Those of us that actually value Bitcoin and running our own nodes to verify transactions to use the network lost the battle to limit SPAM, but it wasn’t a total loss. We’ve shown the people capturing Bitcoin that we won’t go along without resistance, with the Bitcoin Knots alternative Bitcoin client taking a significant share of nodes, 25 percent. And I still filter all the SPAM on my node thanks to Bitcoin Knots, and I even reject any OP_RETURN transactions from my mempool, so my bandwidth usage is down significantly, only downloading SPAM after it’s included in a block. And Big Bitcoin had to put significant effort into fighting BIP-110 exposing their assets in the industry with their weak emotional propaganda attacks, and BIP-110 exposed that miners are colluding against Bitcoin users and a future problem, with the big American and Chinese mining pools working together for unknown incentives.
And it’s worth highlighting Matt Hill’s analysis on why the miners would reject the soft fork, colluding with political pressure which is interesting given the American and Chinese operations were on the same page like when they engineered COVID in a Chinese lab…
Myself, I’m up for a hard fork and firing the miners with a POW change, and I never cared for the ASIC miner hardware dominated by China. We’d probably end up with a smaller Bitcoin alternative, but it could be made more pure and resilient, and we’d be able to fix the SPAM issues and UTXO set bloat, and make running nodes more economical going forward. Eventually, when Big Bitcoin goes too far, people will flee into the purer fork. And you could keep your holdings on both until such a time that converting to the other becomes inevitable. Wall Street that controls a lot of Bitcoin would sell the hard fork side and kill the price to start off, but you could keep the Wall Street side and pick a time to dump or convert into the hard fork side, ending up with a lot more true Bitcoin than you had to start with. Eventually, they’ll crash their side after centralizing nodes, filtering UTXOs and probably forcing custody… And this would make it a lot easier to add some privacy features as well without having to depend on coinjoins.
Here’s Matthew Kratter’s thoughts this morning.