How my heart skips a beat when I think of you. And yet you’re so hard to define. It wasn’t long ago, just a few weeks to be honest, that I was a proud Bitcoin BTC maximalist. I was as certain about the future of BTC as I was about anything.
I wasn’t always that way of course. It took a reasonable about of arguing and investigating before I came to the belief that Bitcoin (BTC) would become the global currency. But I felt confused and betrayed come December 2017 when it became impossible to send a small amount of Bitcoin on the Bitcoin network.
My hopes of paying my staff with Bitcoin, and even accepting Bitcoin for the products my business sold got washed away, and even when the fees eventually returned to sensible levels, I was too hesitant to ever press the “Bitcoin accepted here” button in my company. Instead I argued with Adam Back and other Bitcoin advocates over the moronic idea to keep the block size at 1mB. But I didn’t realise at the time that everyone who thought like me had already given up on BTC and moved on to other things. My journey from there became one of hope in the lightning network. A wait which ended in what I thought was fulfilment, but was ultimately complete disappointment as I learned how Lightning really worked.
My background for the last 7 years has been in local media via a company I founded in 2012, and I have had to build websites, apps, and a local social network of sorts. In the years since I launched my company I’ve learned a lot about what consumers will and won’t use and the lengths they will or won’t go to in order to use a product or service. Ultimately, my conclusion about using BTC on the Lightning network was that the ridiculous need to have incoming AND outgoing channels with BTC in them, the need to do an on-chain payment simply to get onto the Lightning network, and the fact that devs and BTC advocates celebrated $100+ fees so much in 2017, led me to the conclusion that BTC in its current form would never see mass adoption, and that Lightning was a waste of time.
I spelled out my misgivings about Lightning on Twitter recently. For my troubles, I was accused of being everything from a fraud, a fake account, being paid by Craig Wright or someone, or flat out lying. You can read the thread here. (NOTE: PLEASE don’t message me and tell me BTC on chain fees are low right now. I know they are.
The fact remains that when fees were high there was no move to raise the block size, and in fact the high fees were celebrated. There’s currently discussions to lower the block size, and the constant discussion of a “fee market” as being a great thing for Bitcoin. There’s no way I can build business systems that rely on BTC.) After that thread, and after seeing the responses from people who I genuinely admired in the Bitcoin space, I realised not only did no-one working on Bitcoin have any interest in seeing businesses succeed by using Bitcoin, but it seemed it was impossible to have an honest conversation about the genuine possibility that scaling via LN was a complete dead end.
I mean, Lightning was being advocated by private companies whose business model was collecting as many routing fees as possible, and here we all were in BTC cheering them on with never a question about whether that made any sense to BTC’s on chain incentives. Soon I recognised what was going on. You see, I have first hand experience of being in a real life cult. From the age of 15 to about 23 I was in a cult that eventually kicked me out because I dared suggest they didn’t have all the answers to what God wanted.
I lost all my friends, was disinvited from wedding parties, was set adrift onto the ocean of loneliness. And it wasn’t so I would see the light, it was as a message to everyone else who would ever dare think about challenging the orthodoxy… do it and you’re out of the group. The truth about BTC is all the cult members on Twitter telling me to “get out” don’t actually have access to my private keys, so it’s neither here nor there what they think in all honesty. But all the same, I felt a sense of loss and sadness when people I had grown to cherish interacting with turned so quickly on me.
But the hope of what Bitcoin was meant to be to me wasn’t just me hodling and eventually being rich. I wanted a global money that my staff in the Phillipines could accept and rely on, that my kids could use to save, that I could use to shop online, and that was sound in that its supply couldn’t be inflated and would be a great tool to use to save. A money that the poor among us could collect in small amounts and save, gradually lifting themselves out of poverty. Not a money with transaction fees higher than their daily income.
And yet there are members of Blockstream, Lightning’s biggest advocate, who conveniently think Bitcoin really isn’t for the poor. So back to the drawing board I went. BTC wasn’t going to cut it for me, and the devs on BTC seem to have made up their minds about who is allowed to use it. I was fortunate to have so many different cryptocurrency groups reach out to me.
One advocate of Ethereum was particularly helpful. He too saw all the shortcomings of Lightning, and had been arguing about them for ages. But Ethereum’s USP was that they “listened to their community”. This, to me, was the entire problem with BTC. Listening to the community just incentivises “proof of social media”, sybil attacks, etc.
Just nonsense. The only thing that should ever matter is hash rate, yet Ethereum has little to no regard for what miners want from all I can tell. Your local supermarket doesn’t decide what to stock based on “community feedback”. They look at what people actually purchase.
The lack of understanding of how a capitalist system should work in the crypto space is absurd. Ripple fans were also out in force, God bless them, but I don’t think a single one of them understood the Byzantine Generals problem, or even how their own particular token worked under the hood. That said, they’re a nice bunch and I wish them well. I don’t think they’ve quite thought through the possible ramifications of the Ripple company owning more than 50% of the total supply and being in control of all changes to the code where there’s no proof of work needed. I was ultimately left with considering the two major forks of Bitcoin outside of BTC, namely BCH and BSV. I have been watching videos from Daniel Krawisz for some time so had a soft spot for his suggestions. His kooky approach to content production for some reason struck a chord with me.
I could never catch him saying something I believed to be untrue as such. But I genuinely believed that it didn’t matter that he thought another token might have been better than BTC under the hood; ultimately the “Schelling point” was all that mattered. BTC had the network effect, anyone going to Coinbase to buy “Bitcoin” was going to end up with BTC, and nothing else was of any consequence. But my realisation that BTC could never actually be useful in the real world made me sober up.
I had not being paying a lick of attention to the BCH/BSV split that occurred recently. From the elevated plateau I lived on as a BTC maximalist the BCH/BSV hash war seemed like toddlers fighting over the best seat in the back of the car. So I spoke with folks in both camps to see what was going on. Most BCHers I spoke with basically had the following arguments about why I should support their network. BCH has a bigger network of merchants and exchanges etc than BSV.
Craig Wright is a lying scammer who thinks he’s Satoshi but he’s not so is clearly just a scammer and anyone who uses BSV is a scammer or being scammed. For the first point, this didn’t make much sense. By that logic BTC is a better product. But if the BCH chain’s superior performance and potential outweighs the larger network BTC has established, the same logic might also apply for BSV. For the second point, I just didn’t see how it was pertinent. I wanted to see what Craig Wright had to say for himself. When I spoke with folks from the BSV camp, I was met with a very different vibe.
They didn’t require I accept their lord and saviour Craig Wright as I had perhaps feared. Instead they seemed to lay out a clear vision of on chain scaling, being business and government friendly (unlike the anarchists I had butted heads with several times in BTC), and the return of OP codes that would allow genuine development on BSV without devs worrying the rug would be pulled out from under them. I read some posts from devs to that effect as well who were happy to finally be able to develop on Bitcoin that would be stable and unrestrictive, and I started playing with some of the apps already created on BSV, like Handcash and others. Holy crap are they good! I won’t go in to detail here, that will be for another post. But considering the name “Bitcoin SV” is less than 6 months old, I was blown away at what is already being developed on the platform.
And of course, the fees to send money back and forth are ridiculously low, and there’s no complicated Lightning channel openings etc. But what about Craig Wright? Honestly, it did bother me a little that Craig Wright might be lying about the fact that he was the inventor of Bitcoin. But as I sat and contemplated about whether to go on an investigation to look at all the evidence for or against him being Satoshi, I realised there was something far more useful I could do with my time.
I decided to go and see what Craig Wright actually says himself about Bitcoin. You see, everything I have seen or read about Craig Wright was edited by BTC maximalists, or quoted out of context, with the specific aim of painting him in a bad light. So I spent the next week watching hours and hours of interviews with Dr Craig S Wright, and what I discovered was completely unexpected. I will save the details and my conclusion for a post of its own. But I found that when Craig is interviewed one on one, he’s incredibly articulate, and when on stage he sometimes fumbles his words a little as we all do, but if you’re genuinely listening to him, you can still catch his point. Craig understands Bitcoin and its incentives better than ANYONE I’ve ever come across, and certainly better than any BTC dev or twitter troll. Even older content I found of Craig’s didn’t contradict his message of how Bitcoin works (or is supposed to work) today. So what next? B itcoin SV ticks all the boxes I want in Bitcoin.
The plans to scale on-chain on not mucking around with ridiculous lightning is all good. The ability to easily put large amounts of data for a fee in the blockchain appeals to me as a media publisher. Creating content about officials and politicians can be challenging, and in Australia now we have laws that allow authorities to stop ISPs from allowing certain URLs, anti encryption laws, and ridiculous powers by authorities without needing a warrant to spy on communications.
I have always thought that miners voting with their hashpower was the only vote that mattered, and that “community consensus” was nonsense and impossible to measure anyway.
BSV is completely aligned with this understanding of network governance. The Bitcoin SV camp doesn’t seem to be overrun with socialists pretending to be libertarians. In BTC, the idea of running a successful business is not as aspirational as being a poor coder keeping the blocks small so everyone can run a full node. This never made sense anyway as if you need to be able to run a BTC Core node on a $50 computer, you won’t be able to afford the tx fees anyway so you’ve achieved bupkis.
BSV is on enough exchanges that I can start to acquire it. The community is diverse, but welcoming, and for the most part, maximalists.
They’re not like other Bitcoin forks that think we’re going to live in a world with 2 dozen coins all being swapped between each other all the time. Right or wrong, I’d rather aim for a world with one currency that allowed everyone to participate and served as a standard unit of measure for value everywhere.
I think this would be a better world. But what I like the most is that BSV is right now what Bitcoin was MEANT to be.
I have a wallet on my phone, and my kids have one on their iPads. We send small amounts back and forth whenever we want, I pay them their pocket money or bribes for making me a coffee, they pay me so I’ll get them some V-Bucks on Fortnite. It’s far easier than a bank account, more convenient than cash, and more understandable to my kids who are digital natives.
We never have a concern about fees, confirmation times, receivers being online, channels being funded, or any other such nonsense. BSV is what Bitcoin was meant to be. BSV is Bitcoin. .
