“What are you looking so miserable about? There's a whole ocean of oil under our feet.” -Daniel Plainview
The trauma of the block size wars of 2017 is being relived by Bitcoin plebs and core sycophants. Fear, sorrow, and confusion reign, even amongst us Roughnecks, and we’ve seen some shit! But this is the best outcome for Bitcoin. If the miners had followed the plebs, as they did in 2017, and smoothly activated a soft fork, there would still be the narrative hanging over Bitcoin that miners decide protocol rules. This narrative would be used to gaslight Bitcoiners into going along with whatever 5 or 6 mining pools decide in the future. This is an antifragility test that needed to happen. Better that it happens now instead of 15 years from now when the plebs would be less equipped to mount any meaningful resistance. This is a victory for Bitcoin and it sets the precedent for Bitcoin’s survival into the distant future long after our tongues are silenced.
Our garden weeds itself. The shitcoiner/big blocker mining pools. . . gone! The bithereum bros hell bent on turning Bitcoin into another Ethereum clone. . . gone! The NFT idiots and token scammers. . . gone! The suitcoiners who think nodes and self-custody are curse words. . . gone!
What comes next is a proof-of-work change, Bitcoin’s first. There is some hesitation amongst Bitcoiners that a POW change creates an altcoin. We disagree. A POW change is an inevitable part of Bitcoin’s maturity and a necessary tool to keep mining honest and decentralized. Whatever you think of BIP110, you can’t claim mining is decentralized. So how do you do it without creating an altcoin? We have a proposal that sets a positive precedent for POW changes.
The Bitcoin brand must not be surrendered. We can hear your objections already being shouted at the screen, “Bitcoin is captured, we need a clean break from Bitcoin!” or “You’re just gonna replay the bcash drama!”
Both objections are wrong as we will explain. Bitcoin is not a company. It is money. Money cannot rebrand itself every couple of decades. If the Bitcoin name fails or is abandoned, no one will trust its replacement. Money needs to be timeless. Money needs to be trusted to hold your life savings and be passed down to heirs without worry. If the Bitcoin name is held exclusively by bad actors, then fiat will have won. There will never be a Bitcoin standard if Bitcoin is renamed every time there is a POW change.
The next objection is a Block Size War flashback. No one wants to argue over what the real Bitcoin is. Good news, you won’t have to. Here’s our naming convention that can apply in 2026, in 2046, 2066, and whenever the future POW changes happen. The new POW algo gets attached to the coin’s name. We don’t know yet what Bitcoin’s new mining algo will be so we will use the example of a fictional algo SHA357. The coin will be called Bitcoin-SHA357 so there is no confusion with the core chain or Bitcoin-SHA256. This naming convention will be used only around the time of a POW change. Eventually, as the new algo outpaces adoption of the previous algo, the algo suffix gets naturally dropped and people just start referring to it as Bitcoin again. It’s still Bitcoin. It just had an upgrade to its algo, that’s all. This is intuitive as users expect periodic upgrades to software. Bitcoin is not immune from this need for periodic upgrades.
If misbehaving miners are unceremoniously forked off with a new algo, they are less likely to misbehave in the future. Or they’ll misbehave less frequently.
Note that Bitcoin Cash did NOT have a POW change. Some of the same mining pools that are currently mining on the invalid Core chain also mine bcash to this day. They are not Bitcoiners. They are big blockers who have once again forked off to a new chain. They didn’t decide what Bitcoin was in 2017 and aren’t deciding it in 2026 either.
Roughneck Chronicles 4: Antifragility Test
“What are you looking so miserable about? There's a whole ocean of oil under our feet.” -Daniel Plainview
The trauma of the block size wars of 2017 is being relived by Bitcoin plebs and core sycophants. Fear, sorrow, and confusion reign, even amongst us Roughnecks, and we’ve seen some shit! But this is the best outcome for Bitcoin. If the miners had followed the plebs, as they did in 2017, and smoothly activated a soft fork, there would still be the narrative hanging over Bitcoin that miners decide protocol rules. This narrative would be used to gaslight Bitcoiners into going along with whatever 5 or 6 mining pools decide in the future. This is an antifragility test that needed to happen. Better that it happens now instead of 15 years from now when the plebs would be less equipped to mount any meaningful resistance. This is a victory for Bitcoin and it sets the precedent for Bitcoin’s survival into the distant future long after our tongues are silenced.
Our garden weeds itself. The shitcoiner/big blocker mining pools. . . gone! The bithereum bros hell bent on turning Bitcoin into another Ethereum clone. . . gone! The NFT idiots and token scammers. . . gone! The suitcoiners who think nodes and self-custody are curse words. . . gone!
What comes next is a proof-of-work change, Bitcoin’s first. There is some hesitation amongst Bitcoiners that a POW change creates an altcoin. We disagree. A POW change is an inevitable part of Bitcoin’s maturity and a necessary tool to keep mining honest and decentralized. Whatever you think of BIP110, you can’t claim mining is decentralized. So how do you do it without creating an altcoin? We have a proposal that sets a positive precedent for POW changes.
The Bitcoin brand must not be surrendered. We can hear your objections already being shouted at the screen, “Bitcoin is captured, we need a clean break from Bitcoin!” or “You’re just gonna replay the bcash drama!”
Both objections are wrong as we will explain. Bitcoin is not a company. It is money. Money cannot rebrand itself every couple of decades. If the Bitcoin name fails or is abandoned, no one will trust its replacement. Money needs to be timeless. Money needs to be trusted to hold your life savings and be passed down to heirs without worry. If the Bitcoin name is held exclusively by bad actors, then fiat will have won. There will never be a Bitcoin standard if Bitcoin is renamed every time there is a POW change.
The next objection is a Block Size War flashback. No one wants to argue over what the real Bitcoin is. Good news, you won’t have to. Here’s our naming convention that can apply in 2026, in 2046, 2066, and whenever the future POW changes happen. The new POW algo gets attached to the coin’s name. We don’t know yet what Bitcoin’s new mining algo will be so we will use the example of a fictional algo SHA357. The coin will be called Bitcoin-SHA357 so there is no confusion with the core chain or Bitcoin-SHA256. This naming convention will be used only around the time of a POW change. Eventually, as the new algo outpaces adoption of the previous algo, the algo suffix gets naturally dropped and people just start referring to it as Bitcoin again. It’s still Bitcoin. It just had an upgrade to its algo, that’s all. This is intuitive as users expect periodic upgrades to software. Bitcoin is not immune from this need for periodic upgrades.
If misbehaving miners are unceremoniously forked off with a new algo, they are less likely to misbehave in the future. Or they’ll misbehave less frequently.
Note that Bitcoin Cash did NOT have a POW change. Some of the same mining pools that are currently mining on the invalid Core chain also mine bcash to this day. They are not Bitcoiners. They are big blockers who have once again forked off to a new chain. They didn’t decide what Bitcoin was in 2017 and aren’t deciding it in 2026 either.
Bitcoin survives this antifragility test.
Cope.
So the answer to centralized mining is… even more centralization?
https://twiiit.com/Roughnecks110/status/2087128292444996022