Daniel Vegas #BIP-110

Tech banker, former linux geek, EV enthusiast, extremely toxic Bitcoin maximalist.

[Daniel Vegas #BIP-110 @DanielV93391605]

"The press and the price will take care of themselves" - Steve Jobs on #Bitcoin
https://t.co/ScfNHbnjRW

[Daniel Vegas #BIP-110 @DanielV93391605]

@WolfgangRichtEU You forgot the /s

[Liquid Network 🌊 @Liquid_BTC]

We are aware of a security incident on @Liquid_BTC. Purported white-hat hackers have withdrawn ~4,000 BTC (~$320 million) from the Liquid Federation wallet. The @Blockstream team is working on contacting them on-chain with a signed message.

What we know so far is that the funds were withdrawn via the SideSwap PAK (Peg-out Authorization Key), but that key was not compromised, nor were any others.

Exchanges have been notified and have already paused (or will pause) LBTC deposits and withdrawals. Other Liquid assets such as USDT, DePix, and RWAs are unaffected by this security incident.

Bridge nodes have been temporarily disabled, so no new transactions can be submitted to the network. Effectively, the Liquid sidechain is paused until this issue is resolved.

Liquid wallets will be impacted, and we're sorry for any inconvenience. Federation members are actively working on resolving this so we can restore normal network activity.

You can monitor the situation via @mempool's https://t.co/M46Zhn8nlY site below:

https://t.co/B8j9u4j6i4

[hodlonaut @hodlonaut]

I fully accept what happened yesterday. It is sad, I will admit that. But it also feels like a catharsis.

BIP-148 is celebrated as Bitcoin Independence Day, because it proved that ordinary users, running nodes in their homes, could force the most powerful mining cartels and corporations in the industry to back down. The users had no hashrate, no exchanges, no lobbyists. They had conviction and they had nodes, and that was enough.

BIP-110 ran the same play with the same conviction, a reasoning that was shared by all bitcoiners five years ago (Bitcoin is money and not a grift database), and node support at levels at least comparable to 2017. This time the miners and the corporate layer simply refused to follow. They extended their spam-friendly chain and moved on like nothing happened.

Remember yesterday as Bitcoin Dependence Day.

What changed between 2017 and 2026?
Not the users. They showed up with the same fire.

What changed is everything that grew in the years between. ETFs. Treasury companies. Custodians holding millions of coins for people who will never touch a node. Hashrate concentrated into a handful of pools building templates for the whole world. Capture of the governance of the reference implementation resulting in stark philosophical pivot.

Those already celebrating Bitcoin Dependence Day are not simply cheering an outcome they won. They are treating evidence that miners and the corporate layer now control Bitcoin as if it were a grand cypherpunk victory, while ridiculing the people who fought for decentralization and for Bitcoin as money.

In my opinion, and in my heart, legacy Bitcoin is not what I signed up for. Captured. Centralized. Led by suits.
No longer about freedom, sovereignty, or the mission of separating money from state.

No longer about the things that made me a ride or die bitcoiner for many years.

The fire that originally drew me to Bitcoin is still alive in the node runners who supported BIP-110. I will follow it where it goes.

As for legacy Bitcoin, I have no interest in it anymore as a freedom project. In my mind, it is now a stock.

[COLDCARD @COLDCARDwallet]

@blk014 It’s when the project makers could have a “bug” in the entropy generation for later retrieval.

[Michael Crandall @MJCrandall]

https://t.co/fS42Jwty9K

[Daniel Vegas #BIP-110 @DanielV93391605]

@saylor Look at the mirror.

[Daniel Vegas #BIP-110 @DanielV93391605]

@adam3us I see.
Rules For Thee but Not for Me

[Daniel Vegas #BIP-110 @DanielV93391605]

@saylor Most of us are here since... forever.
And you just came yesterday.

[Daniel Vegas #BIP-110 @DanielV93391605]

@saylor I am fine integrating at the upper layers, just don't mess up with the base layer.

[SpectrGen // XBT @SpectrGen]

#BIP110 supporters were wondering whether @jackmallers supports non-monetary Bitcoin use-cases, so I pulled this clip.

His answer is clear.

[hodlonaut @hodlonaut]

CAPTURE

An investigation across four articles into how informal power over Bitcoin Core was assembled, exercised, and defended.

Article Three: The Merge
https://t.co/UROGy2Czo0

[dewmap @separ8]

The Capture of Bitcoin Core

For years, Bitcoin maintained a reputation as the ultimate uncapturable network.

It was designed to be decentralized, driven entirely by consensus, and highly resistant to corporate influence.

In 2015, the community famously defended the protocol during the Block Size Wars, repelling a coordinated corporate takeover attempt.

In June 2025, that streak ended.

A heavily contested code change was pushed into the software despite overwhelming opposition from the community.

The update targeted a feature called **OP_RETURN**, a space within a transaction meant to hold tiny amounts of arbitrary data, strictly capped at 80 bytes.

The 2025 update stripped those limits away, allowing massive amounts of non-financial data to be embedded directly into the blockchain.

Bitcoin requires broad consensus to function, and it has no central leadership.

So how did a handful of developers manage to bypass the community and force a major policy change into the software?

---

The path to this change began two years earlier with a six-line administrative edit that went virtually unnoticed.

By early 2023, the small group of developers who maintain Bitcoin's reference software were seeing an influx of traditional venture capital funding.

Major crypto investment firms began directly funding the developers responsible for the software's upkeep.

This financial concentration caught the attention of the mainstream press.

In February 2023, *The Wall Street Journal* profiled the vulnerability, highlighting how few people actually controlled the software and where their funding originated.

Four months later, on June 6, a funded maintainer submitted a code update.

It appeared to be routine housekeeping: a six-line adjustment to the software's documentation strings.

The edit narrowed the written definition of the network's data limits.

The original documentation stated that the limit applied to all data-carrying transactions.

The new text restricted that definition to one specific data field.

This left several newer data pathways completely unregulated, even though the underlying code itself had not changed.

The update passed without scrutiny.

But by quietly altering the official definitions, this developer cohort rewrote the rules of engagement for all future policy debates.

---

In late 2023, new projects began exploiting the exact gaps left open by that documentation edit.

The Bitcoin network was suddenly flooded with digital artifacts and spam, significantly increasing system congestion.

The community attempted to respond.

An independent developer wrote a software patch to restore the original data limits and secured an official security designation from the National Vulnerability Database to track the exploit.

To get that patch implemented, it required approval from the Core maintainers.

They rejected it.

The cohort cited the six-line documentation edit from earlier that year to justify the rejection.

They argued that because the documentation now explicitly excluded those data fields, the spam was technically within the rules.

They claimed that fixing the loophole would violate the software's documented intent.

In October 2024, during a closed-door developer session, the cohort administratively closed the issue tracking the formal security record, effectively erasing the vulnerability designation from the project's history.

By manipulating bureaucratic definitions, a centralized group of developers proved they could protect the specific data streams they favored while blocking community security efforts.

---

By early 2025, a specific corporate interest emerged.

A venture-funded entity called **Citrea** was building a product that required massive, uncapped data limits on Bitcoin to function.

To meet this requirement, an active Core developer commissioned another programmer to submit a code update.

This new pull request proposed removing the OP_RETURN data limit entirely—a change explicitly requested on behalf of Citrea.

When the community discovered the arrangement, they rejected the proposal by roughly a four-to-one margin, citing the clear conflict of interest.

Rather than address the criticism, the developer cohort leveraged their administrative privileges on GitHub to suppress the backlash.

They banned vocal critics, locked discussion threads, and hid comments that pointed out the venture capital ties.

They also utilized a coordinated public relations campaign at the MIT Bitcoin Expo in April 2025.

The cohort's leaders used the university backdrop to project authority, dismissing widespread community opposition as "trolls" and "noise."

The system designed to require broad consensus was being managed to produce the appearance of one.

The decentralized community was systematically silenced by an institutional machine.

---

On June 9, 2025, the uncapped OP_RETURN policy was merged into Bitcoin Core.

Overriding the community's objections, the developers promised a harm-reduction measure.

By opening OP_RETURN, they argued, existing spam would redirect into this cleaner channel, relieving pressure on the network.

But post-merge data showed that the spam did not redirect.

The original channels remained fully active while a new flood emerged through the uncapped space.

The system load compounded.

---

The 2025 merge redefined Bitcoin's governance by demonstrating exactly who holds the levers of power.

This event, according to its critics, showed that Bitcoin Core could be influenced by a centralized group of operators willing to rewrite policy in ways that aligned with particular corporate interests.

Whether one accepts that conclusion or not, the episode has become a case study in the governance of open-source infrastructure and a blueprint—real or perceived—for how a decentralized system can be captured from the inside out.

Source from:

CAPTURE
An investigation into how informal power over Bitcoin Core was assembled, exercised, and defended

by @hodlonaut

Article One of Four — The Network
https://t.co/hVkCUTsM90

Article Two of Four — The Lever
https://t.co/aTkUNBlNrs

Article Three of Four — The Merge
https://t.co/zJ4MOhgKT3

[Saifedean Ammous @saifedean]

Bitcoin is not the sweet treat you want; it's the bitter medicine you need.

[Daniel Vegas #BIP-110 @DanielV93391605]

@stephanlivera "pro 110 camp"? If you cannot name names, then you are full of shit.
https://t.co/QUF6orixbP

[Mars University @MarsUniversityX]

When Elon Musk exposed a fake BBC reporter, live!😎

[Daniel Vegas #BIP-110 @DanielV93391605]

@saylor @stephanlivera Jk🤣

[Daniel Vegas #BIP-110 @DanielV93391605]

@Strategy @BTCconsortium 🤣

[Daniel Vegas #BIP-110 @DanielV93391605]

@saylor @stephanlivera That is exactly what Core did.
Now we have to fix their mess.

[Hardfork Kratter @mattkratter]

Best article of the weekend-- make sure you read the whole thing to the end

[Nick Szabo @NickSzabo4]

@stephanlivera @mattkratter For fuck sake get some logic in your brain: making a new bucket bigger without making the old bucket smaller increases the risk. Fucking obviously. Are you really this much of a fucking idiot or do you just think your followers are such big fucking idiots?