The Bitcoin Alliance

There's a lot of fighting these days. You have Core vs. Knots, self-custody maximalists vs. orange ties, and so on. Everyone seems to be at each other's throats and the community looks like it's in a horrible state.

But is there even such a thing as a Bitcoin community?

There's no "internet community." There's no "money community." These are open systems that billions of people use for their own reasons, in their own ways, often at cross-purposes, and they work anyway. Bitcoin is the same kind of thing.

A better term is the Bitcoin Alliance.

A community implies sameness: shared beliefs, shared tribe, a single voice. Yet Bitcoin is built on the opposite principle. It's sovereign individuals running sovereign nodes, each verifying for themselves, each answering to no one. Nobody has to ask permission, and nobody has to agree. An alliance fits that far better.

An alliance is made up of sovereign parties. It can be individuals, companies, developers, even nation-states. What makes us allies isn't shared opinions; it's a shared cause. We can disagree fiercely on the details and still be pointed in the same direction.

I believe we all want Bitcoin to succeed. That's why we're here.

Disclaimer

This is going to be really long and possibly boring. No one will be happy after reading it either, because it's probably not exactly what you want to hear.

Storytime

My X handle @Excellion originated in Lineage II (a Korean MMO) a long time ago. I played on the Lionna server and was famous for a line PvP (일기토) where I took down almost 5 players by myself (almost, because I just needed to hit the last opponent one more time).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZm54cSFD3I

I later formed an alliance called INVINCIBLE and we took over the entire server, controlling all the castles, collecting tax revenue, killing all the dragons, etc. Fun times. I managed to accomplish that not by being a great player, though I was one, but by building a very powerful alliance. There were a number of farming groups grinding for in-game currency, and they'd get targeted by real players because they were competing for resources. I cut a deal with them to offer protection and brought them into my clan and the alliance.

The thing you need to understand about Lineage is that it's a super hardcore PvP game and it was absolutely crushing to die in combat because you would lose XP. I saw something valuable in the farmers though, because they didn't care about dying at all. In fact, it would benefit them, as they would de-level after losing XP and would be able to kill easier mobs to earn the game currency. So when we would fight against the other alliances, my army would charge in, die, respawn, and go right back into combat.

During siege battles, we'd have every clan leader in the alliance switch their clan banner (the flag that sits above your head) to a single shared one. This did two things. It made it much easier to tell friend from foe on the battlefield, and it meant our enemies saw one unified force bearing down on them instead of a loose collection of clans.

So basically I had an undead army that knew no fear. That was obviously an incredible advantage, which when paired with our other tactics and tight organization, allowed us to take over the server.

So there are three lessons to take away from this story:

1⃣ You can accomplish a lot on your own, but a strong alliance changes what's achievable.

2⃣ Everyone has something to offer; you just have to find out what it is.

3⃣ Sometimes things can be counterintuitive and work differently than you assume.

Divide and Conquer

Here's how I look at things in the Bitcoin world.

There are different armies in the Bitcoin Alliance, each advancing on its own front, each working toward a different goal. They don't coordinate, agree, or even necessarily align ideologically, and they don't need to.

@Strategy and the other treasury companies, like @Metaplanet in Japan, are advancing on the institutional front, breaking into TradFi markets, and pulling passive flows into Bitcoin.

Miners are on another front entirely, converting energy into security and keeping the network running block after block.

Protocol developers, the people maintaining Bitcoin Core and Knots, are hardening the base layer and arguing over every line of it. That's the job.

R&D teams like the one at @Blockstream are working on the hard cryptographic problems. They've designed SHRINCS and SHRIMPS, compact hash-based post-quantum signature schemes built for Bitcoin's block space.

Wallet and hardware makers are turning self-custody into something a normal person can actually do without losing their coins.

Then you have the podcasters, busy interviewing each other. Kidding! Podcasters are valuable educators. They meet people where they are and cover the topics newcomers actually want to understand.

Plebs are on the ground spreading the word, running nodes, stacking sats, and using Bitcoin every day.

Meanwhile, @JAN3com is pushing for nation-state adoption.

Everyone has a role to play, and no single army wins this alone. Every group is valuable, and none is disposable.

Bitcoin is Money

First, I should state where I stand. I'm building @AquaBitcoin to onboard the next billion people to Bitcoin. Obviously, I believe Bitcoin is money.

Bitcoin is also many other things.

Much of the current conflict centers on that statement: Bitcoin is money. People agree on the words and then fight over what they're supposed to mean in practice. Is it money you spend? Money you hold? Money you build products on top of? The answer is yes. It's all of those at once, and it doesn't need your permission to be any of them.

There's no one way to be a Bitcoiner, and there's no one way to use Bitcoin.

A lot of the anger I see comes from people being upset that someone else isn't using Bitcoin "the right way." There is no right way to use Bitcoin. That's the entire point of it.

If you recall, the Bcashers also liked to argue that HODLing Bitcoin was not using Bitcoin. They believed that there was a right way to use Bitcoin, and that was spending it as cash. Roger Ver voice: "It's in the whitepaper title! Did you even read the whitepaper?" MoE is more important than SoV, and so on. Imposing your view of how Bitcoin should be used, or what it is, is not useful and not in the ethos of Bitcoin.

Digital credit products don't make Bitcoin a lesser form of money. They don't distract people from self-custodial Bitcoin either. Companies like Strategy are opening up new markets and bringing new people to Bitcoin who would never have shown up otherwise. A door into Bitcoin is a door into Bitcoin, regardless of which side of it someone walks in from.

This is the part people get wrong. They treat Bitcoin like a fixed pie, where every person who comes in through Strategy or an ETF is somehow a person taken away from self-custody, as if there's a limited amount of Bitcoin adoption to go around and the wrong kind spends it. That's not how any of this works. There is no fixed pie. Every new person, every new institution, every new nation-state is another slice of demand added to a supply that never grows past 21 million.

The pleb stacking sats on a hardware wallet and the pension fund buying a Bitcoin ETF are not fighting over the same coins. They are both bidding against a hard cap, and every bid strengthens the case for the next one. The ETF buyer today is the self-custody convert tomorrow. Almost nobody starts at the end of the journey; they start wherever the nearest door is and move deeper over time.

Growing the pie is the whole game. A bigger, more liquid, more widely held Bitcoin is more resistant to attack, more useful as money, and harder to ignore. You don't get there by gatekeeping the on-ramps. You get there by building more of them.

You can't get upset that Saylor doesn't talk about Bitcoin the way you want him to. Sure, it would be nice to see him give a keynote on the monetary properties of Bitcoin, but he can do what he wants as a sovereign individual. You can't fault him for talking about $STRC any more than you can fault @BenJustman for talking about his wine. It's his business and his passion.

Plus I'd rather have @saylor working the capital markets than going door to door in Ohio onboarding merchants.

At the end of the day, all you have control over is what you yourself talk about and do. If you think someone with 5 million followers should talk more about Bitcoin being money, then go get 5 million followers and say it yourself. Complaining that the other guy won't behave the way you would is not practical. It's just noise.

You Can Disagree and Still Be Allies

It's important to be able to disagree with others and still be civil. It's impossible to agree with everyone on everything, because we aren't all clones.

I can discuss BIP110 with @knutsvanholm and @lukedewolf without us screaming at each other. I tell @marttimalmi all the time how Nostr sucks ;) We're all still bandmates and we'll play together @LuganoPlanB.

Even @adam3us and I don't agree on everything, and we were allies through the Blocksize War and worked together at Blockstream. I think it's a problem that Core runs on such a large share of nodes; he doesn't see it as an issue. That disagreement doesn't change anything between us.

I started @ProductionReady with @jimmysong, @jratcliff, and @parkeralewis to fund another Bitcoin client focused on conservatism. Parker messages me every few days to tell me how wrong I am about $MSTR and $STRC. That's fine. We can agree to disagree and keep building ProductionReady together.

Allies aren't people who agree with you on everything. They're people pointed in the same direction. If agreement were the requirement, no alliance would survive contact with a second opinion. You'd be left with a tribe of one.

The mistake is treating every disagreement as a loyalty test. Someone lands on the wrong side of one issue, and suddenly they're the enemy, written off, unfollowed, and added to the list. Do that enough times and you don't have an alliance anymore. You have a shrinking circle of people who happen to think exactly like you, which is the opposite of strength.

This Isn't That

The current BIP110 fight isn't the same as the Blocksize War. And before anyone says I don't know what I'm talking about: I was there through all of it. Front-row seats.

There are similarities, but the roles are reversed. Where the small blocker camp was fighting against the corporate takeover of Bitcoin, the BIP110 side today has more in common with the big blockers.

"We need to increase the block size or babies will die."

The arguments for BIP110 are well meaning, but they're largely driven by emotion, much like the big blockers were.

I empathize with the BIP110 supporters, and I hate spam too. I took the anti-spam position publicly, many times, early in the discussion. I believe development work should be done to mitigate spam, even though it's a cat-and-mouse game that can't ever fully be won. What I disagree with is the method. There are things worth doing, but through building consensus, not by pushing through a fork with a low signaling threshold on an urgent timeline.

Last year, I tried to arrange a meeting during the Plan B Forum to bring people together and discuss a path forward. This was before everything escalated so much. There was tentative agreement to work on something, since there was real demand for it, but then Luke and others seemingly decided to push forward on their own. That's when I decided I didn't want any part of it, and I've largely stayed quiet since, because I've already done this before, and it's not fun.

During the Blocksize War, quite a few people attacked me personally and tried to get me fired. It was purely because BTCC was a major economic node and a mining pool with ~18% of network hashrate. BTCC refusing to join the "corporate" side against Core was a huge obstacle to the big blockers' plans. So they went after me and the BTCC exchange business too, with many of the big blocker leaders trashing us on Chinese social media, telling people not to trade there. They even threatened the miners in the BTCC pool, saying they wouldn't sell them equipment if they kept using our pool.

BIP110 mirrors a lot of that, especially if you look at the attacks against Adam and his companies.

During the Blocksize War, there was never this "if you're not with us, you're against us" mentality on our side. The small block camp never had to coerce anyone to join. We just all "got it" and were confident in our position.

The tactics that defined the big blockers, the coercion, the emotional appeals, the ultimatums, are the ones showing up on the BIP110 side this time. The lesson from last time was never that one camp simply out-argued the other. It was that Bitcoin doesn't bend to pressure campaigns. It moves on consensus, or it doesn't move at all. That hasn't changed, and it won't.

I'll probably get some hate now for speaking out against BIP110, but so be it. I like many people who support it, like Hodlonaut, Arthur, and many more. You may hate me, but I don't hate you!

It Takes Two

You can't clap with one hand.

The Core side was a problem too. Many Core devs did and said things that added fuel to the fire, and they definitely should not have removed the OP_RETURN limit. The way they handled the OP_RETURN change was full of stupid mistakes, from banning people on GitHub to the ninja ACKs. Any normal person could have predicted the reaction from the plebs. People store their time and value in Bitcoin. Anything that appears to threaten that will get people up in arms.

Many things can be true at the same time. Core devs can be talented developers who understand how Bitcoin works at the protocol level while being incredibly immature, arrogant, and oblivious to social signals.

The white knight Core supporters didn't help the cause either. They were so hated by most people that they just made things worse. Probably only @bitschmidty was effective as a calming force, because he isn't hated.

Is Core captured? I don't think so. There is probably a fair amount of groupthink though, and again, I think having multiple competing clients, and the developers not all working out of the same three offices in the US, would be good for Bitcoin.

Ultimately, does removing the OP_RETURN limit really change anything? No, because it can be bypassed easily. On top of that, even though they removed the limit in Core v30, you can still run Core v29.

Does it matter for policy? Yes, because defaults do matter. However, if you want to change and unify policy, you need to build consensus. You need to talk with miners and mining pools. You can't UASF this. There is no shortcut.

I don't want to get into all the weeds, since the information is all out there already, but the long and short of it is this: Bitcoin is information. There are endless ways to stick other information into Bitcoin transactions. If you don't want that information on your node, well, you've got a hard road ahead.

The Core devs who pushed for removing OP_RETURN made a huge mistake and dug themselves into a hole that was impossible to get out of. They should not have made a contentious change in the first place, but caving to social pressure to undo the change would set a bad precedent too.

So here we are.

Monoliths

Core is not a monolith. Miners are not a monolith. The plebs are not a monolith.

We're all sovereign individuals with different views and opinions.

Core is made up of hundreds of developers. Even if you disagree with Adam that it runs on an IETF-like process, just think about the probabilities. Why would hundreds of developers all conclude that BIP110 is a bad idea, or withhold support for it? If BIP110 were viable, you'd expect to win over at least some meaningful share of them.

Again, I get big blocker vibes when I hear people talk about Core like it's a monolith. Even during the Blocksize War, there were many different groups and opinions within Core. Some developers went to Hong Kong for the Roundtable; others thought it was a dumb idea. When we were pushing BIP148, some devs were for it and others were against it.

Personally, I like Luke, but when he says things like "We're not asking miners' permission anymore. They had their chance," it just isn't grounded in reality. Who are these miners, exactly? The individuals hashing on the various pools? The big prop mining companies? Why do you need to ask them and what obliges them to listen to you at all?

The sooner people understand that nothing here is black and white, the sooner we can de-escalate.

Consensus

Your opinion doesn't matter. Only consensus matters.

You can have any number of incredible, worthwhile, and noble causes to fight for, but that doesn't mean the Bitcoin network will care, nor should it. There's always something.

Bitcoin is hard to change by design.

You're okay with BIP110 because you agree with and like the group pushing it (or you just dislike Core). Now think of it from another perspective. What if, instead of spam, it's an urgent quick fix to add covenants, and they manage to get a big podcaster onboard, 1% of hashrate, and 20% of nodes? Is that enough? What if it's Peter Todd next time, pushing for his tail emission? He met the criteria, so you'd better prepare, right?

Of course not.

The bar cannot be that low.

Who are you to tell me that I need to upgrade my node by August 7th?

I should be able to wake up from a three-year coma, sync my node, and transact Bitcoin.

I have no obligation to care about the latest thing that you care about.

You're welcome to run whatever Bitcoin software you want, because you're a sovereign individual, but if you're not in consensus with the Bitcoin network, then you have to be prepared for the consequences.

Cheerful and Constructive

I see a lot of people focused on attacking others and spreading FUD. Again, I've seen this before with the Tether Truthers. Tether just kept building through the constant attacks, and now it's one of the most profitable companies on the planet.

You're either in the arena or a spectator. If you're in the arena, you're building something. It could be a product, a protocol, or a company. If you're a spectator, you're just commenting or complaining online. You can't fail, because you can always complain, indefinitely and ad nauseam.

Personally, I'd rather be in the arena working on Bitcoin software and adoption.

You may feel you need to fight against some cause, but don't let that fight define you. It's better to focus on creating something and living your life.

Be Thankful

We Bitcoiners are lucky, and most of us don't act like it.

When I see people complain about Strategy, I'm baffled. What exactly would you want to be different? Here's a company that bet its entire balance sheet on Bitcoin and became the largest corporate holder in the world. In another universe, Saylor is on TV accumulating XRP and trashing Bitcoin every chance he gets.

Same with Tether. People complain about stablecoins, but stop and think about how this could have gone. The dominant stablecoin on earth, the one that settles more value than most payment networks, is run by @paoloardoino, a Bitcoiner. Tether holds billions of dollars of Bitcoin in self-custody. It invests in Bitcoin infrastructure and companies. It funds and builds free, open-source, cypherpunk tech like Keet and QVAC. Now picture the alternative: the world's biggest stablecoin run by a bank, a hostile government, or someone who wants Bitcoin dead. We're in the good timeline.

Here's the part the complainers miss. Even if the company you dislike vanished tomorrow, the role wouldn't. If you believe in markets at all, you know someone else would step in to fill it, and there's no guarantee the replacement shares any of your values.

Time to Move Forward

I like to approach things from the perspective that we're all going to be here and that we all want Bitcoin to succeed in our own way.

You can't get rid of the suitcoiners any more than the suitcoiners can get rid of you. You can't fire Core, and Core can't force you to run v30. No one's going anywhere, so let's try to make the best of things.

Seek the humility to understand that we're all just nodes in the network. Adam cannot do anything more to stop spam than you can. You can't force me to upgrade my node for your cause.

Try to focus on the value that everyone brings to the table instead of what we disagree on. We have more in common than we think.

Bitcoin is bigger than all of us. It will continue after Saylor is gone. It will continue after I'm gone. It will continue after you're gone.

That is why Bitcoin is so amazing. It will endure long after we are all gone.

Let's get the Bitcoin Alliance back on track. Embedded post:

Author: Samson Mow (@Excellion) Post ID: 2074208063737774541 Source: https://x.com/Excellion/status/2074208063737774541 Reply to: none

Text:

> Bitcoin is money. > > Bitcoin is information. > > Bitcoin is property. > > Bitcoin is software. > > Bitcoin is a commodity. > > Bitcoin is energy. > > Bitcoin is time. > > Bitcoin is freedom. > > Bitcoin is math. > > Bitcoin is an asset. > > Bitcoin is a currency. > > Bitcoin is speech. > > Bitcoin is hope.

Embedded post:

Author: Samson Mow (@Excellion) Post ID: 2071389243784515660 Source: https://x.com/Excellion/status/2071389243784515660 Reply to: none

Text:

> Consensus is a lot like love. You just know when you have it and you can’t force it.

Links

• www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZm54cSFD3I