Fishy mining with Ocean pool

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It is hard to overemphasize what a deeply political animal Luke Dashjr can be about many things. From extremely hot takes about religion, family, and life (some of which I actually agree with) to his extreme positions on the proper use of Bitcoin and a whole bunch more!

The Catholic Church hasn't had a pope in 65 years

— Luke Dashjr (@LukeDashjr) November 5, 2023

In the past, he has advocated for the need to reduce the BTC block size limit to 300kb, censorship of all kinds of “SPAM” that he calls attacks on the network, and draconian use of his power as the sole “BIP Editor” of BTC Core—a position that few understand.

In 2011, Dashjr started one of the first BTC mining pools called “Eligius,” presumably named after the patron saint of gold—given Dashjr’s penchant for conservative Catholicism and the digital gold meme.

However, due to bugs in the implementation, the pool was not successful once more sophisticated engineers started competing, but for a time, it was a significant player in the space despite the fact that Dashjr was always controversial and extremely bold with his opinions.

For example, one of his early lowlights was his abuse of his position in the Linux community, which he used to specifically push out node implementations with address blacklists and other acts of censorship included in Debian distributions.

Some context

During the Bitcoin Civil War‘s early stages, folks with any technical or economic understanding of Bitcoin were very scarce. This lack of general knowledge allowed BTC Core developers, of which Dashjr was a significant member, to wield mostly unchecked control to dictate all kinds of protocol and implementation decisions on the network at large. One such situation was in the usage of OP_RETURN. By merely adjusting some parameters in the source code, Dashjr effectively thwarted attempts by users to embed data in transactions. People might argue that nobody made anyone else run Dashjr’s software, but the average Bitcoin user didn’t have the skills or the disposition to audit code, so they would typically rely on group validation for their upgrade schedule. As such, Dashjr’s software became the network standard by de facto. This practice hasn’t really changed, given that over 95% of the network just runs BTC Core-like lemmings, and Dashjr is still the sole BIP Editor.

Atop issuing the software, Dashjr employed his Eligius mining pool to filter out and censor transactions containing any OP_RETURN data— severely hampering the operations of CounterParty, SatoshiDice, and others reliant on OP_RETURN within Bitcoin. This act kicked off the scaling war in earnest, leading many to criticize Core developers for consolidating power and imposing their will. Rather than seeking collective solutions, dissenting voices were also silenced from forums of discussion, so the most machiavellian of small blockers ended up controlling the software, significant hash power, and the public forums of discussion—consolidating their personal opinions into the official opinion about Bitcoin.

Since most of this happened between 2013 and 2017, many historians may say those wars are long over, but I promise you, they are not.

Fast forward

Since the beginning of 2023, Ordinal tokens on BTC have resurrected arguments that echo those of the OP_RETURN wars. Adam Back, Blockstream’s CEO, initially tweeted endorsing miners’ censorship of certain transactions as a deterrence method. However, he later deleted this tweet and changed his tone more toward advocating for educating and encouraging developers to use BTC more judiciously. Dashjr, on the other hand, has taken a hard stance that any economic use of BTC that he doesn’t like is an invalid use of the blockchain.

1) They're not valid txs, just obfuscated such that they don't trip block checks.
2) Many more real transactions will get confirmed instead in our blocks.
3) As honest miners take back control, the spam will be reduced further and further until it's rejected entirely

— Luke Dashjr (@LukeDashjr) December 4, 2023

Now, Jack Dorsey, a man with his own long reputation for leading businesses that censor people and their ideas, has led a 6.2 million dollar round to “radically decentralize” 
mining by resurrecting the extremely buggy Eligius pool under the name “Ocean” led by none other than Luke Dashjr. They are so worried about the lack of censorship resistance in BTC and the risk of other people being censored that they are launching a pool with the expressed goal of [checks notes] filtering out and censoring ordinal inscriptions?!

Bitcoin already isn't censorship-resistant.

That property came from mining being decentralized, which hasn't been the case in years.

It's not about forcing miners to mine your transaction. It's about if one miner chooses not to, another one will – or you can mine it yourself.

— Luke Dashjr (@LukeDashjr) November 22, 2023

So, in the interest of decentralization, they’re censoring people. Classic double-talk from the small blockers who want you to be free as long as you obey. Maybe when the “Twitter Files” style messages leak from inside the small blocker cabal, Dorsey can say more than “mistakes were made…” as he said about the deeply rooted journalistic censorship and corruption at Twitter under his tenure.

While writing this piece, Ocean mined its first block! Humorously, it had a bug because the Eligius pool was poorly coded, and apparently, they didn’t have time to fix it before launching. But they’re excited anyway!

Congratulations to our early miners! Our first block today was a huge reward and we’re happy for and grateful to the miners who have supported us. Everyone will be receiving about 5.48x what they would have received from FPPS pools.

A minor misconfiguration leftover from our… https://t.co/43BqK3TiFe

— OCEAN (@ocean_mining) December 1, 2023

I don’t want to be mean-spirited, but Dashjr and Dorsey both really genuinely seem to be bad people with bad intentions and an extremely conflicted relationship with the concept of free speech, free thought, and free economies. I can’t help but feel like this whole Ocean Pool thing is just one more layer to Dorsey’s masterplan to take over centralized payments by forcing people to use Lightning Network through the infrastructure he has built at his payment company, Block.

The real play is behind that curtain somewhere, I think. Either that, or they’re all fools…And I don’t think they’re fools…

The renewed look at Dashjr and his past has resurrected his advocacy for the consumption of cat meat, so at least we can have some fun with that information.

The small blockers have resorted to censoring jpegs and eating cats.

Protest against the madness!

Mine like an ape at https://t.co/iTw4lhOFH5. pic.twitter.com/XMXToaBHIJ

— GorillaPool (@MineLikeAnApe) December 2, 2023

In closing, Bitcoin is about a stable protocol. Ordinals wouldn’t exist if Dashjr didn’t approve the Segwit and Taproot BIPs to be discussed and ultimately merged into BTC by the Core devs. So, he is truly reaping what he has sown. In the fixed and unbounded protocol of the BSV blockchain, nodes compete to build the biggest possible blocks as a function of profit-seeking, and this is why I think the BSV blockchain will win in the long run. No scheming by toothless cat farmers or billionaires from San Francisco pretending to be hippies. Just an open network, a fixed protocol, and real freedom to compete. At some point, if any of these ideas are valuable, they will thrive where they are cultivated—not where they are stifled by authoritarians.

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