The block size wars were a mistake All of this development energy should have taken place on one Bitcoin

Shitcoiners aren’t broke. They own more BTC than you and your friends ever will. 100k BTC is locked right now on Ethereum for DeFi. Lightning only has 4k BTC.

Interesting altcoins that test + refine ideas first proposed for Bitcoin: Zcash: Zerocash, soft fork proposed for BTC in 2014 Litecoin: MimbleWimble Extension Block, soft fork proposed by Andrew Poelstra for BTC in 2016 Monero: ring signatures, Confidential Transactions, Dandelion++, Bulletproofs, all of which were proposed individually for Bitcoin Decred: CoinJoin by default, smaller blocks & stable Lightning Network Bitcoin Cash: dynamic block size, OP_CAT + a bunch of restored OP codes from the Satoshi era (AND, OR, XOR, DIV, MOD, MUL, LSHIFT, RSHIFT) What else?

Just replace these people’s names with “broke rent seekers who like to virtue signal” and everything they say makes much more sense

Remember last year’s 7-hour interview with Amir Taaki? Well, this year he has booked the entire new year’s eve 😂 So we might just break every record! Got no plans for December 31st 2025? Join our livestream!

Same way Tor, Signal, and a lot of open source cryptography libraries (some of which Monero is also using) are working without permission. They’re useful for everyone involved.

Over the last week I’ve spoken with 3 Bitcoin devs who are migrating part of their work to Zcash Not because Zcash pays them – they’re frustrated by the shitty dev culture where they must constantly ask for permission to build stuff One is a Lightning dev, one is a Starkware dev, another one is a Counterparty/Ordinal dev and artist. Not everyone wants to take part in the “Knotzi vs Coretard” debate. The revenge chain scenario is very real.

Oh so Tron is better than Bitcoin because the price outperformed it over the last 5 years since they added USDT? Good to know.

On Bitcoin Takeover podcast, I’ve interviewed 3 of the people sitting at this dinner table (Sergio Lerner, Zooko & ) And over the next couple of months I think I will have 3 more (this is a picture from 2014, taken by Matthew D. Green at Princeton University)

Guacamole is hallucinating, he was orange pilled by Lawrence Nahum (fellow Italian, CTO of Blockstream). Before he met Lawrence, he was a Ripple shill.

Up until last year I was really upset that I never get invited to any of the Bitcoin Magazine conferences Not in Nashville/Vegas, not in Amsterdam, not in Abu Dhabi I used to write for BM, currently run one of the most popular podcasts & also produced competing magazines Ironically, now I get invited to Ethereum conferences despite holding no ETH and not doing anything relevant for their community 🤷🏻‍♂️ But now I also understand the value of being counterculture and not selling out to the suits. While brushing shoulders with politicians and corporate CEOs can be educational, I feel more at home among idealistic nerds who want to change the world with their code. Punk rock is not played in every large expo hall. And I like punk rock quite a lot.

Different ball games, my friend. Zcash developers are doxxed and paid by legal entities. They did something smart when they moved part of the operations to Switzerland, though. This is the price they pay for building the most advanced privacy tech. In comparison, Monero just takes stuff that was already built and merges it into the tech stack.

Bitcoin is a tech stock, whether you like it or not. Not a digital commodity galaxy brain store of value sound money whatever Most people buy it because they hope it becomes the money of the future. Something that you can use for all payments. And when it drifts away so much from this expected outcome, don’t be surprised that these people sell their bitcoin and look for something else that looks promising. The US dollar is still king, cash still rules everything around us, and Bitcoin no longer poses a threat (or even competes) with the status quo.

Arbitrary data (aka “spam”) is the red herring The goal of Knots is to create a precedent for transaction censorship & UTXO confiscation Why? Because institutional investors, some of which back Ocean pool, consider Satoshi’s coins an existential risk and want to freeze his BTC to effectively prevent him from ever selling. Some of the quantum resistance debates aim for the same goal. But they have lesser credibility due to the unconvincing evidence that quantum computers will be able to crack elliptic curve digital signatures anytime soon. Follow the money.

“So it’s gonna be in mempools, or it’s gonna get filtered by Knots You can tell me when it’s over if the Slipstream mined your cats Got a long list of space monkeys, they’ll tell you I got the smarts Cause you know they pay for uni to listen to brainfarts. Yes Gloria’s young and she’s reckless, not even 35 She maintains Core like an empress, keeps all the spam alive Got a long list of Knots filters, I swear I’m not insane Cause I got a Blank Slate, Coretard and I’ll write your name”

It was great for GPU miners, while it lasted. But it was a popular fork in 2017 and it experimented with something that some anti-ASIC bitcoiners would have wanted to see. Is it possible for you to look at a crypto without checking the price chart?

I told you Zcash is the revenge chain against the current mental derangement in Bitcoin. Just like Ethereum was the revenge chain for builders who were fed up with the block size war in 2016-2017. To many investors, Bitcoin is not sound money digital energy banana. It’s a tech stock which promises to accomplish the goal outlined in the whitepaper: peer to peer electronic cash. If the goalpost shifts from “let’s make bitcoin the ultimate form of money, with contracts, fungibility & quantum resistance” to “Bitcoin is already perfect, let’s fight about jpeg inscriptions instead”, investors will notice and try to minimize their exposure to risk. So far, Ocean mining has been the most destructive actor in Bitcoin since Craig Wright. The hatred, infighting & division they caused will take years to heal. Meanwhile, Zcash is just building stuff. It’s technologically interesting, way ahead of its time, but still familiar thanks to its Bitcoin roots. Zcash is bringing devs on board to work on privacy that scales to billions of people (Tachyon). Zcash is working on shielded assets (imagine stablecoins that are truly censorship resistant because you cannot know who sent them, to whom, and in which amount). Zcash is the Bitcoin we were promised more than a decade ago, refined and improved over the years. While Bitcoin is dangerously stagnant, Zcash is evolving. And investors love throwing their money at something that’s vibrant and promising. Haters will point out that Zcash was dead until a few months ago. Well, that’s also when bitcoiners lost the plot. Think about it. Also, some of the same things that were being said about Bitcoin in 2013 (that it’s persistent, mathematically sound & usable as both a store of value and a medium of exchange) can be said about Zcash too. There’s a lot of virtue in not giving up… and this industry provides more incentives for developers to pivot to new VC-funded projects. But the Zcash team has been consistent over the last 9 years and honestly deserves this influx of users & developers. It’s fine to be in denial when confronted by new information. But don’t let any ideology blind you. In 2017, it was infighting bitcoiners who guaranteed Ethereum’s status as the number 2 coin. Eight years later, some of the same names are causing an exodus to Zcash. There’s also a narrative shift that’s going on, with privacy (something bitcoiners of today fear) becoming more important in everyday life. A decade ago, financial privacy was for paranoid nerds. Today, it’s what billions of CBDC forced adopters need. Embrace the change, or else stay zidelined and bitter. Either way, you can’t say nobody tried to explain to you what’s happening.

2013 was the most important year in Bitcoin history It’s when traditional finance guys came up with “Bitcoin 2.0” to lay the foundations of DeFi (Counterparty, Mastercoin, Ethereum) It’s also when cypherpunks created Zerocoin & Zerocash to improve Bitcoin’s privacy with zero knowledge proofs The sad part is that Bitcoin itself didn’t benefit too much from this due to the community’s conservatism. The happy part is that today we have Ethereum + Solana for the contracts/DeFi side and Zcash for the ZK privacy side.

What I like about altcoins is their ability to do what Bitcoin cannot and test ideas that are too experimental for Bitcoin. Privacy, contracts, scalability, anything that is useful to the entire open source money world. What I don’t like about altcoins is arrogance, zero sum thinking, stagnation & virtue signaling. You were not the first one to hit the market, you don’t have the largest community of users, your coin is not the most accepted for payments of them all, and it most likely underperforms Bitcoin for bear market saving. Act like it, build cool stuff to compete for users and market share. Push the research beyond the known boundaries. Refine the user experience. Give people something so cool they didn’t know they wanted it. But don’t stagnate and simply add more years under the belt.

I should have someone from Ergo on my show 🤔