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I've been seeing a lot of people saying that because BIP-110 failed, that this now means that the Suecoiners and the corporate miners control Bitcoin.
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Now, is this true? And if it isn't, then why did BIP-110 fail?
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The first thing to understand is that there was a lot of differences between the UASF during the block size wars and BIP-110.
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Now, I never really saw the support that I felt was needed for BIP-110 to work.
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That's part of why I never supported it, despite being friends with a ton of people who did,
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and I shared some of their opinions about spam.
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But if I had thought BIP-110 was the best path forward, even if I had thought it would fail,
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I would still have supported it, but I simply didn't.
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But that's a video for another day, one I was going to do two weeks ago.
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But literally the day I was going to do it, cold card happened.
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And so just like a bunch of people's Bitcoin, all of my time went poof.
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Poof.
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And it just didn't seem that important anymore.
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But if you actually still care and want to know why I never supported it,
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I'll still do the video that I was going to do before it actually went down.
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Just let me drop me a comment and let me know. And I'm also going to be doing another video breaking down everything we know so far and answering a lot of questions about what happened with cold card. So subscribe to the guys take YouTube channel. It's our new channel. I'm still trying to get it out there. So please subscribe to that one. And that's where you'll find that content as well as social.
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Speaking of cold card, if you actually want to get a hardware wallet that is fully open source and is surviving all of the AI infiltrations and entropy tests, you can get yourself a BitBox with my discount code.
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You can find that right down in the show notes.
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One little news item on that, actually, Nunchuck Mobile is going to be supporting the BitBox Nova soon.
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And I'm very excited about that because I've been wanting that for a long time and I've been bugging Hugo about it.
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But let's get back to the topic.
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So the first thing to understand is the dynamic between miners and nodes.
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Now when I say nodes, I do not mean a thousand VPS instances booted up on DigitalOcean pretending to be people.
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I mean Bitcoiners with Bitcoin willing to stake their capital, many running businesses, building tools, developing software, and running a node to defend their definition of what Bitcoin is.
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So if you come in here and respond with nodes can be Sybil attacked
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Well, I'll know that you didn't actually listen to the video
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Because when I say nodes i shortcutting that a lot to say and i not going to say that every time so I just going to say nodes Nodes and miners have a push and pull relationship a defense and offense dynamic Miners extend the network Users and their capital defend it
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For the sake of this explanation, I think we can analogize it or picture it as sort of a horse in a carriage that has no driver.
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Its direction is actually determined by the common denominator of the resistance and the pulling of all the horses and people in the carriage.
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Now, the people in the carriage can't make it go unless they get out and pull, joining the horses.
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But they can drop an anchor or hit the brakes and cut the ropes.
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if the horses start going in the wrong direction.
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We can think of the nodes and the users and the businesses
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and the people who invest their lives in Bitcoin
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as the people in the carriage.
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And the horses are the miners.
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The horses, without anyone in the carriage putting up any resistance,
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could take the carriage wherever they wanted,
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as long as all of the horses agreed to the direction.
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This is why it's important that anyone can just get out of the carriage
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and join the horses.
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And importantly, why we all want everyone building their own blocks, because 100 small horses are way better than three giant horses.
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So why did BIP-110 fail?
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Because it only had a minority of the people in the carriage, a surprising amount of support, no doubt,
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and basically only one out of 100 of the horses in alignment with their desired change.
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Now, there's an important distinction about what they were trying to do that we'll get to in just a second.
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So back to the UASF. You say the UASF didn't have any minors. It was specifically against the minors that the UASF was only support from nodes in the carriage. This is a misunderstanding of the situation of the UASF and why it succeeded.
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In fact, the UASF, or the change it was pushing, segregated witness, actually did have broad user, minor, business.
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Everyone was in support of segregated witness.
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The disagreement was over how and when to activate it and what else would be activated with it.
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The UASF was not about forcing segregated witness onto a network that didn't want it, but in dropping the anchor against the horses who wanted a different change that the carriage wanted no part of.
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The UASF was in response to something called the New York Agreement This is when the DCG the digital currency group and a bunch of major corporate entities and most of the large corporate miners got together and agreed that they were going to activate segregated witness and a doubling of the block size at the same time refusing to activate Segwit in the way that the users businesses and developers had already agreed to do
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Segwit was not contentious.
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The doubling of the block size was contentious.
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The minor conglomerate was trying to package them together.
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What the UASF did was call their bluff.
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The UASF said,
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If you don't signal for Segwit on the non-contentious path,
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we are going to cut your ropes and you can go wherever the hell you want.
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The UASF was saying that if the horses did not signal for the non-contentious path to segregated witness, that they were going to drop full anchor and they were absolutely willing to cut their ropes.
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This would sort of be like the horses and everybody in the carriage got together and they all said, yes, we will agree to a five degree turn to the right and everyone is on board.
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Then the horses say, except we are only going to turn five degrees to the right if you get out of your carriage and into this new one that we control.
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The user-activated soft fork responded by saying, you can do whatever the hell you want with that carriage.
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We are taking a five-degree turn with or without you.
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Even though the UASF changed the consensus rules, it was a special case because it was a disagreement over which of two different paths to change the network that would be taken.
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Everyone had already agreed that we were going to make a change.
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We were going to turn the carriage.
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the UASF provided just enough defensive anchor to get the group who wanted to push the more contentious change,
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the shift in the carriage, to drop back to the less contentious one, the 5-degree turn.
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But importantly, this required explicit support from the users, the software developers, the nodes,
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the service operators, the wallet operators, and like 20 to 30 percent of the miners to get this defense in line.
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Even the traders on the exchanges selling the futures contract for the hard fork.
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It required broad support in opposition to a large group of miners and corporations who thought that they were in charge,
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specifically because of what I refer to as fiat consensus.
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They were the biggest companies with the most customers and the most mining power and in
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fiat land, this means you're the one in charge.
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Welcome to Bitcoin.
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But Segregated Witness did have broad support The miners and conglomerate had explicitly agreed to it just not in the way that everybody wanted which is why the game theory leaned heavily toward activating SegWit alone
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and abandoning the hard fork to double the block size.
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The nodes, the users, the developers, the community were acting in defense
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against an unwanted consensus change,
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which is exactly where their power is strongest.
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They can drop anchor and refuse to follow the horses that get out of line.
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BIP-110 did not have this advantage.
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BIP-110 was actually trying to turn the horses,
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both with a minority of the horses and a minority of the people in the carriage.
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Even though it was a soft fork, BIP-110 supporters only really had decent defensive power, but they were attempting an offensive maneuver, which is exactly why it only stayed relevant in the fight for about one block.
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I don't think the BIP-110 outcome suggests that anything has changed about how Bitcoin works or who has control.
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To the contrary, I think it actually gives clarity to the balance that has always been there.
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And I'll tell you why I know and why I think it's best for all of us BIP-110 supporters and everyone else, core supporters alike, whatever you want to call it, should stay on Bitcoin proper.
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Because if this had been turned the other way around, if core had been trying to introduce something contentious to the consensus rules like demurrage or continuous inflation into the supply schedule, and even if they had had like 80% of the centralized corporate mining power on board behind their proposal, that is when even the small group behind BIP-110 would have had the upper hand.
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So no, I do not believe that Bitcoin is now run by suit corners and corporate miners.
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I think Bitcoin behaved as expected, based on the dynamics between the network defenders and the network extenders.
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BIP-110 didn't work, simply because if you don't have broad consensus, you can't change the consensus rules.
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And whether or not you agree or disagree with the change, that is a good thing.
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get yourself a bit box stack sats subscribe to our new guys take channel on youtube because it's
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free and that is an insane deal i mean you're getting like an infinite value for the price
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you can't divide by zero and i will catch you on the next one until then that's my two sets
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you
