
new transactions without the bugs. From an engineering point of view, SegWit
seemed fantastic. The problem, again, was the complexity; most Bitcoin users
had no idea about these problems and did not care about them.” 61


“The non-linear scaling of sighash operations means that, as the number of
inputs in a transaction increase, the number of hashing operations required to
validate the transaction increases quadratically rather than linearly. This
scaling problem was an impediment to larger blocks, as attackers could create
transactions which took so long to verify that the network could grind to a
halt. This issue was actually one of the main reasons cited by small blockers
for opposing blocksize limit increases” 61


“third party transaction malleability is essentially an issue that arises
because anyone has the ability to change the transaction ID of a Bitcoin
transaction before it gets confirmed in the blockchain, and for the
transaction to remain valid. This had caused issues for some wallets and
merchants in the past, who had trouble tracking funds. It is essentially a
bug. Fixing this was also somewhat necessary for a layer-two transaction
network called lightning.” 60


“the new SegWit transaction format also fixed a number of bugs, namely third
party transaction malleability and the non-linear scaling of sighash
operations.” 60


“SegWit was exceptionally complicated and almost nobody understood it.” 58


“I remember speaking to some of the long-standing large blockers at the time.
They informed me that they thought they had been outmanoeuvred by what they
considered to be an ingenious proposal.” 58


“The proposal was simply so good there were no valid arguments against it.
Gavin would have to support the SegWit proposal, and for the most part he
did.” 58


“From the perspective of old wallets, the new style transactions would be
missing a signature. However, the wallet would still see the transaction and
recognise it as valid once it was included in the blockchain.” 58


“SegWit was a new transaction format, where the signature would not need to be
included in the old block, which still had a 1 MB limit. Clients that upgraded
to SegWit would see a new block, which included these signatures; for these
newer clients, the old 1 MB blocksize limit was removed and replaced by a 4
million unit "weight limit". The weight limit was defined as four times the
amount of non-signature data in bytes plus the amount of segregated signature
data, in bytes. This meant that the signature data received a discount in the
calculation, but the overall limit would be around 2 MB, which is of course
what many people seemed to want: a blocksize limit increase to around 2 MB. A
Florida-based Bitcoin developer called Luke Dashjr had figured out a hack,
which made SegWit possible as a compatible (softfork) Bitcoin upgrade. Luke
was regarded as one of the most extreme small blockers” 57


“I began to realise that the rules of the network had to be robust. It doesn't
matter who is trying to change the rules, or whether it's a good idea or not.
If Bitcoin is going to succeed, it had to be really difficult to change the
rules, otherwise it would not stand up to the pressure from the main financial
establishment, which would surely emerge as the value of the system increased.
However, from the large blockers point of view, increasing the blocksize limit
was not a change in the rules. On the contrary, it was sticking to the
original vision. It was a change in the rules in a literal sense and in a
computer science sense, in that the network rule would become relaxed if the
blocksize limit increased. However, they thought that, if the limit persisted,
then there would be a major economic change and a change in vision: we would
go from non-full blocks to full blocks.” 56


“what did seem clear to me was that Bitcoin XT was dead. The view was that 2
MB may be appropriate for now, not 8 MB. Bitcoin XT was not formally
withdrawn, nor was there an acknowledgement from its proponents that they had
pushed too aggressively for a limit that was too large. Such an admission may
have helped resolve the situation. To the small blockers, Bitcoin XT had
created a crisis situation, causing tension and controversy which made
progress on the blocksize issue more difficult. While, to the large blockers,
it was a necessary catalyst to get the debate going.” 54


“Roger was the owner of the alternative Bitcoin subreddit, /r/btc and, given
his forthright libertarian views, he was very strongly opposed to what he
perceived as censorship on the main /r/bitcoin subreddit. At this point, at
the conference, Roger was not known as one of the main proponents of larger
blocks. Instead, he had a loud and very public altercation with the CEO of
OKCoin, Star Xu, over the Bitcoin.com domain and a supposedly fraudulent
contract.[37] This appeared to have something to do with Changpeng Zhao (then
CTO of OKCoin), who would go on to found the extremely successful
cryptocurrency exchange, Binance.” 53


“Roger Ver describes himself as the first investor in Bitcoin startups. He
certainly had a successful investment track record in the space, backing
companies such as Blockchain.info, Bitpay and Kraken. Roger had been one of
Bitcoin's most prominent and relentless promoters in the early days, and he
had always been extremely enthusiastic about Bitcoin. When he first discovered
Bitcoin, Roger is said to have been so excited by the opportunity that he was
hospitalised for several days.[34] In particular, he had always been very keen
on the payments use case for Bitcoin, and had been instrumental in driving
adoption of Bitcoin by aggressively encouraging merchants to accept Bitcoin
payments. Perhaps due to this unabated enthusiasm for Bitcoin, which was not
to everyone's taste, he earned the nickname "Bitcoin Jesus". Prior to Bitcoin,
Roger Ver had a company selling computer components, MemoryDealers.com. Prior
to that, he was convicted of illegally selling explosives online in the US,
something he served a prison sentence for. Roger had not spent much time in
the US after his release from prison. He formally relinquished his US
citizenship in 2014, and by this point he lived in Tokyo. As far as I can
tell, prior to this Roger was interested in the practical and business side of
Bitcoin and, prior to the blocksize war, he had little interest in the
technical or computer science aspects of the system. Roger was also well known
in the Bitcoin community for ensuring users of the solvency of the MtGox
exchange in July 2013, after reviewing "multiple bank statements". […] in
February 2014, MtGox spectacularly failed” 53


“If Bitcoin XT reached the 75 percent threshold and then everyone upgraded to
the larger block client, then there would be one new, larger block Bitcoin.
However, if users refused to upgrade, then the original chain would persist
and miners would not be in control. The trouble here is that most people
assumed that other users would behave the same as themselves, without
considering that they may act differently.” 51


“Wang Chung, the operator of one of the larger mining pools, F2Pool, said that
miners are the only party that could vote and therefore miners would decide.
Bitcoin is a proof-of-work system, he argued, and there is no mechanism for
anyone else to vote. However, he went on to say that an 8 MB blocksize limit
was too large, as it would take too long to sync a node, which he said would
be a disaster. Most miners seemed to agree that they were in control of the
network and that it was their decision, however they believed they did not
have enough information available to make the right decision. In general, the
smaller blockers did not believe the miners had decision-making power over the
Bitcoin protocol, and that end users either did, or should, control the
network. Proof of work was there to solve the double spending problem, they
contended; miners merely decide on the order of transactions.” 51


“Bobby Lee, who at the time was the CEO and founder of the BTCC exchange.
Bobby was an enthusiastic proponent of Bitcoin and had been one of the key
promoters of Bitcoin in China. The two proposals that were discussed on the
panel were BIP 101 (implemented by Bitcoin XT) and BIP 100 (a proposal by Jeff
Garzik allowing miners to vote on what the blocksize limit should be). Most of
the miners indicated a preference for BIP 100, rather than BIP 101. This is
perhaps no surprise, as BIP 100 gave more discretionary power to the miners.”
50


“conspiracy theories by some of the most extreme large blockers. Horizon
Ventures, Li Ka-Shing's VC firm, had invested in Blockstream and therefore
this association with Cyberport was cited as evidence of an establishment plot
to cripple Bitcoin and keep the blocksize small. The same was said about the
French insurer AXA, whose venture arm also invested in Blockstream. The former
CEO of AXA was Henri de Castries, chairman of the steering group for the
Bilderberg meeting” 49


“Large blockers seemed to favour a more business-like approach; they did not
regard Bitcoin as some theoretical science project, but a real world, live
system, with real users. In general, large blockers were active users of
Bitcoin and they wanted to make their usage easier, without being hampered by
theoretical computer scientists they perceived as not even using Bitcoin.
Large blockers accused the conference organisers of making the issue too
complicated and using the event as a stalling tactic” 47


“Adam was the only person referenced in the main text of the Bitcoin
whitepaper for his Hashcash concept in 1997, and he eventually became one of
the leading characters on the smaller block side of the debate. Adam was the
president of Blockstream. At this time, Adam appeared to take a more moderate
stance than Gavin, offering his support for the idea of increasing the
blocksize limit to 2 MB, then 4 MB and then 8 MB, with two-year time gaps
between the changes (BIP 248). This didn't seem too far away from what Gavin
wanted, except Adam opposed the continued increases to 8,000 MB that Gavin
supported. On the podcast, I remember Gavin commenting that Satoshi had said
nodes could be operated in data centres processing many transactions. Adam
argued back that mining was now more centralised than under Satoshi's time.
This mining centralisation meant that the balance had shifted: users running
nodes to validate the rules and keep the network decentralised was now more
important than it was before. It is important to realise that, when Satoshi
was active in the space, there was no real distinction between validating
nodes and mining nodes. They were essentially the same thing. By 2015, things
had changed; there were now specialised mining farms.” 43


“Gregory himself was very active in debating this issue on Reddit, and he
became one of the most derided figures in the space. Gregory considered the
Bitcoin development process as highly complex and scientific, with many
challenging technical trade-offs. He did not welcome the involvement of what
he considered the uninformed masses in the decision-making process, likening
them to "beer cup hat" spectators at a racing event making decisions about how
to engineer the racing cars.” 41


“Gregory Maxwell, a Bitcoin developer, was a staunch and uncompromising
supporter of the smaller block side of the argument, perhaps less willing to
compromise than anyone else. Gregory was exceptionally intelligent and
appeared to me to have an extremely strong understanding of most of the
various fields of study Bitcoin touched, from the computer science and
cryptography, to the game theory and incentives. He was sometimes referred to
as the Bitcoin Wizard. His very first public post on BitcoinTalk, in May 2011,
was about Bitcoin transaction fees and mining incentives, describing how fees
were necessary to secure the network.[26] In 2014, Gregory co-founded
Blockstream, a company which appeared to consist entirely of small blockers
with a business model which depended on Bitcoin fees becoming high, as
Blockstream offered potential solutions to this problem. A problem which,
according to the large blockers, did not, or more precisely, should not,
exist. Blockstream was therefore hated by the large blockers, who considered
it to have a financial conflict of interest: an incentive to keep blocks
small. In Blockstream's defense, there is considerable evidence that most of
the co-founders and employees of the company supported the small blocker
arguments long before the company was even created or conceived.” 41


“Therein lies the second major blunder from the large blocker side: Bitcoin XT
was too associated with Mike, rather than being dressed up as more of a
grassroots user approach. Even focusing the software around Gavin was likely
to improve the chances of success.” 39


“There was a meeting In Beijing, at which miners are said to have disagreed
with Gavin in pushing for an increase to 20 MB, as the Chinese communication
infrastructure was considered too weak to quickly broadcast blocks of this
size. Therefore, agreement was said to be reached for 8 MB blocks.” 38


“small blockers tended to consider full blocks as both necessary and
inevitable in the long term anyway. It was necessary to prevent a fee market
death spiral when the block subsidy was low. It was also necessary to ensure
miners would move the chain forwards once the subsidy became low. It was
considered vital to always have a surplus of transactions which didn't get in
the blocks and were sitting there waiting to be included; that way, miners
always had an incentive to build blocks. If there were no full blocks and no
surplus transactions, why would a miner even bother mining if there is no
revenue? Instead, miners would turn their machines off, save energy costs and
wait for a backlog of transactions to build up again after each block. This
would greatly reduce network security. Large blockers considered this
reasoning as highly inappropriate. The block subsidy would be around for
decades; why lose customers now for something that may be a problem in 20 to
100 years?” 37


“Avoiding full blocks was key, otherwise users would have to wait for an
unpredictable amount of time for their transactions to confirm. What merchant
would adopt Bitcoin as a payment method if it was as unreliable as this?
Forcing users to bid against each other in a bidding war for blockspace would,
by definition, deny some users the ability to use Bitcoin, driving them away
to something else. This was considered as a terrible business strategy.” 37


“To my astonishment, Gavin and the large blockers did not react positively to
BIP 103 at all. They regarded the proposed increase as so small that it was
more of an insult than progress. […] they wanted the blocksize limit to
increase faster than demand.” 36


“On July 21, 2015, Pieter Wuille, another Bitcoin developer, who had worked
with Mike Hearn at Google in the past, proposed a hardfork blocksize increase.
Pieter was regarded as being on the "small block" side of the argument. To me,
this appeared to be a compromise proposal, a response to the pressure from
Gavin. The proposal was numbered BIP 103 and acknowledged Wladimir Van Der
Laan and a developer called Gregory Maxwell for their suggestions[23],
indicating their potential support. The proposal was for the hardfork to
activate in January 2017, at which point the blocksize limit would increase by
17.7 percent per annum until the year 2063. The proposal did not include any
activation methodology. It appeared to be meant as a catalyst for further
discussion and then, once agreement had been reached, the activation
methodology could be determined.” 36


“On May 29, 2015, Gavin gave the strongest hint yet of what he planned to do:
that he may switch his support over to Bitcoin XT and throw his weight behind
the alternative incompatible Bitcoin protocol.” 34


“the name Bitcoin Core was adopted in February 2013 after a suggestion from
Mike Hearn[21], which now seems somewhat ironic. Gavin had previously handed
the ownership of the Bitcoin repository on GitHub to Wladimir, to enable Gavin
to focus more on the research side of Bitcoin.” 34


“On May 7, 2015, the lead maintainer of the Bitcoin Core project on GitHub,
Wladimir Van Der Laan, made the following comment in an email to the Bitcoin
mailing list: I'm weakly against a block size increase in the near future.” 33


“Mike was pushing Gavin to take a tougher and tougher stance on the blocksize,
while Gavin was pushing back a little. Mike was even asking if Gavin could
boot the other developers out of the main Bitcoin Core repository on GitHub
and take full control of the repository.” 33


“When discussing blocksize, Gavin said the following: I may just have to throw
my weight around and say, this is the way it's going to be, and if you don't
like it, find another project.” 32


“Gavin quietly mentioned to me that he favoured a jump to a 20 MB limit, but
that he was willing to compromise and maybe change this to 8 MB” 32


“Gavin emphasised to me that 1 MB was ridiculously small, and that many web
pages were larger than that. In his mind, the history of information
technology was about exponential growth and things becoming faster and
larger.” 32


“Large blockers prioritised the short term, while small blockers focused on
the long term; ● Large blockers prioritised the user experience, while small
blockers favoured making the system more resilient; ● Large blockers
prioritised growth, while small blockers were more concerned about
sustainability; ● Large blockers were more pragmatic and business-focused,
while small blockers were more scientific and theoretical, typically highly
intelligent computer and cryptography boffins.” 32


“If the mining industry was highly concentrated among a few small players,
then FSS seemed a somewhat logical policy and the fee death spiral argument
appears not to apply. This is because the decisions these miners make would
have a significant impact on the ecosystem and thus potentially damage their
future earnings as miners. If the level of industry concentration is low, then
the impact the decisions of individual miners have on the ecosystem is more
limited. Miners may instead choose to maximise their short-term profits,
rather than care about the long-term user experience, that their action alone
would not impact significantly anyway.” 31


“Opponents of RBF opined that it damaged the user experience and made double
spending more likely, while advocates claimed miners were incentivised to
choose higher fee transactions anyway, to increase profits, therefore it was
inevitable and the software policy might as well align with this economic
reality.” 31


“The first public evidence of active campaigning on this blocksize issue was a
video produced by Bitcoin developer and small blocker, Peter Todd. In May
2013, he released a professionally-produced video on YouTube[16]. In the
video, he argued that it was necessary for the blocksize limit to remain
small, such that users could validate all the transactions and keep Bitcoin
decentralised. The video even talked about "ignoring anyone trying to change
the software you use, to increase the 1 MB blocksize". The video has been
extensively derided by the large blockers, who even eventually took over
Peter's small block campaign website keepbitcoinfree.org, and replaced it with
material supporting larger blocks. Peter Todd also angered many of the large
blockers, due to his position as the main proponent of something called
"Replace by fee" (RBF). RBF allows users to replace a Bitcoin transaction
(before it is confirmed in the blockchain), with a new transaction by spending
the same transaction input again, only with a higher fee. Miners adopting this
RBF policy would choose to include the higher fee transaction. In contrast,
miners not adopting this and instead using the first seen safe (FSS)
principal, would include the transaction they saw first. In general, Mike,
Gavin and large blockers were opposed to RBF, while small blockers tended to
support it.” 30


“Most of the people who thought the fee market death spiral was a problem
seemed to settle on a proposed solution: the blocksize limit would prevent
fees falling too low, as users would have to bid against each other for space
in blocks, which would be full. This blocksize limit would therefore create
what economists call a producer surplus, which could incentivise miners once
the block subsidy ran out. While this disagreement seemed to split the
community right down the middle, nobody appeared too worried by the
situation.” 30


“While, in 2010, there were discussions about these scaling issues, there were
no significant disagreements; everyone was just learning. By April 2011,
things appeared to have changed a little and a deep disagreement about
scaling, transaction fees and long-term Bitcoin mining incentivisation became
apparent. Everyone was still civil and polite, but a fundamental difference of
opinion seemed to emerge.” 28


“On the day Bitcoin XT was published, an email was sent from one of Satoshi's
email addresses (Satoshi@vistomail.com), articulating the small blocker side
of the argument, including a claim that he had changed his mind about scaling:
I have been following the recent block size debates through the mailing list.
I had hoped the debate would resolve and that a fork proposal would achieve
widespread consensus. However with the formal release of Bitcoin XT 0.11A,
this looks unlikely to happen, and so I am forced to share my concerns about
this very dangerous fork. The developers of this pretender-Bitcoin claim to be
following my original vision, but nothing could be further from the truth.
When I designed Bitcoin, I designed it in such a way as to make future
modifications to the consensus rules difficult without near unanimous
agreement. Bitcoin was designed to be protected from the influence of
charismatic leaders, even if their name is Gavin Andresen, Barack Obama, or
Satoshi Nakamoto. Nearly everyone has to agree on a change, and they have to
do it without being forced or pressured into it. By doing a fork in this way,
these developers are violating the "original vision" they claim to honour.
They use my old writings to make claims about what Bitcoin was supposed to be.
However I acknowledge that a lot has changed since that time, and new
knowledge has been gained that contradicts some of my early opinions. For
example I didn't anticipate pooled mining and its effects on the security of
the network. Making Bitcoin a competitive monetary system while also
preserving its security properties is not a trivial problem, and we should
take more time to come up with a robust solution. I suspect we need a better
incentive for users to run nodes instead of relying solely on altruism. If two
developers can fork Bitcoin and succeed in redefining what "Bitcoin" is, in
the face of widespread technical criticism and through the use of populist
tactics, then I will have no choice but to declare Bitcoin a failed project.
Bitcoin was meant to be both technically and socially robust. This present
situation has been very disappointing to watch unfold.” 27


“Satoshi made many comments during the first two years of his involvement in
the space, many of which could be said to support either side in this war. In
general, it could be said that the quotes indicate that Satoshi seemed to
broadly support the large blockers with respect to the narrow issue of then
blocksize limit and transaction throughput, but Satoshi seemed somewhat
supportive of the smaller block position with respect to their view on the
flexibility of the Bitcoin rules. At this point, the debate appears to get
almost religious, with both sides poring over every Satoshi quote looking for
comments or interpretations supporting their cause.” 26


“Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be
safe for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section 8) to check
for double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers,
or about 12KB per day. Only people trying to create new coins would need to
run network nodes. At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the
network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to
specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would
only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects
with that one node. The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you think.
A typical transaction would be about 400 bytes (ECC is nicely compact). Each
transaction has to be broadcast twice, so let's say 1KB per transaction.
Visa processed 37 billion transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100
million transactions per day. That many transactions would take 100GB of
bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or 2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth
of bandwidth at current prices. If the network were to get that big, it
would take several years, and by then, sending 2 HD movies over the Internet
would probably not seem like a big deal.[8]” 23


"The next quote from Satoshi widely cited by the large blocks is from even
earlier, November 2008:


“Just 15 minutes later, Theymos replied, stating that: "Applying this patch
will make you incompatible with other Bitcoin clients." Satoshi then chimed
into the conversation: +1 theymos. Don't use this patch, it'll make you
incompatible with the network, to your own detriment. We can phase in a change
later if we get closer to needing it. The next day, Satoshi made an additional
comment, in what is now one of the most widely quoted statements from the
larger blockers: It can be phased in, like: if (blocknumber > 115000)
maxblocksize = largerlimit It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the
time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions
that don't have it are already obsolete. When we're near the cutoff block
number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to
upgrade.” 22


“Not even one month after the blocksize limit became active, one of the
Bitcoin developers, Jeff Garzik, proposed removing it and increasing the
limit.[7] He submitted a software patch removing the 1 MB rule and he argued
this would ensure Bitcoin could scale to match Paypal's transaction rate.” 21


“This type of upgrade was called a softfork, i.e. a new rule tightening
restrictions on block validity. It is a softfork because adding or lowering
the limit tightens the rules. Increasing the limit would relax the rules and
is therefore known as a hardfork.” 20


“When Bitcoin was released, there was no blocksize limit, although it is
likely that larger blocks, perhaps more than 32 MB, would have broken the
system. The limit was first introduced by Satoshi in the summer of 2010.” 20


“If 90% of r/Bitcoin users find these policies to be intolerable, then I want
these 90% of r/Bitcoin users to leave. Both r/Bitcoin and these people will be
happier for it.” 15


“It doesn't make sense to support two incompatible networks/currencies -
there's only one Bitcoin, and r/Bitcoin serves only Bitcoin. If a hardfork has
near-unanimous agreement from Bitcoin experts and it's also supported by the
vast majority of Bitcoin users and companies, we can predict with high
accuracy that this new network/currency will take over the economy and become
the new definition of Bitcoin. (Miners don't matter in this, and it's not any
sort of vote.) This sort of hardfork can probably be adopted on r/Bitcoin as
soon as it has been determined that the hardfork is not absolutely against the
spirit of Bitcoin (inflating out-of-schedule, for example)” 14


“Theymos appeared to mostly sympathise with the smaller block camp, at least
the aspect of it which meant it was sensible to have widespread agreement
across the community before running incompatible clients. On August 17, 2015,
two days after the official launch of Bitcoin XT, Theymos announced a new
Reddit moderation policy. This policy proved to be both extremely
controversial and divisive.” 13


“BitcoinTalk and /r/bitcoin were both controlled by the same person, with the
username Theymos. His real name is Michael Marquardt. Theymos had been an
early pioneer in the space, managing bitcoin.it (the Bitcoin Wiki) as well as
both of the two major forums. Theymos had also created the first block
explorer website” 13


“Gavin also cofounded the Bitcoin Foundation in 2012, of which he was a board
member. In addition to several other functions, one of the main
responsibilities of the foundation was to pay Gavin to work on Bitcoin
development.” 11


“In 2010, Gavin purchased 20,000 Bitcoin for $50. He then created a Bitcoin
faucet, or website to give away the Bitcoins. All people had to do was
complete a Captcha and then they would be sent around five BTC for free.” 11


“In his public forum posts and at events, he came across as patient,
thoughtful, calm and pragmatic. It is these personality traits and leadership
qualities that made him stand out from the other developers more than anything
else. When Gavin spoke, people listened; he sounded reasonable and took time
to explain things. This was in stark contrast to some of the other developers,
who were sometimes regarded as being intolerant of those with weaker levels of
technical knowledge, or preferred to remain behind the scenes. Gavin had this
perceived level of influence over the technical community because of who he
was, not a handover of power.” 11


“Gavin had control of the Bitcoin software repository on Sourceforge, and
later on GitHub, until he handed it over to Wladimir Van Der Laan several
years later, in April 2014.” 10


“At the time of the supposed handover, the Bitcoin software was published on
Sourceforge and, in January 2011, two people were listed as maintainers,
Satoshi and Gavin.” 10


“Gavin explains how, in his mind, he took over as leader of the project: Over
time [Satoshi] trusted my judgment on the code I wrote. And eventually, he
pulled a fast one on me because he asked me if it'd be OK if he put my email
address on the bitcoin homepage, and I said yes, not realizing that when he
put my email address there, he'd take his away. I was the person everyone
would email when they wanted to know about bitcoin. Satoshi started stepping
back as leader of project and pushing me forward as the leader of the
project.” 10


“BitPay, Blockchain.info, Circle, Kncminer, itBit, Bitnet, Xapo and BitGo” 9


“On August 24, 2015, just nine days after the release of Bitcoin XT, there was
a letter of support published by some of the largest and most significant
companies in the industry.” 8


“Many Bitcoiners had a preconceived idea that one cannot, or shouldn't,
conduct a hardfork without first ensuring there is widespread support across
the users of the network. To them, this characteristic is what made the
network resilient” 7


“The contention was essentially about four somewhat interrelated issues: 1.
The level of blockspace available in each Bitcoin block - Essentially, whether
the eventual state should consist of surplus capacity available in the blocks,
or consistently full blocks. 2. How to modify the rules of the Bitcoin
protocol - Whether the rules on the validity of Bitcoin blocks should change
relatively easily, or whether they should be more robust and only change in
exceptional circumstances, with broad support from all interested parties. 3.
The significance of the nodes of ordinary users - The extent to which, if any,
validating nodes of the ordinary end users had a say in enforcing Bitcoin's
protocol rules. 4. Time preferences - Whether Bitcoin was like a tech startup
which should prioritise gaining market share in the short term; or if it was a
long-term project, a new global money, and one should think decades ahead when
making decisions.” 6


“August 15, 2015 […] Two of the most prominent and respected Bitcoin
developers at the time, Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen, had respectively
released and thrown their support behind a new, incompatible version of
Bitcoin […] called Bitcoin XT […] the blocksize limit was 1 MB and Bitcoin XT
wanted to increase this limit to 8 MB and then double it every two years until
2036, when the limit would be around 8,000 MB.” 5


Jonathan Bier, The Blocksize War: The Battle over Who Controls Bitcoin’s Protocol Rules (Independently published, 2021).


“Bitcoin Puritans because I think it’s a more precise description.” (Lopp,
2023, p. 27)


“Now we live in an era of “no true bitcoiner” due to competition amongst
virtue signalers. Bitcoin is inherently counterculture. It is an adversarial
environment. We should not expect that everyone will get along. Bitcoin is for
enemies. Bitcoin maximalism itself is neither good nor bad; it was born as a
rational pushback to flawed narratives used to perpetuate scams and poorly
architected projects.” (Lopp, 2023, p. 25)


“The term "bitcoin maximalism" is a descriptive rather than a prescriptive
statement of facts. It simply refers to the refusal to transfer one's wealth
to self-appointed currency issuers.” (Lopp, 2023, p. 24)


“If we consider “toxic bitcoin maximalists” to be like white blood cells in
Bitcoin’s immune system, then we should also understand that sometimes they
will misfire in a sort of autoimmune disease. […] Remember when the toxic
maximalist mob tried to cancel Lightning Labs because the WEF put them on
their web site, despite Lightning Labs having nothing to do with them?” (Lopp,
2023, p. 22)


“Once the pandemic hit, some folks shifted to focusing on social media
engagement as a way to wield influence. Twitter’s engagement mechanics reward
dunking and general dickishness, which was noticed by plenty of personalities
in the space, who became more and more provocative in their content, in an
attempt to be more visible and shout louder than bad actors who would
otherwise dominate the narrative for newcomers. I believe that this resulted
in otherwise rational and intelligent people pandering towards algorithms that
encourage behaviors and communication styles that are actually rather high
time preference. That is to say: prioritizing knee-jerk reactions and
engagement over tribalistic matters while avoiding the more boring and complex
topics that require nuance. […] If we mainly talk in memes, what we lose is
nuance. And a lot of the problems we’re experiencing with toxic behavior are
due to a rejection of nuance […].” (Lopp, 2023, p. 21)


“While it could be argued that “money” is a zero-sum game, it’s not
controversial to claim that technology and wealth are certainly NOT zero-sum
games. As such, I believe that multiple crypto asset networks will exist and
serve different use cases. Of course, the value will be concentrated in the
largest few due to network effects and the fact that no one wants to have to
manage dozens of different tokens.” (Lopp, 2023, p. 20)


“a line gets crossed when Bitcoiners butt into other folks' lives to chastise
them from a position of moral superiority. Toxic Bitcoiners are those who act
like “it’s not good enough for Bitcoin to win, everyone else has to fail.” […]
NFTs and DEXs were OG Bitcoin ideas.” (Lopp, 2023, p. 19)


“it certainly does have some cult-like attributes... but if we’re comparing
the sociology of Bitcoin to a religion, I’d consider it to be less like
Catholicism and more like Protestantism or even Islam. Why? Because there is
no structural hierarchy like you have with the Roman Catholic Church. Rather,
there are independent scholars who amass followings based upon their teachings
and interpretations.” (Lopp, 2023, p. 17)


“NIMBYism results in an odd schism and potential hypocrisy: on one hand, many
maximalists decry the use of other protocols because folks “should be building
on Bitcoin” while on the other hand, many of the same maximalists decry folks
who are building on Bitcoin for “doing it wrong.” Trying to impose your
subjective morality upon the use of permissionless protocols is a non-starter;
you might as well piss into the wind or yell at clouds. As a technologist I
believe Bitcoin is only limited by human ingenuity. A longstanding maximalist
view on altcoins was that anything other cryptocurrencies can do can also be
achieved on Bitcoin, a Bitcoin layer, or a centralized alternative that is
effectively the same. Though in recent years, prevailing narratives have
trended toward “Bitcoin shouldn’t do ____” rather than “we could do ____ on
Bitcoin.” Thus this group is now actively limiting the advancement of the
Bitcoin economy in line with their ideology; they will claim that they do so
in order to keep Bitcoin safe from unforeseeable side effects of changes.”
(Lopp, 2023, p. 14)


“Bitcoin is not merely money. It is a new type of database with radical
integrity and robustness assurances that can be used to improve the
trustworthiness of other systems that anchor into it. This perspective also
seems to grind the gears of some maximalists who believe that Bitcoin should
only be money. This conflict around the “correct” way to use Bitcoin has
arisen numerous times over the years, often in the form of debates around
whether or not a certain use case should be considered “spam.” Satoshidice;
OP_RETURN wars; Micropayments / dust transactions; Inscriptions.” (Lopp, 2023,
p. 14)


“One of the biggest scams that collapsed in 2022 ran ads all over the place,
even at the Superbowl! While consumer protection is an admirable goal, it's
far from clear just how effective these moral teachings have been. Few
newcomers look to Bitcoin maximalists before deciding on an NFT purchase or
token pre-sale. From what I’ve seen, a ton of folks only become Bitcoin
maximalists after learning a lesson the hard way and getting burned on an
overhyped “investment.” […] which use cases are an acceptable use of
blockchain space and which are “spam.” […] 1. Economics is the sole judge of
what constitutes spam. Transaction fees ensure the propagation of the chain in
perpetuity, therefore any paid use of the chain is "good." 2. Accessibility is
what matters most. Bitcoin users ensure the propagation of the chain in
perpetuity, thus anything that makes Bitcoin more expensive to use, or
benefits one group at the expense of the collective (aka miners) is immoral. A
moral Bitcoiner should strive to use the blockchain as little as possible to
keep fee pressure low and fight the tragedy of the commons.” (Lopp, 2023, p.
13)


“Bitcoin is one of the few projects of which there’s strong consensus that
it’s not a scam. […] The Bitcoin community is by far the only crypto asset
community that second-guesses every consensus change, mostly due to the scars
left from the block size wars. But that makes it unique - it is money without
masters.” (Lopp, 2023, p. 12)


“I've come to see modern maximalism as being shaped by 3 major components: 1.
The Immaculate Conception - Bitcoin has unique properties (leaderless, fair
supply distribution) that cannot be recreated. 2. Ethics of Money Production -
Bitcoin is the only ethical money among all crypto assets because of the first
point, thus other assets should be rejected as monies. 3. A culture of
protecting minority rights / individual sovereignty. Because of the software
rule set you can call any compatible software bitcoin and cannot be infringed
by the majority.” (Lopp, 2023, p. 9)


“Personally, I see maximalism as a pragmatic decision that results from our
scarcest resource: time.” (Lopp, 2023, p. 9)


“I also observed an acceleration in the trend of “thought leaders” during this
period. I saw educators and builders being drowned out by what appeared to be
entertainers and performance artists. Folks who were skilled at “growth
hacking” amassed huge audiences despite only offering shallow content. […]
This was how more mainstream Bitcoin culture degraded from intellectual
expressions of ideas (2017-era debates) to tribal recreations of the past. […]
Some nuanced maximalists pivoted to become provocateurs of the extremists,
using their predictable behavior for engagement farming. These folks have come
to be known as “anti-maximalists” (Antima) […].” (Lopp, 2023, p. 8)


“The disruption caused by the pandemic made it essential to explore
alternative content distribution channels, and those who leveraged social
media engagement were the primary beneficiaries. A wave of newcomers with a
more limited understanding of Bitcoin were able to dominate the conversation
in these new arenas where other Bitcoin enthusiasts were also seeking
information and entertainment. Bitcoiners already had a head start navigating
this new era of online-heavy interactions due to the borderless nature of our
interest group. Early Bitcoin adopters already tended to be smart, contrarian
thinkers who were happy to push the envelope with hot takes on covid-related
authoritarianism. The travel restrictions during the pandemic also played a
significant role in directing attention towards the United States, where
conferences continued, providing Americans with more platforms to expand their
reach. This helped elevate the profile of Americans who were less affected by
lockdowns, resulting in a post-2020 narrative that heavily leaned towards
digital gold. This narrative was not new to Bitcoin (it has always been
dominant) but it is logically more appealing to first world folks with access
to modern financial infrastructure ... and those subject to U.S. taxation.”
(Lopp, 2023, p. 7)


“It wasn’t long before the pandemic provided plenty of cannon fodder. There
were plenty of authoritarians to decry and the money printers went into
overdrive. During pandemic lockdowns we saw an acceleration of “lifestyle
maximalism” as several new facets of “maximalist culture” appeared or were
reinforced, such as: Carnivory; Laser eyes; Anti-woke; Weightlifting; Tradwife
culture; Climate change denial; Overt Christian moralizing; “Have fun staying
poor” retorts; Rejection of seed oils and sunscreen; Vaccine conspiracies,
alt-health cure-alls; Contrarianism for the sake of contrarianism; Political
populism and support of strongmen; “Fiat” criticism of contemporary art and
architecture.” (Lopp, 2023, p. 7)


“The Bitcoin Standard was published, countless new memes were crafted and
entered into the vernacular (Bitcoin fixes this / number go up / etc), and
carnivore dinners started being held. The scaling wars died not with a bang,
but with a multi-year grinding whimper. By 2020 it was quite clear that the
plethora of big block bitcoin forks were not going to gain meaningful
traction. A lot of the OGs who had been heavy participants in the scaling wars
were weary and withdrew from public life. This left a void for newcomers to
fill […].” (Lopp, 2023, p. 6)