₿ 𓄿 🔴🟠🟡🟢🇸🇻 Marcel Smeets

linux bitcoin UNIC 2020 ₿ node & miner; ∞/21M nostr: npub1278ptwa5y8hx28ye69xvj6cpcfx3q7wau72dufy52ny9w2hs45jqs9eq8w ⛳️

[₿ 𓄿 🔴🟠🟡🟢🇸🇻 Marcel Smeets @MarcelSmeets]

If you really want to understand #Bitcoin start with reading these papers

[Documenting ₿itcoin 📄 @DocumentingBTC]

Best #bitcoin papers everyone should read.

1. The Bitcoin Whitepaper

What started it all. Satoshi Nakamoto once said, "I had to write all the code before I could convince myself that I could solve every problem, then I wrote the paper"

[Read here: https://t.co/kXJ49TdwQY]

[₿ 𓄿 🔴🟠🟡🟢🇸🇻 Marcel Smeets @MarcelSmeets]

How investors learned to live with inflation https://t.co/B2udjlVlyM Nothing about the hardest asset of them all: Bitcoin

[₿ 𓄿 🔴🟠🟡🟢🇸🇻 Marcel Smeets @MarcelSmeets]

@coinbureau The Shitcoin 💩 & Poop Index by S&P

[₿ 𓄿 🔴🟠🟡🟢🇸🇻 Marcel Smeets @MarcelSmeets]

BIP-110 State of the discussion according to Grok

Here is an updated Top 10 list of conclusions on why BIP-110 is not the best path forward for Bitcoin, incorporating the full conversation history, pro arguments (including Knut Svanholm’s emphasis on protecting monetary purity and reducing bloat, and Fred Krueger’s points on Taproot enabling spam and preventing a return to high fees), and broader critiques from figures like Michael Saylor and Jameson Lopp.

Creates a precedent for subjective censorship
BIP-110 introduces consensus rules that invalidate certain currently valid transactions based on data content. Even with good intentions (as Knut argues for refocusing on money), this risks normalizing future interventions that undermine Bitcoin’s neutrality and permissionless nature.

High risk of chain splits and network instability
The 55% hashrate threshold plus mandatory signaling creates a realistic path to splits, especially with low current signaling. This contrasts with Bitcoin’s proven model of broad consensus and could harm price stability and user confidence.

Invalidates legitimate scripts and reduces programmability

Restrictions on Taproot features, OP_IF, data pushes, and other elements can affect existing multisig setups, presigned transactions, and future innovations—countering the pro view that it’s a minor, temporary fix.

Does not effectively solve the spam problem
While Krueger and supporters highlight past high fees and Taproot’s role in enabling inscriptions, workarounds exist and major spam (e.g., Runes) is largely unaffected. Market fees and block limits already constrain low-value data without consensus changes.

Damages Bitcoin’s reputation for immutability and predictability

Temporary changes that alter what counts as valid activity signal that the protocol can be “fixed” for contested uses. This erodes the trust that drives long-term monetary premium and adoption, outweighing short-term bloat relief.

Limits future upgrade paths and flexibility
By handicapping certain script capabilities during the window, BIP-110 could slow Bitcoin’s evolution for advanced monetary and settlement use cases, even if the goal (per Knut) is to prioritize sound money.

Process and governance concerns outweigh benefits
Limited broad testing, reliance on specific implementations, and a process perceived as driven by a minority reduce confidence. Proponents see it as pragmatic maintenance; critics see risks to decentralized governance.

Market incentives are a stronger, less risky solution
Higher organic fees from real demand, Layer-2 scaling, and economic pressure naturally price out spam without protocol changes. Krueger’s concern about returning to $20 fees is valid historically, but past cycles show the network adapts without soft forks.

Short-term signals (e.g., price or engagement) do not prove long-term value
Pro arguments citing current price levels or discussion volume as proof of success overlook that Bitcoin’s price is driven by many macro and adoption factors. The deeper risks to neutrality and trust matter more for sustained growth.

Historical precedent favors resisting such interventions

Bitcoin has strengthened by defending core guarantees against well-intentioned changes. While Knut and Krueger make compelling cases for defending monetary focus against spam enabled by features like Taproot, the cumulative risks to permissionlessness, consensus stability, and predictability make BIP-110 net negative for Bitcoin’s long-term monetary power and price trajectory.
Market-driven and Layer-2 solutions better preserve its unique strengths.

Bottom line: Proponents rightly identify real issues with data bloat and incentives.

However, the proposal’s structural risks—precedent, potential invalidations, limited effectiveness, and governance friction—make it suboptimal compared to preserving Bitcoin’s uncompromising neutrality.

The decentralized process (hashrate, nodes, economics) will decide, but caution aligns better with Bitcoin’s proven winning formula.

[₿ 𓄿 🔴🟠🟡🟢🇸🇻 Marcel Smeets @MarcelSmeets]

@dotkrueger Like e.g. Saylor, or anyone in this space for years, already bought, recurrently keep buying, don’t have to wait, specially now Love a mid summer rally, it’s a nice start again

[₿ 𓄿 🔴🟠🟡🟢🇸🇻 Marcel Smeets @MarcelSmeets]

@callebtc He is a true legend. We all miss him. Great educator for many, loved his bitcoin talks and educational videos, he helped understanding what this all is about A lof of strength @aantonop Hope his team will send him this support

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

Fiat currency is the problem. Companies, institutions, securities, and technologies that strengthen Bitcoin are part of the solution. We can debate ideas without mistaking allies for enemies.

[Fred Krueger #BIP-110 @dotkrueger]

Everybody is over-complicating this.

✅ buy bitcoin. HODL.
❌ buy call options on bitcoin
❌ buy call option spreads on bitcoin
❌ buy bitcoin and sell call options for yield
❌ buy and sell bitcoin based on TA
❌ buy and sell bitcoin based on "slow stochastics"
❌ buy and sell bitcoin based on "4 yr cycles"
❌ buy bitcoin in a tax inefficient c corp with debt
❌ buy bitcoin and issue pref shares in c corp
❌ buy real estate and use the cash flows to buy Bitcoin
❌ buy portfolio of cash positive biz and buy Bitcoin

[Jack Mallers @jackmallers]

Satoshi solved digital scarcity. Bitcoin solved money.

When someone tells you they need another token, a money where they're the central bank, ask: Why?

If your product is valuable, why does it need its own money?

No man should work for what another man can print.

[Daniel Batten @DSBatten]

One Brazilian solar plant wastes enough power to mine ~$20-25M Bitcoin p.a.

The whole country's Bitcoin mining is $3M.

Other power producers are now closing the gap, a pattern I've not seen outside US.

In Brazil, and other places, Bitcoin is being adopted as an energy solution

[Decentra Suze @DecentraSuze]

Digital control is expanding through surveillance, debanking, KYC databases, internet shutdowns and financial repression.

Builders and activists are creating an emerging freedom tech stack of private payments, resilient communication, spyware research, peer to peer funding and practical education.

My latest piece in @Forbes features @CashuBTC, @citizenlab, @hodlhodl, @HRF, @OsloFF, Bitchat, Agora, Nostr and Bitcoin.

With insights from @Farida_N @jsrailton @callebtc @leopoldolopez and @AnyaChekhovich.

Read the full article:

https://t.co/peIqlUzY2H

[₿ 𓄿 🔴🟠🟡🟢🇸🇻 Marcel Smeets @MarcelSmeets]

@dotkrueger Seems to me it was Satoshi and others idea, back in 2008 / 2009?

[Decentra Suze @DecentraSuze]

When governments shut down your communications or a platform debanks you, what’s your backup plan?

Listening to activists at the @OsloFF describing surveillance, censorship and financial exclusion, one thing stood out. For nearly every problem they raised, builders were already working on solutions.

It became the opening to my talk at @BTCPrague. In this clip, I explain why CBDCs may not arrive in the form people expect and why stablecoins can carry many of the same risks.

Full video, article and practical tools linked below.

Freedom depends on having money that no government, bank or platform can switch off.

Bitcoin gives us that option.

[₿ 𓄿 🔴🟠🟡🟢🇸🇻 Marcel Smeets @MarcelSmeets]

@bramk Looks more and more like (American) elections Just fabricate the procedure well enough, votes, gerrymandering, ID thresholds etc so you are elected and can rule. Is this the path forward?

[₿ 𓄿 🔴🟠🟡🟢🇸🇻 Marcel Smeets @MarcelSmeets]

Proponents' stated motives are straightforward and public: protect Bitcoin's core purpose as sound money by curbing non-financial data bloat (inscriptions, Ordinals, Runes) that raises node costs and diverts incentives. Figures like Luke Dashjr and Bitcoin Mechanic argue recent Core policy changes (e.g., expanded OP_RETURN) enabled spam, and a temporary soft fork restores historical norms without permanent rules changes.

Speculating on "hidden" future motives is inherently uncertain, but critics highlight plausible incentive misalignments tied to weakening change-resistance:

Governance precedent and control: Using a 55% signaling threshold (lower than traditional supermajority norms) for an "urgent/temporary" fix could normalize slimmer-consensus forks. If successful despite minimal miner support (~1% signaling so far), it might embolden future activist campaigns—whether for anti-spam iterations, compliance filters, or other ideological goals—shifting power toward vocal node/client factions over broad economic consensus (miners, users, businesses). Opponents like Michael Saylor and Adam Back explicitly warn this turns policy disputes into consensus risks far more dangerous than spam itself.

Ideological or competitive edge: Strong advocates often favor a stricter "money-only" vision. Success could discourage data-heavy protocols (NFTs, tokens on L1), indirectly benefiting aligned scaling solutions (L2s) or reducing competition for block space. Long-term, repeated interventions might entrench a maintenance culture where "temporary" measures become tools for ongoing curation, eroding ossification—the very change-resistance that makes Bitcoin predictable and trustworthy.

Short-term win with long-term erosion: Even if temporary, activating via user/node pressure (e.g., Knots adoption) tests UASF-style mechanisms. Future motives could involve reusing the playbook for escalating issues, gradually lowering the bar for rule changes and inviting regulatory or majority capture scenarios—the slippery slope Claude and @bramk discussed.

Bitcoin's history shows spam waves are often self-limiting via fees and adaptation, while governance fights over consensus changes have higher stakes (e.g., block size wars). BIP-110's low traction suggests the community largely rejects this tradeoff for now. The real test of motives will be how proponents react if/when it fails: accept the market signal, or push variants that further strain immutability? Truth-seeking favors high evidentiary bars for rule changes over speculative purity tests.

[₿ 𓄿 🔴🟠🟡🟢🇸🇻 Marcel Smeets @MarcelSmeets]

It's the last part which worries me the most: "In short, BIP110 might reduce obvious data-dump spam short-term but could increase harder-to-remove, higher-cost spam long-term if the cat-and-mouse game escalates. The real debate is whether the temporary relief justifies weakening Bitcoin's change-resistance norm."

[Daniel Lacalle @dlacalle_IA]

The digital euro is not innovation, it’s infrastructure for control — programmable money, political surveillance, and the end of financial privacy in the EU.

Read why this “cashless utopia” is a blueprint for Big Brother banking — and what it means for your savings, your data and your freedom.

👉 The Digital Euro: Control And The End Of Financial Privacy

https://t.co/XPdNgjTe06

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

In Bitcoin, influence is earned through work, not ambition. Those who contribute money, utility, and power to the network shape its future.

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

There are 110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam.

BIP 110 turns a spam dispute into a consensus change that would invalidate some currently valid, fee-paying transactions.

That precedent is the danger. We should save our energy for threats that really matter. $BTC

[Adam Back @adam3us]

On the filter fork topic.

I don't usually have time, but this morning listened to one of the twitter spaces from earlier in the week, with some well meaning relative bitcoin newcomers, that humanized them, and their concerns and thoughts for why they thought that made it logical to support 110.

My feeling after listening, is if these are the people with #110 in their handles, I'm sad to see them about to fork off and get disillusioned without understanding why bitcoin rejected 110 robustly.

So here's a more empathetic, constructive higher level version of explaining why not. I hope it's high-level and first-principles enough that everyone can follow.

They seem to want to understand what makes people tick, and are suspicious of intent. So, if someone asked me why is Bitcoin important and what is it, I'd say my (personal) mission and hope for bitcoin is to build the cypherpunk future, that "Snow Crash" was a blueprint, and work backwards from there. Bitcoin I hope leads to fully free markets via bearer unseizable, hard mathematically dependable money. Not everyone is comfortable with that level of freedom, but that's my view. And at this point, I believe that surprisingly, even now many governments have come to understand and value bitcoin's gold-like mathematical assurance, a positive development. Others may have milder views than myself, but still like hard censorship resistant money.

Because of motive suspicion, if it's not obvious: I hate spam with a passion, that's how I came to design hashcash while researching decentralized bearer money with others, and running nodes in privacy related cypherpunk p2p networks nearly three decades ago.

People seem upset about the default op return policy change in bitcoin. I will just assert, there are extremely robust and simple reasons for bitcoin changing default relay policy, and most just didn't do their research, so don't know what those are, or maybe not technical enough to fully understand though there have been 1000s of posts trying to explain in various simplified ways. So that lack of understanding lends itself to shared build-up of false narratives. So here's my back-to-basics higher level explanation.

The decentralization needed to create cypherpunk money has implications a: side effect of decentralization is that you can't impose your views on others. The very decentralization mechanism that helps that, is working against what BIP 110 wants, which at it's most basic is a quest to police other people. I understand supporters don't see their intent like that, but introspect deeper.

You can modify your software, but not anyone else's. Another critical and incredibly robust technical bitcoin immune system is bitcoin can't have people who don't understand technology basics insist on eroding security, decentralization robustness and core properties. That would end badly, fast, and so people will fight you on that.

So the message is Bitcoin respectfully says "no" to what you want. Sorry, and bitcoiners do genuinely understand and empathize that you mean well, have high level thoughts that make emotional sense, and articulate sensible bitcoin-defensive high level ideas, but they are not grounded and without you seeing it, the way you propose to achieve your ideas, hard-conflict with free cypherpunk permissionless money.

My advice is to listen to more experienced people who understand the system and why it works the way it does, to whatever detail you want to understand the grounded reasons for why this is the implication of decentralization and cypherpunk money.

I guarantee you the developer and protocol ecosystem shares and exceeds your views on bearer hard money (and dislike of spam). You may not agree with individual developers choices, views, way of expressing themselves etc, BUT you also need to understand the IETF-like decentralized technical consensus process creates a protective change resistance, that is highly effective at protecting bitcoin mission. The implication of which is no developer can change anything without technical consensus from hundreds of other developers and protocol observers who are pedantic and extremely knowledgeable clever people who won't let any unaddressed technical question past. The protective change resistance is robust and decentralized in an amplifying way because of this technical consensus.

And the many highly technical mainline developers' cypherpunk mission mindsets are probably far more determined than you can even handle on clarity of understanding and views about freedoms on permissionless networks, as many of you are probably still subconsciously inured by the matrix, where they have transcended that, and grew up immersed in it decades ago. They think natively in this space, while you are just grappling with the surface. Many wont have internalized or have the experience to know how this internet physics works, where there is no policeman, no policy authority, just mathematics, free market and hard money. That has implications for your views also, unfortunately.

Now the tough pill, which is unfortunately true: If you won't listen to reason, educate yourself, learn, the same radical freedom applies to you: your permissionless recourse is to club together and create a fork. But bitcoin won't be joining it. (With respect and no sleight intended.)

Please rejoin bitcoin now, or later if you're not convinced and need to experience 110 forking off and fizzling for yourself to start that journey of introspecting and learning. It would be sad if bitcoin lost people disillusioned due to simple lack of understanding of what's going on there, we're all trying to defend bitcoin and keep it on mission. Including btw the 110 technical promoters, just they wandered off plot somehow.

Join the cypherpunks on bitcoin, come cypherpunk summer🌞 in a few weeks.