Now**, Den is definitely double-tripling dipping and (ass-?)milking his writing!**

• write a thing for outlet A
• repurpose/republish it for outlet B
• Make an SN post for both!
  = PROFIT!

Anyway, I'm releasing the Print edition review of Luke's book for BTCHEL today. #1524157* #1504762

Go have a look... Below are some extract, and HERE's the bit I liked the most:

“Spammers aren’t using Bitcoin as money. Rather, they’re using it as a way to generate value for themselves through the data they embed. It’s worth it to them to pay the fee to get their data inscribed on Bitcoin, and presumably they expect to make their money back”

Call me blue-eyed, I just don’t believe there’s a constant, ever-lasting demand for worthless digital junk. Besides, in manias and bubbles, that sort of leaning-against-the-wind never works — in part because people (irrationally) hoping to profit from peddling nonsense think they’ll profit so much that whatever tiny obstacles you place in their path are but a nuisance. The kicker is that they won’t; thus, the existence of a final sucker.

This review ran in Bitcoin Magazine Print, in the Quantum Issue (#42), the mentioning of it here was a condition for republishing. It was written before the fork failed.

Whenever someone comes out claiming to save Bitcoin, it’s always unclear exactly from whom or from what, and whether the saving is all that very useful; a new moron with a savior complex, scaling a Dunning-Kruger curve, is born every minute.

Luke de Wolf’s Defending Bitcoin isn’t like that — at least if you can stomach Chapters 11 and 12, where his hard-hitting and controversial opinions about Bitcoin Core and “spam” transactions reside.

The book itself is comprehensive, interesting, refreshing, impeccably written, and with a competent rendition of Bitcoin as money. It comes with an extremely slick promotional website at defendingbitcoin.com that the author promises to keep updated in the fast-changing landscape of software and security breaches.

De Wolf’s unique niche is his professional background in industrial control systems (ICS) — the kind of software and informational processes that safeguard societal-level, critical infrastructure. Think power plants and gas pipelines, water systems or telecommunication. He treats Bitcoin as the society-critical infrastructure that it is, or at least will be (“Bitcoin isn’t a factory or a pipeline, but like them, it has to keep running, no matter what”, page 86).

"Hyperbolic Contradictions Won’t Rug the Spammers"

The arguments for either side of the broad schism running through Core-Knots, arbitrary data, mining (template) centralization, and node settings are presented competently and succinctly, only occasionally misleading. To de Wolf’s credit, they’re portrayed miles better than the often performative mudslinging we’re used to from Twitter or conference stages. This is the best possible version of the argument; whatever your stance on quantum, Bitcoin Core, Knots, or nonmonetary data on Bitcoin, Defending Bitcoin is the bright, shining star for considering these themes.

"De Wolf definitely goes too far at times, and he’s repeatedly too shilly for Knots and OCEAN."

The final, optimistic takeaway is that this deep dive made de Wolf see Bitcoin as more resilient than he first supposed. Despite outlining dozens of threats, across AI and quantum and spammers and poor key management and colluding miners and faulty privacy and hostile governments, de Wolf’s “assertion is that Bitcoin has held up remarkably well” (page 383). The downside is that we are its security team.
It’s a beautiful summary of a painstaking journey, with lots left to do. The repeated emphasis on balancing convenience and security lingers.

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