So let's bring it back then:
Every internet address is really two parts — where to deliver, and who you are.
Normally the "who you are" part is just a number. This method builds it from your own key instead, so the address itself proves it's really yours. Like a tamper-proof name tag.
Here's the clever bit: routers only ever read the delivery part to move your data along. Your name tag is only checked at the very end, at the front door.
So you get an address that proves who you are, and it changes nothing about how the internet routes traffic.
Drop-in, no new rules.
On Feb 23, 2016, Bitcoin Core shipped Replace-by-Fee and made unconfirmed transactions reversible.
Mike Hearn: it makes Bitcoin "useless for actually buying things."
The whole community condemned it. They shipped it anyway. Ask who benefits.
Tether could have used the blockchain to store records of deposits and tether issuances to keep track of everything and prove they’re not a giant fraud.
Tether instead chose to use a paper notebook that they threw away after being sued.
Because that’s what you do when tethers are fully backed, destroy evidence of your own honesty and legitimacy.
I'm sorry, but at some point reality has to be invited into the discussion.
A record-keeping system that can process roughly seven transactions per second on paper, and often closer to four or five once real-world conditions are considered, is not a global monetary system. It is a queue.
Gold moved slowly because it involved ships, wagons, vaults, guards, and the occasional empire collapsing. BTC moves slowly because it was deliberately engineered to move slowly.
Those are not the same achievement.
And before someone points to Lightning, Lightning's entire purpose is to avoid putting most activity onto the ledger being celebrated. The system only appears to scale by moving transactions elsewhere and accepting that many interactions never become permanent ledger entries at all.
Imagine building a library, discovering it can only hold seven books a second, then announcing the solution is to stop recording most of the books.
That is not scaling.
That is avoidance.
The irony is that the chart claims BTC has "fast settlement."
Fast compared to what?
A carrier pigeon that has been stripped of its feathers?
Visa settles vastly more economic activity. Mastercard settles vastly more economic activity. Modern banking systems settle vastly more economic activity.
A monetary network is not measured by slogans. It is measured by the amount of commerce it can support.
The most amusing claim is that BTC is the greatest record-keeping system ever devised.
The greatest?
A global system that cannot economically record even a tiny fraction of world commerce?
The greatest record-keeping system in history would record more records, not fewer.
The greatest monetary system in history would support more trade, not less.
A ledger that spends its life desperately trying to avoid recording transactions is a very peculiar candidate for the title of history's greatest record-keeping system.
Try again after understanding the engineering rather than memorising the marketing.
Imagine believing a man whose career included one of the most spectacular financial collapses of the dot-com era, then treating every new price prediction as if it arrived carved into stone tablets from a mountain.
"Sixteen million."
Of course it is.
And next week it will probably be thirty-two million, followed by infinity, followed by a solemn explanation as to why infinity was actually bearish.
The truly fascinating part is not the prediction. It is the audience.
A sheep walks up to a lion and says, "I have some broccoli. Would you like to share?"
The lion smiles.
The sheep concludes that they have become friends.
The lion concludes that lunch has delivered itself.
That is roughly the level of financial sophistication involved here.
People hear a promoter telling them he will happily buy at $200,000, $500,000, $1 million, $2 million, $4 million, $8 million, and $16 million, and somehow interpret this as reassurance rather than marketing.
Astonishing.
The man selling optimism is optimistic. What a shocking development. Next we shall discover that bookmakers enjoy gambling and funeral directors have a favourable outlook on mortality.
The best part is that every prediction is treated as proof of the last prediction.
Price goes up? Genius.
Price goes down? Opportunity.
Price stays flat? Accumulation.
There is apparently no possible state of reality capable of falsifying the thesis.
At that point one is no longer discussing investment analysis. One is discussing theology.
And theology is always easiest when somebody else is paying the tithe.
🧵👇Internet está a punto de cambiar para siempre: El Dr. Craig Wright (@CsTominaga), el que muchos pensamos que es el creador de #Bitcoin (Satoshi Nakamoto), acaba de anunciar que ha creado un sistema para poseer la verdadera propiedad digital. Durante décadas, la seguridad de la información se ha basado en una idea simple: todo se puede copiar, pero ahora surge una propuesta completamente distinta: que un archivo digital deje de ser una simple copia y pase a convertirse en un activo criptográfico con dueño, historial y reglas de transferencia propias. Por primera vez en la historia, los bienes digitales podrían transferirse con exclusión real. Craig regalará el código, abierto, gratuito y seguro, que será, sin duda, revolucionario. Un cambio que podría redefinir lo que entendemos por propiedad en Internet. Y todo dentro de la red más escalable y segura del mundo: #Bitcoin #BSV DENTRO HILO 🧵👇
“Can’t be taken from you.”
Adorable.
There have just been multiple announcements about so-called BTC Core "Bitcoin" being seized or frozen, but sure, keep chanting the nursery rhyme.
And if developers can change the protocol, then the system is governed. Controlled. Managed. Administered. Pick the word you like. It is not set in stone, and it is not Bitcoin. It is BTC.
Calling that “decentralized money” is like calling a bank account self-sovereign because the website has orange branding.
Society is not moving slowly. It is merely taking time to notice that you bought a committee-controlled token and mistook the marketing brochure for monetary theory.
1 million transactions per second.
Not a theoretical max. That's what Teranode sustained for two weeks straight in live trials on a globally distributed test network.
Proven. Tested. Real. #Teranode#BSV
This changes the entire model of Silicon Valley.
Not adjusts it.
Not inconveniences it.
Destroys it.
The present model is a cathedral built from surveillance, dependency, rented access, artificial scarcity, artificial friction, and the magnificent fraud of pretending that “users” are the same thing as value.
They are not.
A billion users clicking, scrolling, liking, twitching, reacting, and being harvested like cattle in a behavioural abattoir is not value. It is motion. It is noise. It is a nervous system without a brain, a marketplace without property, a circus where the clowns count applause and call it economics.
Silicon Valley has lived for years on that confusion.
It counted users.
It counted interactions.
It counted impressions.
It counted engagement.
It counted every little digital spasm it could induce in the population and then sold those spasms to advertisers, investors, analysts, and governments as if they were the natural units of civilisation.
What it did not count, because it could not count it honestly, was value.
Real value requires property.
Real value requires ownership.
Real value requires transfer, exclusion, control, accountability, provenance, and enforceable rights.
The current model avoids those things because they are dangerous to monopolists. A user who owns nothing can be farmed forever. A creator who cannot transfer enforceable property remains dependent. A buyer who merely receives access can be revoked, re-priced, profiled, restricted, and herded into the next platform enclosure.
That is not innovation.
That is feudalism with better fonts.
Once digital goods can be owned, transferred, controlled, licensed, resold, inherited, restricted, and monetised without begging permission from the platform landlord, the entire architecture changes.
The platform stops being the kingdom.
The creator stops being livestock.
The buyer stops being a temporary tenant.
The intermediary stops pretending that standing in the doorway is the same thing as building the house.
That is what real competition looks like.
Not competition over who can trap the most users.
Not competition over who can generate the most meaningless interactions.
Not competition over who can build the most addictive Skinner box and then call the lever-pulling “community.”
Competition over value.
Who creates it.
Who owns it.
Who transfers it.
Who pays for it.
Who receives it.
Who can prove it.
That is the part Silicon Valley will hate most. It is very comfortable competing over illusion. It is much less comfortable competing over property, utility, and measurable economic output.
The old model asks: how many people can we capture?
The new model asks: what did you create, who owns it, and what is it worth?
That question is fatal to a great many empires made of vapour.
And it is coming.
And the next chapter is not being written by the people who thought they owned the ending.
Welcome to the comeback.
Welcome to the new world.
I am still standing.
For years, we have been invited to admire architectural drawings of palaces that were never built. We were shown sketches of splendid cities suspended in the air and assured that gravity was merely a temporary inconvenience.
Ethereum promised a world of applications that would transform commerce, identity, gaming, finance, ownership, and human cooperation itself. BTC promised a revolution in money that somehow required every useful feature to be removed in the name of progress. Both became masters of anticipation. The future was always arriving tomorrow, and tomorrow developed a remarkable talent for never becoming today.
My ambition is considerably less fashionable.
I intend to take every significant idea that was promised and not delivered, every application declared inevitable but somehow perpetually unavailable, every system that remained trapped inside a white paper, conference presentation, roadmap, or venture capital pitch deck, and turn it into something that actually exists.
Not theories. Not aspirations. Not demonstrations designed for applause.
Code.
Working examples.
Documentation.
Libraries.
Systems that developers can examine, test, extend, improve, and build upon.
The modern age suffers from an excess of visionaries and a shortage of builders. It has produced countless prophets of the future who appear strangely allergic to construction. We have become accustomed to celebrating intentions while quietly excusing results.
I prefer a different standard.
If an idea is worthwhile, it should be implemented. If it can be implemented, it should be documented. If it is documented, it should be placed in the hands of those capable of creating something greater.
The highest compliment one can pay an invention is not admiration. It is use.
My objective is therefore simple: to place into your hands the tools that others promised, so that you may go out and build the future they merely described.