Many things in this post are incorrect, and it matters that we correct them, because this version of the history is exactly what convinced people the last few months were a good idea. “BIP-148 is celebrated as Bitcoin Independence Day, because it proved that ordinary users, running nodes in their homes, could force the most powerful mining cartels and corporations in the industry to back down. The users had no hashrate, no exchanges, no lobbyists. They had conviction and they had nodes, and that was enough.” First, the framing. August 1st is what's celebrated as Bitcoin Independence Day (I coined and popularized that term). August 1st was the flag day, and it commemorates the outcome the UASF threat produced, not BIP-148 itself. Second, BIP-148 was not just "ordinary users" running nodes at home. It was a cross section of the entire Bitcoin network, something a lot of BIP-110 supporters seem to disregard: developers, exchanges, wallets, miners, and mega whales, alongside ordinary users. Most important to understand is that BIP-148 and the small block camp carried a massive amount of economic weight. Chain split markets ran on @bitfinex through 2017, and outside of those markets I know of many OTC deals struck privately in whale groups to trade one side of a split against the other. There was skin in the game on both sides of the war, and huge amounts of BTC put on the line to show real conviction. This was as much an economic war as an ideological one, and that point is rarely acknowledged. Even the companies backing BIP-148 were taking real risk. BIP-148 was never merged into Bitcoin Core. Running it meant deliberately installing different software and accepting that if the UASF chain lost, you could be reorganized off the chain entirely. Bitmain spelled that scenario out themselves, calling it a wipe out, in the same post where they laid out their hard fork contingency. Dozens of companies committed anyway (BIP-110 supporters would likely call them suitcoiners today). On the topic of hashrate, BIP-148 had no version bit of its own. It required bit 1, which was BIP-141. So the accurate way to state it is that BIP-148/BIP-141 had 30-45% of hashrate behind it for most of its deployment window. During that time I was COO of BTCC, overseeing a mining pool that was the biggest one signaling SegWit. So the UASF threat had three components that made it credible: economic weight, hashrate, and nodes. BIP-110 only had nodes. That is UASF cosplay, not a real UASF. Another point to cover: Mechanic was spreading misinformation in Spaces (and likely other places) that BIP-148, a UASF, activated SegWit. That is false. It was technically BIP-91 that brought miners in line with BIP-141. BIP-148 was effectively frontrun and never had to be tested. So Bitcoin Independence Day, while celebrating the flag day deadline, is as much a celebration of BIP-91 as it is of BIP-148. So no, it was not just nodes and conviction. Just think about things rationally for a minute. Why would buying a node-in-a-box give you the right to dictate what anyone else on the network does, regardless of whether it's a miner or another user? Does buying two nodes-in-a-box give you that power? Of course not. Btw the whole plug-and-play node culture came after the Blocksize War. In 2015-2017 you just downloaded the software and ran it on your computer. Stay humble and stack sats, but also stay humble when people who lived through the history try to explain it to you.

"Use a real secure element" quietly assumes the SE is the whole trust boundary, and that the seed is structurally locked inside it. Neither has held up. Ledger Recover shipped a firmware path that shards the seed out to three custodians. When people objected, Ledger's answer was that firmware capable of key extraction had "always been possible" to write, and that users had simply been trusting Ledger not to ship it. So the actual model isn't "the silicon won't let the seed out," it's "we promise not to." BOLOS is closed, so there's no way to check the promise is being kept, and the chip documentation sits behind an NDA, so you can't check the layer underneath it either. Jade puts the gate outside the device, where you can run the oracle yourself and read the code. Worth remembering the trust boundary took a while to settle, too. On the original Nano S the SE didn't drive the screen or the buttons, so an attacker owning the MCU could show you one address while the SE signed another. Ledger moved the display into the SE from the Nano X onward, which is a tacit admission that "keys are in the secure element" was never the whole story. On your point about "breaking the ESP32," the level of evil maid attack needed to take advantage of EM fault injection is akin to someone replacing a Ledger device completely and logging PIN entries. Neither of those is a silicon problem. None of which makes Jade invulnerable. The ESP32 is a general purpose MCU and it behaves like one under a lab attack. But Jade is the only wallet where I can read every line of the firmware, run the oracle myself, and see the whole security argument end to end rather than being handed a certificate and asked to trust it. For a device holding real money, that tradeoff isn't close. Jade is genuinely great, and I think it's underrated precisely because its threat model is honest about what silicon can and can't do.

The @BlockstreamJade is one of the best hardware wallets on the market, bar none. I wonder how many people dismissed it due to the FUD that it lacked a secure element? Secure elements aren't a panacea but are often sold as such. A physical SE in the device means everything needed to extract the seed is sitting right there, and potentially in the hands of someone that steals it. It's a stationary target. An attacker can wreck a dozen units learning the technique before touching yours. Ledger's Donjon has done exactly this to Coldcard silicon twice, the Mk2 ATECC508A and later the SE2 on Mk4, and voltage-glitched the Trezor Safe 3's MCU. Jade moves the target instead. Your seed is encrypted with an AES-256 key that the device and a blind oracle build between them, and the oracle never holds more than a piece of it. The ESP32 only has ciphertext. You can't extract something that was never in there. The attack turns interactive, against a party who rate-limits you and wipes its half after three bad PINs. Coldcard split your secret across three chips from different SEs. That genuinely helps against one vendor's silicon getting broken. But the pitch lands as arithmetic, and security doesn't really work that way. As we've seen, bad entropy at setup meant none of the silicon even mattered. You could have 10 SEs in the CC and that wouldn't have saved you. But people ate that security theater up. My mind keeps circling back to what we could have done differently. I keep landing on the same conclusion: we should have pushed back on the SE FUD much harder, and promoted Jade far more aggressively. We'd never have attacked CC, but we should never have taken the unwarranted flak for Jade's security model. The FUD steered people away from Jade. If we'd fought it, maybe more of them would have avoided the CC tragedy. When we first launched the Jade, it sold for just $39.99. For that price you got such an incredible amount of value (at launch and later with subsequent updates). ➡️ Virtual secure element via blind oracle (@Blockstream's or self-hosted) ➡️ Can function as a stateless signing device (like SeedSigner) ➡️ Anti-Exfil protocol to protect against your seed being exfiltrated (Jade is one of only two HWWs that do this) ➡️ Genuine Check verification to prove the device is authentic and untampered with ➡️ Secure Boot ensuring only properly signed firmware runs ➡️ BIP39 passphrase and duress PIN ➡️ Air-gapped operations ➡️ Store Liquid assets like @tether USDT ➡️ Multisig support AND the ability to back up the multisig config (descriptors) for a setup involving ANY devices (or mixed hardware/software), as long as at least one Jade is part of the multisig - this makes multisig far less brittle since losing the config is catastrophic The best part of all of this? You don't even need to BUY a Jade. You can build your own with almost any ESP32 board. Pair it with your own self-hosted blind oracle and you have a completely sovereign stack with no HWW vendor supply chain risk. If you're looking for a new hardware wallet, take a serious look at @BlockstreamJade. It's built by a world-class team of engineers and cryptographers assembled by @adam3us. But don't take my word for it. The firmware is fully open source, so read it yourself. Don't Trust. Verify.

The Anti-Exfil protocol also originated from @Blockstream and they developed the first production-ready code for it. Anti-Exfil protects you against private key (or seed) exfiltration via signature nonces. A dishonest hardware wallet can secretly hide tiny pieces of your private key inside the “random” numbers it uses every time it signs a transaction. Over enough transactions, someone watching the public blockchain can put those pieces together, recover your key, and steal your bitcoin - without you ever noticing anything wrong. Only two HWWs have this implemented: @BlockstreamJade @BitBoxSwiss (they call it Anti-Klepto) @Blockstream and @adam3us have been protecting you from this class of attacks since 2021.

I spoke with @Cointelegraph about how BIP110 harms Bitcoin's neutrality and permissionlessness. Bitcoin can be sound money, or it can be a protocol you can easily modify the rules of. It cannot be both.

In 2015, Andresen and Hearn began pushing Bitcoin XT (BIP101) which was intended to change consensus rules and increase Bitcoin’s block size. They originally attempted to get BIP101 merged into Bitcoin Core, and said it would only go in if the other developers agreed. They never reached that agreement. The fight was over how much of an increase there should be and how fast it needed to come. But mostly it was over whether forcing a contentious hard-fork was legitimate at all. A contentious hard-fork either breaks the chain in two or forces some to swallow rules they never agreed to. Sipa, quoting someone from the debate: "I did not sign up to be part of a central banker's committee." And so when they couldn't convince Core devs, Andresen and Hearn went directly to mining pools and misrepresented Bitcoin XT as an upgrade to Bitcoin Core. I know this firsthand because I was running BTCC Pool at the time and took the call with them. They also set activation of BIP101 at just 75% miner signaling. That's below the 95% that normally locks in a Bitcoin consensus change. This was the starting point of the Blocksize War which lasted over two years. History rhymes.

BIP110 supporters: You claim Bitcoin is captured by corrupt devs, suitcoiners, spammers, plus "Big Bitcoin," and that only an emergency soft-fork can save it. When BIP110 activates as a minority fork, can you in good conscience keep holding/using BTC after causing so much drama?

Lately there's been a lot of discussion around L2s like Liquid, Ark, and Spark, and the deciding factor for preference seems to have become unilateral exit: the ability to exit to the mainchain on your own initiative, even if the operator is malicious, censoring you, or has vanished entirely. Ironically, as people are discovering, only one Spark wallet actually supports unilateral exit (the others say it's coming later), which is a bit comical, because that's often the very reason the more hardcore Bitcoiners dismiss Liquid. At @JAN3com, we're building on @Liquid_BTC because I firmly believe it offers the best set of tradeoffs. After Liquid, my next choice would be Ark, and personally I would avoid Spark because of how centralized it is. It's all about the substrate. We're all trying to solve for the best L2 substrate, which can also include ecash mints or even databases (like the original WoS). Here's what I believe are the key criteria, in priority order. 1️⃣ Privacy. Both operator-side (are they logging you?) and on-chain (are amounts/assets confidential?) 2️⃣ Operator model. Single operator or federation? Can they steal funds, and can they censor you? 3️⃣ Liquidity. How deep and accessible is it? 4️⃣ Time in production. How long has it been live, and has it held up under real-world conditions? 5️⃣ Data availability. Can you get the data to prove what you own, without relying on the operator? 6️⃣ Economically viable exit. Is that exit actually affordable, or does fee/congestion cost make it theoretical? 7️⃣ Unilateral exit. Can you exit to the mainchain on your own initiative, even if the operator is malicious, censoring you, or gone? 8️⃣ Liveness requirements. Do you have to come online periodically or risk losing funds? (relevant for Ark) How does Liquid stack up for these criteria? Really well. 1️⃣ Privacy. Confidential Transactions by default hide both the transaction amount and the asset type from all observers, including functionaries. Functionaries can't see amounts or asset types, so there's nothing to even log if they wanted to. 2️⃣ Operator model. 15 functionaries, 11-of-15 multisig, HSM-secured, tolerating up to 4 offline. Functionary code is open-source. 3️⃣ Liquidity. $5B TVL, including $4B+ in tokenized securities and ~$97M native USDT. 4️⃣ Time in production. Live since October 2018 as Bitcoin's first production sidechain (~7.5 years). 5️⃣ Data availability. Anyone can run a full node and trustlessly self-validate the chain, with L-BTC always verifiably 1:1 with BTC locked on mainchain. 6️⃣ Economically viable exit. 0.1 sat/vB average fee. For most users the primary exit is an atomic swap of L-BTC for BTC, which is permissionless and doesn't require federation membership. 7️⃣ Unilateral exit. Not there for regular users yet, but coming via a BitVM-style 1-of-n bridge on the roadmap. And as a business, you can join as a federation member today and peg out directly, no third party needed. 8️⃣ Liveness requirements. No online-or-lose mechanic; L-BTC sits indefinitely. Notice that economically viable exit sits above unilateral exit on my list. That's deliberate. Let's dig in. It's important to remember that L2 substrates are exactly that: substrates. None of them can compete with the trustless, permissionless properties of the Bitcoin mainchain. Anything you're holding long-term belongs on mainchain, in your own custody. You're using the substrate for spending (small amounts) or cost-effective UTXO aggregation, so unilateral exit isn't that important outside of an ideological insistence on having it. What you actually want is privacy, durability, liquidity, and economically viable exits. Remember how many Muun wallet users were caught off guard when mainchain fees spiked? When fees climb again, what you thought was a unilateral exit turns out to be no exit at all. Once network fees hit around 5-10 Sats/vB (or higher), unilaterally exiting small Ark VTXOs or Spark leaves stops being worth it. Let's take an example of 10 small balances adding up to 100k sats. At those fee levels, pulling each one out on-chain can eat 40–100% (or more) of what it's worth. You'd burn most or all of the value just to move it. At that point, it's effectively dust. This is because of the tree/branch/leaf structure of Ark and Spark. 5-10 Sats/vB isn't even expensive for a normal BTC transaction: at $100k, that's just $0.71 to $1.41. The cost blows up only because a unilateral exit means unrolling that structure on-chain, not broadcasting one clean transaction. Ark and Spark are really optimized for cooperative exits and if you're expecting cooperation anyway, then rationally you should expect that same cooperation for a Liquid peg-out. So with Liquid you get both: a cooperative exit via peg-out, and the primary atomic-swap model into a pool that's (pun intended) deep and liquid. @Liquid_BTC is perfect for the average person and that's why we're building @AquaBitcoin on it. TL;DR: Unilateral exit is oversold, especially when it's too expensive to actually use. For everyday spending amounts, exiting small Ark/Spark balances becomes uneconomical the moment fees rise, so it's an exit on paper only. Privacy, liquidity, durability, and a cheap real-world exit matter more, and Liquid wins on those. Hold long-term on mainchain; use the substrate for spending/aggregation.

The market is like a wild animal. Nothing you can say or do will calm it down. Sometimes you just have to let the animal get the panic out of its system and see that everything is fine.

Today’s announcement from Strategy is solid. It almost follows my thinking perfectly. Their repurchase program is a structural framework for all prefs (not just STRC) and common, which would be accretive across the board. Most importantly, the buyback isn’t a reactionary measure.