I came to the same conclusion as well.

With almost everything, once you introduce nuance, you lose 90% of the audience. I am retired and have some free time at the moment. Most people spend most their waking hours working. I still wanted to get this done because I've profited a lot from the Bitcoin community and had to just publish the research I'd already done locally.

I do a little bit of Monero research almost every day. However, at this point, I am more bullish on small, circular economies than any of these projects. I'm buying much of my food locally, and will soon start to produce more of my own food, become more self-sufficient and just stay outside the system where possible. I'll probably keep doing Monero research, and focus more on AI as I see more inefficiencies and opportunities for fiat gains there. At this point, I'm pretty much done with my Bitcoin research.

I've got a few more Bitcoin-related topics I'd like to write about and then I'm going to be done with my Bitcoin research and focus on AI. If any influencer wants to steal my Bitcoin homework, feel free to. The odds of someone with my background spending the amount of time I've spent doing research is very close to 0. Hope we manage to address some of these issues.

Imagine the arrogance of Core to fuck with our money and then imagine how complacent we got to allow it to go this far.

I've been doing some research on the biggest mistakes we Bitcoiners made as a community — and obviously we got very complacent over time. Instead of listening to podcast hopium and alienating people with "have fun staying poor" narratives, we should've focused on game theory and patched up at least some of the holes. It was always inevitable that Bitcoin was going to get attacked, and things like having close to 100% of nodes run on a single implementation was just silly in hindsight. People are doing more harm than good when posting charts of hashrate going vertical without the context that 2 pools (Foundry and Antpool) are close to 50% of hashrate and for more than 98% of cases, pools, not miners decide which transactions get added to the blockchain. You had most of the Bitcoin community cheering price over payment share; we welcomed ETFs as victory. Paper share rose, self-custody fell. The entire community also cheered Square's surveilled "Bitcoin payments" where every payment generates identity-linked transaction data: buyer, location, device, and amount. All transactions flow through Square/Cash App's KYC/AML perimeter, meaning both sides of the payment are verified. That data fuels risk scoring, fraud models, blacklist propagation, and targeted marketing. Exactly this surveillance value is Square's enduring moat, not the 1% fee. We just got too complacent. I'd say the 5 main mistakes we Bitcoiners made are: 1. Letting arbitrary data compete with money on the base layer (witness discount abetted it). For Medium-of-Exchange you need predictable fees; underpriced junk data is a Denial-of-Service subsidy. 2. Treating privacy as an "expert mode". That guarantees surveillance wins by default. Make privacy invisible and automatic. 3. Under-investing in operational safety (backups, recovery, liquidity UX). Normal users pick custodians when scared. 4. Relying on norms over policy. In a low Gross Consent Product world, policy beats culture. If your mempool policies are naïve, adversaries will price you out. 5. Ignoring perimeter levers (app stores, banks, clouds). If you don't plan redundant routes, the other side will plan your failure. The uncomfortable truth is that Bitcoin's defense can't be "hope users pick hard mode". Defaults decide outcomes. If Bitcoin wants to be mass Medium-of-Exchange, privacy, finality, recoverability, and predictability must be invisible and automatic — and the perimeter must be treated as hostile by default. Until then, paper wrappers will dominate, regulators will "clarify", and L1 will be priced as store-of-value with supervised access, not as everyday cash. The good news: all of that is fixable — but only if it's designed, not preached.

Who holds the Power in the Bitcoin ecosystem (does your node matter) Had to write this because it is a very misunderstood topic in Bitcoin. Bitcoin does not run on ideals; it runs on coordination between code, hash, and liquidity — and those are controlled by a few dozen institutional actors who can synchronize quickly. https://controlplanecapital.com/p/who-holds-the-power-in-the-bitcoin

I think BTC migrates toward supervised Store-of-Value, with managed cyclicality and paper-dominant flow; self-custody remains a small, high-convexity tail sleeve.

The only thing I am bullish on in regards to Bitcoin is its fiat-denominated price (which is a weird thing to say). Old regime: retail perps set price → parabolic tops, −70% to −85% busts, halving-clock "3 years up / 1 year crash". New regime (post-ETF): CME + ETFs + dealer gamma set price → longer, flatter upcycles, faster but shallower draw-downs (−30% to −55%), macro/liquidity > halving, mean reversion > parabolas. We're already ≈31% below the ATH with constant stop-hunts and very little leverage. Instead of the Bitcoin is "arbitrary data storage" movement, I would've liked to see changes that (1) harden fee predictability, (2) make privacy and self-custody defaults, and (3) blunt perimeter levers. In other words, changes that keep Bitcoin useful as money. However, these are exactly the changes that Bitcoin's developers aren't prioritizing. Instead, we're letting arbitrary data compete with money on the base layer. For Medium-of-Exchange you need predictable fees. Underpriced junk data is a Denial-of-Service subsidy. I was excited about these changes that improve Bitcoin as money, but then I started digging into what Bitcoin Core has been up to and at this point, I'm like "Just stop changing things. You're making everything worse." 😂 More context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/how-bitcoins-developers-are-attacking-2a5

Not sure which one you are referring to since I've linked to 3 articles, but my guess is the Bitcoin Core one. The Bitcoin Core one is quickly becoming the most viewed article on my substack so we're slowly but surely spreading the word.

1) Removing the "legal/moral risk" wording is mostly an optics patch. You can soften the text but the capability + precedent remain: a temporary consensus rule to gate behavior “for safety”. Lawmakers don’t need the scary paragraph preserved — they only need the fact that Bitcoin shipped (or even seriously advanced) a safety-gating soft fork to later say: “Bitcoin has already limited X for safety; extend it to Y.” 2) The political cover persists - press, blogs, and mailing-list archives have already captured the “moral/legal” framing. You can delete lines in the BIP PR; you can’t delete the discourse trail. 3) Once “emergency soft fork for safety” is on the menu, subsequent asks are just parameter shifts: AI-safety provenance, public-health blocks, carbon budgets, foreign-influence filters, sanctioned payload exclusion, non-KYC path restrictions. 4) Even rejection is usable. - Fail path: “You refused — now we must legislate and impose liability on nodes.” - Pass path: “You acknowledged duty of care — make it permanent and expand scope.” So the proposal’s substance — temporary consensus gating — remains the same goal whether or not the word “legal” appears. Multiple outlets already framed it as averting legal exposure for node operators. The record is fixed. The text edit just removes an easy talking-point for critics; it doesn’t close the door that’s been opened. The real move was normalizing consensus-level behavioral gating “for safety”.

Why Bitcoin is in a Lose-Lose situation with the BIP-444 Soft Fork https://controlplanecapital.com/p/why-bitcoin-is-in-a-lose-lose-situation

1) Hash power is coordinated by a small number of mining pools (2-3 pools can easily reach more than 51% at times). These pools decide which transactions go into blocks by setting templates and policies — including filters, OFAC lists, and template upgrades. 2) Bitcoin relies heavily on a single dominant client implementation (Bitcoin Core) and a small group of maintainers. ~80% of nodes run Bitcoin Core. 3) A significant portion of reachable Bitcoin nodes are hosted on major cloud providers. These companies can modify their acceptable-use policies (AUPs), throttle ports, or silently remove images. 4) Most retail users interact through mobile wallets or browser extensions controlled by Apple, Google, or other platform gatekeepers. 5) Most Bitcoin flows touch regulated exchanges or custodians bound by Anti-Money-Laundering (AML) and Travel Rule obligations. These entities enforce address blacklists, apply heuristic “taint” analysis, and freeze funds on suspicion 6) ETFs, futures, and structured notes create synthetic exposure to Bitcoin that absorbs investor demand while keeping custody centralized. 7) Mining pools under insurer or exchange pressure may adopt “compliant templates” that delay or exclude certain UTXOs. (e.g. MARA, F2Pool) 8) Lightning Network Centralization - While the Lightning Network (LN) enables fast transactions, liquidity is heavily concentrated around large hubs and custodial wallets. These hubs are easy to regulate, bank, or deplatform. The result: “Fast Bitcoin” becomes fast, supervised Bitcoin. 9) Fee-Market Steerability - Mempool/policy defaults (datacarrier norms, package relay, ancestor/descendant limits) and state-sponsored spam bursts can crowd out small payments and reshape fees. And so on, and so forth.

Well, you're oversimplifying a lot. Not sure if you read the "allowed to look decentralized and secure" part. 99.99% of stablecoin users can buy, hold and send p2p without having asked for permission (at least explicitly). The whole point is to make it seamless, otherwise, you'd create Martyrs. https://controlplanecapital.com/p/is-bitcoin-decentralized-and-secure

I might write on it eventually. Admittedly, I have prioritized my degenerate, fiat investments research atm because that's where most of my NW is atm.

The most likely outcome is that many Bitcoin holders will "succeed" by accident (fiat gains over time) because Bitcoin is the containable focal asset that keeps attention away from more off-grid rails (e.g. Monero). That isn't an endorsement of freedom; it's incentives doing crowd control. I'll write more about this later, but: - Privacy-by-default is a political non-starter (especially in a low Gross Consent Product cycle). Bitcoin's base case: Managed cyclicality, net up over multi-year windows, less upside convexity than "maximalists" hope, more containment than cypherpunks want. So Bitcoin is the sanctioned pressure valve. That design likely lets many holders win in fiat terms while the system keeps Medium-of-Exchange at scale off the table and diverts attention from privacy rails. It's not emancipation; it's containment with upside. A few signals that support this reading (non-exhaustive): - Growth of ETF/ETN share of total BTC exposure; - App-store/wallet policy pressure toward KYC defaults; - Tax and reporting regimes that bless ETF/custody rails while frictioning self-custody; - Selective exchange de-risking of privacy coins; - Compliance narratives that frame privacy-by-default as aberrant but Bitcoin Store-of-Value as acceptable. Many holders will win in fiat terms - by accident, not because the system ceded control. I don't own any Monero, but I still appreciate the community. Definitely not a shitcoin.

The whole Bitcoin development process is so broken that non-technical plebs with full-time jobs have to try to become technical to understand how badly they've been getting fucked by Bitcoin's developers. The only way out is to at least define: - what it is you're changing (freedom money, distributed, permissionless database, etc), - what is changeable on layer 1 (if anything), - in which cases are these things changeable. The more you change the protocol for the worse, the less of an option not changing the protocol becomes because you have to change the changes. It's kind of funny to see people comparing Bitcoin's L1 to TCP/IP. Have you seen the Releases tab of the default implementation on GitHub ( https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/releases ). These guys are shipping. Development-Process Capture = Perimeter Control You don't have to "hack" Bitcoin's consensus rules to influence how the network behaves. You can steer what gets relayed, mined, or socially accepted by quietly shaping the development process — who gets funded, who reviews changes, which features become defaults, how releases are timed, and how communication is framed. Most probably know this, but governments want to maintain monopoly on force + money issuance. Fiat is the ultimate control layer -> no major government defects from this system. So governments don't like Bitcoin (as MoE) very much. If you expect for governments to come out and try to ban Bitcoin, don't because that's not how the system works. Systems don't rely on bans; they use knobs — adjustable defaults, standards, and processes that subtly guide behavior. The Bitcoin development process is a dense cluster of such knobs. Open source ≠ immune Control flows through funding, maintainers, policy defaults, and release cadence. There are probably less than a 100 people in the world who have game theory studied: - the development process control surfaces — where steering actually happens - what capture looks like - how capture changes outcomes - why the development process is the preferred perimeter to attack I'll just go over the last one because it is quite short. Why the development process is the preferred perimeter to attack: - Cheaper than legislation: Defaults and "safety" framing do the enforcement work. - Plausible deniability: "We're just improving performance". - Asymmetric impact: hits sovereign users hardest; institutional wrappers unaffected. If you require people to be technical for them to be able to protect their savings, this project fails. From the outside looking in, this project is starting to look more and more like Ethereum. Developers are gonna wanna develop and if they are allowed, they'll develop Bitcoin into a centralized shitcoin.