Simple Steve 🌌

Half bar owner, half bitcoiner, half mathematician. I’m very good at one of these

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

Take a moment and reconnect to the soul of Bitcoin

🎵
When the Cypriots were losing faith
That’s when I learned about the blockchain

I still remember how it all changed
When Satoshi said…

Don’t you worry
Don’t you worry, child

Bitcoin has got a plan for you
🎵

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

@ray_bon_ https://t.co/IbxBWIurpA

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

Over the past month I’ve evaluated every criticism to this study’s conclusion. Nothing has changed.

Significant other OP_IF use case (no)
Freezes utxos (no)
Too difficult to remove (no)

Taproot OP_IF is a flaw for a system designed to branch in leaves.

Leaves are what gives Taproot scripts their wonderful advantages of privacy and efficiency.

Using OP_IF instead of leaves exposes unnecessary data, instead of hiding it, which is why it’s ideal for spam.

And it’s essentially only used for spam. 99.6% of the 130 million times OP_IF was used on chain, it was used for spam.

BIP-110 removes OP_IF and puts a few additional limits on arbitrary data. OP_IF removal is the major structural departure from the old consensus.

And it is a good one.

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

We wouldn’t trust a fiat money if they decided not to print for a while. The problem isn’t the decision, it’s the ability. In the long run, the same will be true of Bitcoin. If it’s only a small group that can make change, it’s done. Doesn’t matter who the group is.

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

@Rajatsoni @adam3us @Excellion You wouldn’t have moved to the base layer if you trusted them. Get to you know subconscious

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

@ray_bon_ Idk what you mean. Yes I preferred the bip110 protocol rules as they reverted some of the mistakes of taproot

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

@BitcoinBombadil Maybe. I see it more like gold. If gold was constantly modified it would never have been money. There are command line operations and cryptography functions that have needed no change in decades. If Bitcoin is gonna be a rock solid money, it has to become this imo

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

Software is joining the group of “buy the older model it will last longer”

Cars, refrigerators, AC units,and now my 10yr old MacBook Pro is faster than my new one

New devs and techs with fiat incentives adding stupid features at the cost of reliability

Will bitcoin avoid this?

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

@BitcoinBombadil I like the Coinbase maturity rule. Cat and mouse will never work though long term

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

@BitcoinBombadil Love what Luke and Co are doing but ossiffiocication has to be the goal. Otherwise there’s no reasonable expectation of sustainability

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

@drawandstrike Because money printer go brrrrrrrre

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

Big change in the broad scale character of output distributions in June of last year on the BTC chain.

Before then messy clusters of outputs were usually .001 BTC and less. Now they’re are 0.01 BTC

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

@BitcoinErrorLog Didn’t know that. I still like the book though

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

Taleb writes the foreword to The Bitcoin Standard. Taleb then simps for COVID authorities and sells out. Saif gets mad. Saif is cool until the cold card hack. Then Saif simps for Saylor.

When Taleb sold out I always had a feeling that Saif would eventually sell out too

[XBT | Hardfork cguida | ⚡🪢 @cguida6]

Massive credit to Alphamine for getting this done

As of today, Alphapool no longer offers paid public stratumv1

This is a huge win for decentralization of bitcoin mining

[hodlonaut @hodlonaut]

A pattern is emerging in the responses to CAPTURE: The Machine.

Joe Nakamoto: “Saved you a click. Old news.”

Now Jonathan Bier, CEO of Farside Investors, posting as @FarsideInsights: “TLDR. Already widely publicised.”

Same straw man. Same dismissal. Reduce an investigation to one already-public fact, then declare the entire thing old news.

But that's precisely the point of CAPTURE. The individual facts were often public. What matters is the picture that emerges when you put the editorial conflicts, disclosure failures, policy exemptions, financial arrangements, institutional relationships, and timelines together.

Break that picture back into isolated facts, and each becomes easier to dismiss.

Worth noting: Bier sits on Brink's board, administers Bitcoin developer grants, and personally answered questions for the CAPTURE investigation about Brink's internal governance.

He's not an outside observer of the institutional structures this series examines.

Don't trust. Verify.

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

@_rektbtc @realityblob @davelund_ @friedcash Yes but Coinbase has posted some of their addresses. This means if they were to announce that “everyone” has all their coins split, we can verify whether or not these addresses have been split and it’s not 100%

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

Coinbase is withholding ~$2.47 Billion from customers.

On Sept 1st, Bitcoin’s blockchain split into two separate networks via a hard fork. Every Bitcoin that existed before the split continued to exist on the original network, while an identical balance appeared on the new Blake network.

Two months before the split, Coinbase reported in an SEC filing that they held ~2.9 Million BTC in custody.

Although many speculated that the new Blake coins would be worthless, recent exchange listings have proved otherwise. The most objective valuation we have for Bitcoin-Blake coins is currently $958 on the NeoxEx exchange.

The NeoxEx exchange is low volume, so one would not be able to liquidate large amounts there, but the purpose of this analysis is to report an valuation, not an estimate of liquidity.

Coinbase is not legally obligated to provide customers access to coins that have appeared on the Blake network. The headline "withholding" simply means that Coinbase has not credited its customers with the Blake coins.

Valuation:

At the time of the split, Coinbase's ~2.9M BTC in custody corresponded to ~2.9M Blake coins, which is worth roughly $2.78 billion at $958.

Due to the churn of deposits/withdrawals, and also that some new transactions on the legacy chain are invalid on the Blake chain, a small percentage of the original total is likely no longer splittable.

We can do a conservative on-chain analysis of a subset of Coinbase's self published holding addresses to estimate what percentage remains splittable.

Coinbase publishes updated holding addresses for its cbBTC tokens. This is a small percent (~3-4%) of their total BTC holdings. But we're using this sample for two reasons.

1) These are the only publicly verifiable, self reported BTC addresses held by Coinbase.

2) These addresses almost surely have a higher churn rate in terms of deposits and withdraws, compared to Coinbase's long term holdings, as Coinbase advertises cbBTC as being easier to send and receive than regular BTC.

Of the ~99,426 BTC held in cbBTC, approximately 89.3% is BTC that has not moved since the chain split which means it is guaranteed to be splittable. This is a conservative estimate because the 10.7% of coins that have moved are mostly standard txs, meaning they are also valid on the Blake chain and thus remain splittable.

Taking the conservative 89.3% still-splittable portion of the 2.9M coins held before the split, and multiplying that by the $958 valuation Blake coins, yields a total valuation of $2.47 Billion that Coinbase is withholding from customers.

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

2018 Saifedean: “The only way to own bitcoin is to have control of the private keys.” -The Bitcoin Standard, Chapter 8

2026 Saifedean: Michael Saylor has come out with 4% of all the bitcoin without having control of the private keys

[Saifedean Ammous @saifedean]

Michael Saylor has gone through his second year-long bitcoin bear market and come out with 4% of all the bitcoin, billions in USD cash, & close to zero net debt, all while relentlessly posting AI memes every day.

Haters in shambles.

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

@BitcoinBombadil Every six months

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

A tad behind schedule but the cycle is intact. Expect it to ramp up this month

Screen shot from April:

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

Nvidia, $NVDA, has committed $1 billion to US science research that would focus on “super intelligence” and quantum computing.

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

@davelund_ They’re in such a pickle. I can’t see how they’d offer a market without offering their customers their split coins. Even if they have all the coins they claim, all the coins aren’t 100% splitable anymore. So it’d be an obvious lie if they gave everyone their split XBT

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

@davelund_ Yep. That’s exactly how I see it. Curious - was there some talk about strategy asking for their XBT that I missed?

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

@charbel_g There’s no asterisk on”Not your keys, not your coins”

It isn’t a statement that applies to individuals and does not apply to institutions

You’re still on board with separating money and state right?

[Simple Steve 🌌 @SteveSimple]

@charbel_g 1) Saifedean mentioned an individual, not a company

2) MSTRs risk level has nothing to due with the nature of bitcoin