The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money

"Sabotage isn't sabotage as long as the saboteurs have middling seniority" is amongst the more stupid arguments you've made, which is frankly quite the feat. It doesn't matter how long you've been around, what you did is still sabotage, and the people that were around longer than you who have called you out on it and sometimes even abandoned Bitcoin completely out of frustration at your toxic interference have pointed this out enough times that you trying to raise this argument is just more characteristic of your dishonesty.

> Abandoning instant payment by introducing replace-by-fee where you can "undo" a transaction not in a block yet.

Unconfirmed transactions are inherently at risk for being replaced, which is why confirmation exists in the first place.

When transactions are explicitly market non-final the software makes replacing easier instead of having to broadcast to the entire network yourself. Replacement for non-final transactions was a feature in the very first version of the software but it was disabled because it was vulnerable to a DOS attack (replacing a transaction over and over again in a tight loop). When a fix was found for the vulnerablity the feature was restored.

This is no way inhibits "instant payment"-- if you don't want to honor _non-final_ transactions until they're confirmed or replaced with a final version, just don't! (However, actual testing shows that doublespends of unconfirmed transactions are highly successful even without making them replaceable.)

Regardless, this wasn't a "stripping"-- it was _original functionality_ which was restored.

Aside, I see you are promoting Craig Wright's scammy BSV coin in other posts. I assume you are aware that the "Genesis hardfork" which they are about to release activates replacement in BSV too? https://github.com/bitcoin-sv/bitcoin-sv/blob/dev-Genesis-be...

> The limitation of what can be done with the scripting language by disabling OP codes needed for (even basic) math operations.

Vulnerable opcodes were disabled-- by Satoshi back in 2010. There has not been a single opcode disabled in bitcoin by anyone except Satoshi.

More recent softforks such as BIP141 have made it easy to reenable (fixed versions of) and add new opcodes. But there has been only moderate interest in reenabling any of the disabled opcodes, particularly since on altcoins and test networks (like elements) where they're enabled they've gone unused.

More interest right now is going into bip-taproot, since its structure enables users to use fancy scripts in an extremely efficient and private way-- allowing them to invoke the script only in exceptional cases.

> Forcing transactions to be formatted after specific templates limiting how transactions are used.

That was also done by Satoshi for attack mitigation reasons, but it hasn't been the case for several years now.

> Bonus story: As I understand it, Vitalik tried to build on bitcoin but the limitations in the script languarge and transaction format made a globally distributed computer impossible so he went off and created Etherium.

That is an outright lie. Vitalik never made any made any contact to the bitcoin developers or community related to this. Had any such effort been made it would be easy to point to public evidence of it. It simply doesn't exist.

Moreover, "build(ing ethereum) on bitcoin" would have made it impossible to "premine" 72 million coins (2/3rds of the current ethereum supply) and pocket tens of millions of dollars, as he's done. The folks that he collaborated with to create ethereum had done several prior altcoin pump and dumps and went on to do several others after ethereum.

It's unsurprising that he didn't seek out collaboration with Bitcoin however: He was well known as a scammer in the Bitcoin community at that point because shortly before starting etherum he had been making a nuisance of himself soliciting investments for a "quantum miner" scam. https://medium.com/bitcoinerrorlog/vitaliks-quantum-quest-9e...

Edit: I was just pointed to these chat logs where Ethereum was first suggested-- they strongly refute your claim, https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1214250162069164032/ph... https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1214250162069164032/ph...

Grossly incorrect stats you gave here...

There is only $6 million in capacity, not $6 billion.

Daily transactions are more likely in the few hundreds per day, not tens of thousands. Although this can't be determined with accuracy.

Yes this is true because Bitcoin core plays by the speed of the weakest link.

It's not true for Bitcoin Cash which plays by the "if your node is not making you money why are you running it"

When we upgrade every 6 months or useless nodes just get stuck on the old chain forever and that's it.

Last upgrade there was one miner who upgraded one block to late and lost about 1000 USD. That miner will be the first to run the new software in may.

We had a hacker who got a smart card to get Bitcoin cash to work like a credit card without needing to be online.

Bitcoin cash tx are instant and take on average about 2 seconds to spread to about 1999 out of 2000 mempools.

They settle on the chain on average 10 minutes.

Credit card tx also take a couple of seconds but much longer to settle.

Right now BCH can not yet scale like Visa but we already have the capacity to compete with paypall.

Satoshi's design works at scale but only when you don't delete point 6 from the whitepaper which is "Simple Payment Verification"

Core tries to make you belief the whitepaper was written without points 6 and 7.

7 is how to make the blockchain smaller by pruning it using merkle trees.

Nobody does that yet because storing 200 GB for 10 years is super cheap.

But 6 and 7 are ESSENTIAL in the design to scale.

Core completely ignores them or says: Well SPV is not 100% secure there for it's insecure and should not be used.

Gmax does this with everything, he flips it to extremes.

Meanwhile right now on LN there is couple of hundred thousand dollars that is very easy to steal from non technical people.

1) you find people that want to open a channel with you. These people go online to post their ip addresses and open ports on /r/bitcoin. These posts are encouraged on /r/bitcoin.

2) You open a channel with them for like 100 USD in BTC.

3) You push the balance to their side of the channel by using a swap side that accepts both LN and other coins.

4) You sell this 100 USD for another coin.

5) You publish an old state.

6) You do this to nodes you monitor using nmap to see if they go offline on a regular basis for longer then nlocktime.

7) You can't lose money on this, only win with people that should not be running LN but are.

There is like 6 million USD locked up in LN and about 10% is for grabs.

8) The victims have nowhere to go because if they post about it on their channels they get called stupid and banned and their post deleted.

9) People are already doing this but the victims are still not speaking out. They just belief it was their own fault and move on. Meanwhile the watchtower software is not there yet and if a node does not go offline for nlocktime you can easily DDOS that node for 144 blocks and you doubled your money.

We mainly use the Bitcoin.com wallet on our phones and Electron Cash on our computers. Both are open source with many eyes looking at the code. We try to teach our user to verify hashes on upgrades and to have copies of dev pub keys on their computer to verify on a fairly regular basis (but not every upgrade).

We also try to keep scammers out our community and I think we are doing a fairly good job, better than most crypto communities.