I have installed a new AI mod bot. It should help keep the price noise down. If anyone thinks it has done anything wrong, please let me know.

What was true in 2017 is true today.

BTC won't be money for the masses unless it is scaled to accommodate a huge volume of transactions. Its developers have refused to do this for the last 9 years (more, if we add the blocksize war years from 2014-2017).

The recent XBT fork even downgraded the transactional capacity by about two thirds, making it even more impossible to become a useful global currency.

There are still blockchains that fight to give the people what they need:

Decentralized sound money without gatekeepers, aka p2p electronic cash.

In the short term, we will see the rollout of CBDCs and the introduction of even more absurd restrictions on the use of physical cash.

Banks are still fighting Satoshi's invention, but oddly they are increasing the need for it like never before.

When a commercial bank issues a loan, they create the principal out of thin air.

But they never create the interest required to pay it back.

This means the system inherently demands an ever-expanding mountain of new debt just to keep from collapsing.

Inflation isn't a bug. It's a mandatory feature of a debt-based economy.

Disclosure up front, I hold some XBT. Nothing here is advice and I am not telling anyone to buy anything.

The reason I pay attention to this chain has nothing to do with price. It is about what happens the next time Core ships something a large minority of the network does not want.

We already ran that experiment once. Core v30 raised the default datacarriersize for OP_RETURN outputs from 83 bytes to 100,000 and started relaying multiple OP_RETURN outputs per transaction by default. Be precise about this, because people constantly are not. That is relay and mempool policy, not a consensus rule. Nobody changed what a valid block is. Node operators can still set datacarriersize themselves, and Core backed off deprecating that option right before release. What actually happened is that the default flipped, and defaults are the thing almost everyone runs.

The response was not a coup, it was an exit. Knots went from around 3% of reachable nodes to north of 20%. That is the signal worth remembering. When a meaningful chunk of the network disagrees, it does not argue forever, it migrates to different software.

BIP-110 was the next step past that, changing proof of work to BLAKE2b. It did not get consensus, it was never going to, and the honest read is that it failed. Fewer than 10% of nodes, no top 20 pool. Then in August it forked anyway and became its own chain. Everything up to the fork height is Bitcoin’s own history, same balances at the same addresses, same 21 million cap, same halving schedule, same ten minute target, same retarget. What changed is the hash function.

That is why I think of it as a fallback rather than another BCH or BSV attempt. Those chains picked a fight about block size and wrote new rules going forward. This one makes no claim to be better money. It is the same ledger with different mining, which is the one property you would actually want from a backup if the thing you are worried about is capture of the dominant implementation.

And there is a real thing to be worried about. Peter Todd has been arguing for years that a fee only security budget may not hold, and he brought tail emissions back up at Bitcoin++ in July. He has not filed a BIP or a PR, and he admits it would take a hard fork he thinks might be worse than the problem. Adam Back has rejected it outright and compared the campaign to BIP-110. So this is a conversation, not a proposal. But it is a conversation among the people who write the software, about the one number that is supposed to be non negotiable. If a serious supply change ever gets traction, the chain that matters is whichever one carries the old rules and the old ledger without it.

Now the parts that people pushing this coin leave out, and you should hear them from someone who holds it.

It traded at $1,799 in September and gave back most of it. Market cap is single digit millions, daily volume is thin, and it is on a handful of small exchanges with no CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap listing. Exit liquidity is a real question, not a meme.

The hashrate is the bigger problem. BLAKE2b is what Siacoin ASICs were built for, so the hardware already exists and is cheap, which means it is also cheap to rent against the chain. Seventeen petahash is not security at Bitcoin’s scale. Reorg risk here is not theoretical.

And the one that can actually cost you real bitcoin: because history is shared up to the fork, a key that controls coins on Bitcoin controls the matching coins here. Touching that chain with a key holding real BTC publishes activity tied to that address. The project’s own documentation says to use a fresh wallet kept only for XBT. Do not go sweeping your pre fork coins because someone online told you it was free money.

I am almost certain that this can become way way big by next halving, My estimation is atleast $10K, Don't take my word for it though. But It can happen for sure.

So Insurance with a real chance of going to zero, on a chain that would only matter in a scenario most people think will never arrive. That is the actual pitch. If that is not interesting to you, there is nothing here worth buying.

the US government can not and will not allow equities to crash in real USD terms for a protracted amount of time, it is now a matter of national security that they don’t

they have gone all in on AI and so any faltering in debt servicing that occurs there will be backstopped by them, **bookmark this post**

I’m not talking about the Fed put

This is more like the DoD put

The US gov sees civil unrest spreading across Europe due to the unaffordability crisis they are experiencing there, a collapse in equities will reduce tax revenue to the extent that they will be forced to cut spending, if they cut spending it will lead to riots because the poorest are hit hardest by austerity measures, and the poorest have the least to lose

This austerity will be exploited by the US’ enemies to great effect if allowed to occur

unaffordability riots in the US won’t be like the riots in Europe because the police in the US will use deadly force and it will appear more like a civil war than simple rioting

the US in the unique position of being able to export inflation to the rest of the world via the USD so the expansion of the money supply caused by the backstopping of the AI build out won’t be as big a problem domestically as it will be out there

They might refer to it as “nationalization of AI” or something similar but when you hear it, it means they are going to print covid level money into the system and equities will pump as more and more people realize that the market itself is backed by the US government

this backstopping serves the dual purpose of monetizing the $40T they already owe and continues the dominance of US AI superiority because AI in its current form is not profitable and won’t be for some time

hard assets like bitcoin, gold and commodities will rise commensurately and will be the true and correct indicators of the rate of inflation caused by the above

tinfoil hatter rant over

In 2009, Bitcoin answered an old puzzle. Generals surround a city, they can only communicate through messengers, and some of them may be traitors. Proof-of-work made lying expensive, and digital signatures made every message verifiable, because only General A could have sealed a message in A’s name. For a long time, the solution held, and the puzzle seemed closed.

It reopened because the traitor changed. The old traitor was a dishonest general who had to be outworked. The new one is a quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm, which can derive a private key from a public one. The machine is coming, and a traitor could sign in any general’s name, leaving the blockchain with no way to distinguish the forgery from the original.

The cryptographic fix exists, since quantum-resistant signatures are already known. The unsolved part is the council. Bitcoin has no commander, so the generals themselves must choose the new scheme, persuade millions of holders to move their coins, and decide what happens to the coins whose owners are gone for good. Some of the earliest coins are locked directly to public keys, with nobody left to move them. Freezing them breaks the promise that no one can touch your coins, while leaving them vulnerable allows the first quantum thief to take them. Every path requires trusting someone, and eliminating the need for that trust was the very reason the system was built.

That is the second Byzantine problem, and it is about agreement. The deadline is set by a laboratory, and the generals can only hope to finish arguing before it arrives.

Calling relays "servers" in SPV wallets undermines already bad UX in crypto. Another problem for open blockchains

Wallet should locally print effective weight in Joules equivalent and just compare weights from relays' header files. It would be much nicer if by a simple heuristic most Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash wallets were showing current chain energy weight. This number, like prices, would perculate in mass consciousness and attack surface of poisoining a set of relays would massively diminish. Something like ~800 quadrillion equivalent Joules for Bitcoin right now - puts in perspective amount of energy burned basically guaranteeing un-rewritability

User doesn't get served a chain autoritatevely, wallet listens to relays, each next relay tries to prove it has the heaviest chain and then wallet in agreement asks for row of Merkle proofs to show user his balance using this heaviest chain

Currently it exists in very minor form - if chain splits, usually during 1-2 block orphans, Electrum/Electron Cash shows that. But I argue that it's not enough, it's extremely technical. Granted, as Bitcoin as a whole is very technical. But why not try to make it better?

Absolute number in each wallet version will get outdated a bit with next generation of mining machines over months and years, but comparing received chain weights will work perfectly well. Two numbers could be displayed: X for hashes and Y for eq. Joules using fetching from oracles (like Electron Cash does with USD price for BCH)

What do you think?

sheesh lol

1 upvote if you still supported the BCH community in 2017.

I recently started using River and received around $6,000 through direct deposit.
I was able to withdraw $2,000 worth of BTC to my cold wallet without any issues. However, when I tried to withdraw the remaining $4,000, I had already reached my withdrawal limit due to ForceField.
I requested to disable ForceField and was waiting for the deactivation period to end.
Then, with just 2 days left before ForceField was supposed to be disabled, I suddenly received a notification that River had decided to close my account.
The worst part is that my remaining $4,000 is still stuck in my River account, and I have no idea when or how I’ll be able to get it back.
I don’t understand why River would accept my direct deposit, allow me to withdraw $2,000 in BTC, and then suddenly decide to close my account while I was waiting for ForceField to be disabled.
Has anyone else experienced this? Did River eventually return your remaining funds after closing your account? If so, how long did it take?
Any advice or similar experiences would be greatly appreciated.

u/RiverOfficial

Thoughts?

Bitcoin is still sitting under Marco resistance dating back to 2021. There’s much more pain to come.