Bitcoin is not divided: A message to those who don’t yet understand Bitcoin

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I don’t see a divide between Bitcoiners. The division I see is between those who understand Bitcoin and those who don’t. The good news is that this, as with most things, is only temporary.

BSV is working to fulfill the potential of Bitcoin as described by the whitepaper. Satoshi Nakamoto’s design provides the most optimal performance that can be achieved by a public ledger at scale. The design, when altered by the limiting of functions and changes to the incentive structure, particularly regarding the limiting of on-chain transactions and the usage of secondary transaction layers, ultimately creates a situation that becomes economically untenable for miners and users alike.

The loss of transaction fees to alternative transaction layers and the subsequent rise of transaction costs to balance out the diminishing block subsidy are not improvements to Bitcoin, rather severe restrictions to how the network is designed to operate.

When you limit the capability you limit the usage, and the value

Along with the limiting of the transactional capacity of BTC, the core developers have also limited the capabilities of those transactions. Even more though:  

They have also limited people’s creativity.

The concept of Digital Gold is an idea that lacks inspiration as it limits Bitcoin to be a supposed store of value based settlement layer. Ultimately what is most useful, therefore most sought after, and subsequently utilized, will perform best in regard to value stability. Until then it is purely speculative, and speculation is inherently unstable and not a store of value.

Bit=Information Coin=Money

The most valuable commodity in the world has never been gold but rather information. Entire civilizations have risen and fallen in the pursuit and denial of knowledge. Of course, different information is valued differently and by different users, but really the value proposition for bitcoin is being able to use information in ways that can create immense value.

This further incentivizes a quality to the information which overall does increase the value of the network as it reaches it optimal usability through scale. Ultimately Bitcoin provides for massive quantities of valuable information to be stored, transferred, and used in ways that will undoubtedly surprise us.

How many times does the term “decentralization” appear in the Bitcoin whitepaper?

Whenever I hear someone talking about the decentralization of Bitcoin I ask them the above question. No one that I have asked has ever answered correctly. The answer is zero. That is not to say that there is no decentralization in Bitcoin, in fact the whitepaper makes it quite clear that the decentralization of Bitcoin is that it is a Peer to Peer network and not reliant on the amount of listening nodes or the distribution of its miners for its decentralization.

The notion that BTC will replace gold due to its “decentralized” Raspberry Pi friendly data load or that Bitcoin SV won’t work because when at scale and facilitating large data transactions the necessity of large data centers prevents it from being “decentralized” both notions fail to take into account that currently BTC is less decentralized then our current financial system and that won’t change by adding additional Raspberry Pi “nodes”.

True decentralization comes from ubiquitous usage, not by fringe hobbyists running listening nodes and social media campaigns.

How decentralized will it be when people can’t even rationally use it due to insane transaction fees and nightmare second layer payment channels?

Bitcoin miners are incentivized to facilitate the most transactions possible. Transactions therefore will be as cheap and useful as possible. A fee market isn’t a market to determine how much someone is willing to pay to make a transaction but rather how little can someone pay a miner to validate that transaction.

We can forgive a child for being afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. -Unknown

Anonymity doesn’t truly exist. The value proposition of so-called “privacy coins” such as Monero or Zcash is in the obscurification of the token’s transaction history. One can easily surmise that the very value of that platform then can be destroyed with the subsequent reveal of such transaction history.

Arguably a system that enables hidden transactions paints a very large bullseye on itself for those organizations which are tasked with dealing with kinds of illegal activities that are facilitated by such “anonymous” networks. It would be irresponsible to not assume that given enough incentive to crack the anonymity of such protocols that it is inevitable, perhaps even already accomplished.

Bitcoin’s usage of a transparent ledger means that such a risk does not exist and that illicit activities are not encouraged. If anything it shines a very bright light into the often opaque and dark world of finance and the misuse of corporate and public funds.

The incentive to understand Bitcoin is immense, it always has been, the path is not without real challenge, but also real reward

As my great friend Daniel Krawisz mentioned to me: “You lose if you are wrong about predicting the future.” Thankfully the one and only, the original Bitcoin, as created by Satoshi Nakamoto has survived, it scales as only the real Bitcoin can, and it will allow us to build a great future full of opportunity. Bitcoin is not divided. Bitcoin is BSV.