Open letter to Jordan Peterson

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Hello Jordan,

I watched your recent show with the gentlemen discussing the investment thesis of Bitcoin and waxing on about hard money and other such superlatives while comparing Bitcoin to a digital gold. My goal is to give you a contrarian view about Bitcoin with some often-ignored facts, while respectfully disagreeing with many of the Bitcoin premises of your guests. However, I would view them as allies in the cause of freedom of speech, generally.

Hard money

Every BTC advocate fancies themselves a neo-Rothbardian; replacing “gold” with “BTC” and hoping that people do not dig too deeply into the concepts of Gresham’s Law or Lindy Effect to understand that in both examples, BTC should collapse, and its value should filter toward gold and other precious metals. But their main point is that of socially enforced scarcity of BTC sticking permanently to “21 million” which is a number that their ilk tout endlessly. Unfortunately, that’s plainly disingenuous as there are 21 million tranches of 100,000,000 units in the Bitcoin ledger. Satoshi called them “cents,” while modern bitcoiners typically call them “sats” as a short for “Satoshis” as the smallest unit of account on the ledger. All that to say that the “21 million” scarcity discussion is itself a bit of smoke and mirrors. There are 2.1e15 units in Bitcoin, and its promoters should be honest about the supply.

The other aspect of hard money that they ruthlessly defend is BTC’s 12 years of consensus among nodes. This is also a half-truth wrapped in more social enforcement. Bitcoin has never had a consistent, four-year block of consensus without a major change in protocol, centralized enforcement of a fundamental change or malicious change in governance. A hard money needs provenance, acceptance over time and proof that it is impervious to mob rule and social consensus. On that point, BTC has failed miserably, and I’ll illustrate a few examples of this:

2010: An anonymous actor generated a malicious block which heavily inflated the supply of Bitcoin. Under the directive of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin was rolled back and the history of the ledger was changed in order to prune out the block that was deemed invalid.

2011: Governance of Bitcoin is by honest nodes who validate rules by building blocks. In 2011, a system for changing Bitcoin was introduced by setting “flag days” and the “Bitcoin Improvement Proposal” process, commonly called a “BIP.” This removed Bitcoin’s fundamentally work-based rule enforcement and changed it into a socially enforced democracy. This was a major coup against the system.

2013: An attempted software update caused an incompatible split of Bitcoin, essentially creating two chains, one of which should have been forced to orphan the other. The longest chain with the most proof of work (a cornerstone metric for deciding bitcoin under duress) was orphaned by software developers who called up node operators and told them to switch to the older, less secure version of the chain. This was arguably the death of the original Bitcoin. In fact, to this day, BTC nodes cannot truly synchronize back to 2009 because of the bug in this event and the hackneyed tricks that made it go away.

2016: Bitcoin transactions were changed from observing the “first seen rule” which allowed for small inexpensive transactions to be acceptably safe for commerce, and it required users to wait for block confirmations (roughly ten minutes). The new change was called “Replace by Fee” or “RBF” and allowed users to be able to change the destination of bitcoins even after they had sent transactions so long as they had not already been mined—making Bitcoin impractical as a payments tool.

2017: Out of a desire to seize the means of production, social justice warriors launched a social campaign to cancel the biggest businesses and capitalists in the Bitcoin economy. They were banned from all forums, and their “User Activated Soft Fork” governance model was instituted in order to replace Bitcoin’s definition from an unbroken chain of digital signatures and turn it into an optionally trusted hash which attests to the existence of signatures while removing them from the weight of Bitcoin blocks.

Rather than being a hard money, set in stone and accumulating provenance, the changes are nearly constant. And through a similar process as that of 2017, this coming November, the entire signature schema of the network is going to be fundamentally altered yet again in an upgrade called “Taproot” which is another very aggressive change to the protocol. Fortunately for the SJW group that manages BTC, all dissenters have been removed by force from their conversations, so this incredible undermining of the soundness of the system looks like it will pass almost as certainly and unanimously as the laws in North Korea.

Another path

During the era of the “Bitcoin Civil War” which came to a head in 2017’s UASF revolution, the bitcoiners who fought to keep Bitcoin sound, unchanged and set in stone in accordance with the Bitcoin white paper were cast into a sort of exile with the unchanged ledger of bitcoin’s history. The mainstream of Bitcoin was subverted by tyrannical technocrats, but the original protocol was left in the hands of a collective of advocates who would make Edmond Dantés rattle his sabre in support.

Sparing you the long story, today, the original governance model, unbroken signatures and most complete ledger of bitcoin’s truth has been restored by the implementation of the BSV Blockchain. It is the Bitcoin protocol without hyphens, without limits and without governance by a mob of wavering social consensus. That restoration makes possible a truly sound money, and it includes the return of the programming and computation tools of the original bitcoin which make a globally available, public supercomputer accessible for every economic actor on earth. Oh! And the protocol is set in stone, never to be changed so it can accumulate true provenance as a hard money.

None of this is without consequence, however. The BTC social justice warriors and highly polished social engineers are waging an information war in order to cancel the publication of any knowledge about BSV’s superlatives. They have plastered all corners of the internet with deliberate misinformation about the Bitcoin protocol, rules-based governance, the role of humans, liberty and law in a just society and all of the people who have sought to build a freer world outside of their sphere of purity tests and heavy-handed leadership.

For these reasons, Jordan, I ask you to dig deeper.

Look past the mainstream facade of “Bitcoin” the hype-filled, mainstream investment opportunity, and look instead at those of us who seek to see the world become more honest and more free because of the unbounded power of predictable incentives of bitcoin on the BSV blockchain.

My DMs are open at @kurtwuckertjr on Twitter.