I want people to really think about how stupid and downright insane the phrase "Everything is good for Bitcoin" is. It's a technology that seeks to separate money from state and prevent the entire parasite class from stealing almost everything from >99% of the planet. This means there is huge incentive by the most powerful people on earth to destroy it by any means necessary. And Bitcoin is not magically immune to every one of their tactics. The most successful to date has been infiltration and subversion and it is everywhere for those willing to look. BIP110 is an expression of an uncaptured network, and its opposition was purely and revealingly concerned with the artifacts of that. Do we need large OP_RETURNs or upgrade hooks for a new op code before Sep 27? Or OP_IF in taproot or an address type not used in over a decade? No - we just don't want upgrades from non-technical, non-economic users that lack consensus as that cannot be *permitted*! So now we are left with the "Bitcoin is permissionless, so you have to let people turn it into file storage" bros becoming irate that we are leaving, once again without permission. The unsalvageable dumspter fire that we spent the last three years fighting, in public, for no-brainer upgrades to, is captured. This has been demonstrated, again clearly to everyone willing to look, as it has become impossible to make progress unless working within the appropriate political channels rather than operate forthrightly in public. That is just another fiat system. Decision making was deferred to captured industry players. Those entities are incapable of doing what is required to separate money and state as they require the state's permission to exist.

These views do not reflect the views of @ocean_mining and are mine exclusively: Saturday 8/8 saw the rejection of BIP110 by the Bitcoin industry despite broad support among the community. This shattered a long-standing belief that Bitcoin's anti-fragility and hard-monetary properties would continue thanks to its decentralized network of nodes who were run by people who understood Bitcoin and would fight to preserve it. I have been confident in Bitcoin's future and championed it as a tool for freedom. My reasons for doing so both required that it maintain and treat as a mission-critical priority the decentralization and ultimate authority of the network of nodes determining and enforcing its rules. They are no longer relevant. The degree to which this undermines Bitcoin's future cannot be overstated. Proof of Work is completely pointless if the criteria for what constitutes validity is decided by the ones doing the work. Pools have said "Our blocks are still valid, even if they violate rules we were told to respect." They did so within a small cartel of centralized pool operators clearly acting on behalf of industry players who operated behind closed doors ensuring that their public, breathtakingly arrogant, and nonsensically premature dismissal of BIP110 as a failure would not ultimately turn out any other way. They were not bluffing, they knew. By contrast, BIP110 supporters operated in public. We used neutral metrics that everyone had access to, and made the basis of our confidence publicly known. Sincere attempts were made to gauge community sentiment and engagement was public on all venues where discussion was permitted. Public engagement with influential Bitcoiners who opposed BIP110 demonstrated clearly that their opposition was not in good faith. This led to questions about their characters and intentions which were promptly corroborated by timely Epstein leaks. This meant that it was no longer frivolous dismissal of "the other side" out of pure tribal instinct as is standard within any conflict, and instead it would become laughably naive to continue assuming good faith on their part. Regardless, the spectacular, resolute dismissal of BIP110 necessarily reveals an equivalent stark and chilling reality with regard to decision-making about Bitcoin's consensus rules. No one, not even BIP110's most staunch critics can dismiss the implications of this. When Bitcoin is under attack, spontaneous defense that can withstand whatever onslaught it faces will simply be dismissed as "not economic", "a Sybil attack", "non technical", "censorship" or some other attempt to discredit and undermine it by the attackers. My expectation for the future is that for Bitcoin, reverse-Trojan horse theory continues to play out: The dollarization of the ecosystem will continue, and Bitcoin's ultimate goal - the separation of money and state, will be forgotten, while its captured players work towards the exact opposite end - its unification. Bitcoin is not the first protocol to become captured. It needed to become the exception, not the rule. The mechanism by which it did that is decentralization. Work is being done to hard fork Bitcoin with a new Proof-of-Work algorithm. I have said repeatedly in the past that in certain scenarios, should mining become captured and centralized to too great of a degree then the only defense the network would have would be to hard-fork to a new Proof-of-Work algorithm. I stand by this perspective as a truth fundamental to Bitcoin and everyone must agree with this stance if they are to believe Bitcoin is not whatever a necessarily few mining pools say it is. If you believe the miners acted on behalf of a silent community who secretly opposed BIP110 then I will respectfully disagree but agree that your conclusion about a PoW change being unwarranted must follow. You have misjudged the BIP itself and are simultaneously oblivious to the mechanisms that were abused to deny it, along with the intentions of the people working them. You also did not indicate your dislike of the BIP via discernable metrics (i.e not running a URSF and committing to its rejection) - instead you relied on a few pools to decide on your behalf. So what am I going to do? Wait with a stalled out Knots node. Another block will be along later rather than sooner, but I'll take it. That is what my entire Bitcoin stack sees as the state of the network. If a PoW change HF comes along with the next update to @BitcoinKnots that makes blocks start showing up faster I will upgrade to it and enjoy the benefit. I have no desire to attempt to call this new chain "Bitcoin" - Bitcoin is a case study in protocol capture and instead of dying, becomes a tool for the sickest of purposes. I can think of nothing more evil than centralized Bitcoin. It is whatever tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist told you Bitcoin was. But for all my day-to-day activities, all the software I use, Bitcoin is simply stuck at block 931,633. At current hashrate the next block will take ~32 hours. I sincerely doubt that anyone wants to find another 2000 blocks at this pace so HF is the only practical option.