Last week, Kurt Wuckert Jr. joined the Stackin’ Sats podcast to talk about the history of Bitcoin, big finance involvement, the vulnerabilities in BTC, big blockers, the future of Bitcoin, and much more.
Wuckert’s Bitcoin journey and some Bitcoin history
Wuckert begins by explaining his background in Bitcoin, something that will be well-known to most Bitcoin SV (BSV) supporters. In 2012, he ran a print shop, and a client asked to pay him for a small job in Bitcoin. He accepted the “video game money” offer and stumbled down the rabbit hole. He read the whitepaper, listened to Roger Ver, and became fascinated with the peer-to-peer electronic cash system.
Wuckert began mining Bitcoin, unsuccessfully at first, in his own words. He noticed a big uptake in interest in Bitcoin and digital currencies in 2017, with many of his friends gaining interest in altcoins. He began streaming regularly to explain concepts to his friends, such as why many altcoins and initial coin offerings (ICOs) were fraudulent, and he never stopped.
Wuckert tells Plamenko that “the truth really matters,” and it’s this that has made him so dedicated to telling the true history of Bitcoin that so many have been eager to forget. He’s dedicated to looking at and remembering what Satoshi Nakamoto said and what the white paper outlined. This is what has enabled him to see through many of the lies promoted by BTC Core today.
The Bitcoin civil war and untrustworthy BTC Core developers
Talking about the Bitcoin civil war (more accurately, the war on Bitcoin), Plamenko says that, as a relative newcomer, it looked a lot like a “dirty war” with a lot of ego and underhanded tactics involved. Wuckert says this is absolutely true, saying Bitcoin’s “soft fork roadmap” is deeply corrupt.
Wuckert then makes an important but often overlooked point; a soft fork can be a bigger deal than a hard fork, often fundamentally changing how Bitcoin works. This idea that soft forks are less serious is used to push through the agenda of what have essentially become central planners; BTC Core developers, who convince everyone that a soft fork is better than splitting Bitcoin.
“Bitcoin exists to split when you disagree with the new thing. Bitcoin is the thing, and if hard money can change, then it is soft money,” Wuckert says, laying waste to the BTC maximalist narrative. He pointed out that if Bitcoin can change, then you have introduced political elements to fight over how it should change, including lobbyists and financial interests to back various factions.
Answering a question about why we shouldn’t trust BTC Core developers, Wuckert replies that the idea that they are brilliant, talented software developers is merely a presumption. While some are, Bitcoin is more than a software project; it’s an economic system, and the economic incentives must be protected.
The changes implemented by BTC Core have changed what Bitcoin is at both a software and economic level, and they dismiss any concerns by saying non-technical people wouldn’t get it, Wuckert tells his host. Worse still, the type of people who tend to be good coders is typically weak when it comes to human relationships, game theory, and other important elements of Bitcoin.
Plamenko asks Wuckert if he foresaw big finance moving into and overtaking Bitcoin, and he answers in the affirmative. The fact that so many continue to deny that it happened makes Wuckert think they’re either all fools or malicious. The host wonders if prominent people in BTC are agent provocateurs or whether they just came to their own conclusions when presented with Bitcoin.
Vulnerabilities of the Bitcoin network and Bitcoin as global money
Plamenko tells Wuckert he doesn’t know enough yet to come down on one side or another in the small blocks vs. big blocks debate. He leans towards small blocks, seeing ingenuity in things like the Lightning Network. So far, BTC is what he has learned about and gotten into.
Wuckert tells his host that in 2010 and 2013, there were catastrophic bugs in the network that required rollbacks. In 2013, the bug was deemed too reprehensible to let the miners decide what the right chain was, leading to the shorter chain with less proof of work being deemed the good one. This was called out at the time by Gavin Andresen and others, but nonetheless, it violated the Bitcoin rule set this way.
During the 2013 bug, Wuckert says that developers literally called miners and asked them to switch to the chain of their preference. This leads him to wonder if such phone calls could still be made today. In his view, every time something like SegWit is introduced, it’s a failure by Bitcoin to resist a political change.
“If Bitcoin falls over every time you blow on it, you probably shouldn’t build the global economy on top of it,” Wuckert says, stating that he’s an advocate for doing so, but it has to pass the right tests first.
Plamenko says he’s not sure if anything can live up to that standard and wonders why Bitcoin needs to be a global currency. Wuckert says that being able to interact with each other economically has value, and he wants to be able to do so with anyone on the globe with no friction. There’s a lot of value in being able to do business with someone in Seoul as easily as in South Carolina, he says.
“Andreas Antonopoulos called Bitcoin the internet of money because it’s a protocol that has been missing from the internet,” Wuckert tells his host. He likens Bitcoin to books, a major invention that will change everything, eliminating much of the friction in doing business globally.
Who were the big blockers?
Plamenko asks Wuckert a challenging question: what’s not to say that Jihan Wu, Bitmain, Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), and other big blockers don’t have some agenda to get what they want out of Bitcoin?
Wuckert points back to the New York agreement, which influential big blockers signed and published to make known what they believed about Bitcoin. This open approach starkly contrasts the small block camp, which was funded by old-world interests like AXA (NASDAQ: AXAHF) and Mastercard (NASDAQ: MA). Yet, small blockers sneakily framed it in such a way that the big block camp was the attempted corporate takeover of Bitcoin.
Wuckert urges everyone listening to do their research, look into the history of Bitcoin, and look past charts and prices.
Is Craig Wright Satoshi Nakamoto? The case for BSV
Plamenko says he’s reluctant to get into the question of whether Dr. Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, but he’s curious to know more about the upcoming documentary.
Wuckert says he does believe Dr. Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, and he acknowledges that for most in Bitcoin, that’s a controversial statement. He says he agrees that much about Dr. Wright’s life is complex and doesn’t add up, but he also expected that if Satoshi ever resurfaced, there would be many complications, backstory issues, and disagreement.
When we look at the facts about Dr. Wright’s life, such as his career path and patents related to blockchain technology, some of which precede Bitcoin, we begin to see that he could very well be the inventor, Wuckert highlights.
Wrapping up, Wuckert makes a case for BSV. He believes Bitcoin, as it was originally designed, deserves to be tested. For Wuckert, it all comes down to that. He wants to test Nakamoto’s statement that Bitcoin could scale beyond Visa (NASDAQ: V) levels in its original form.
Watch: On the very start of Bitcoin
New to blockchain? Check out CoinGeek’s Blockchain for Beginners section, the ultimate resource guide to learn more about blockchain technology.
