BIP-148 definitely did have lobbyists working back channels. Many of those lobbyists and BIP-148 supporters back then, were on my side in 2026 fighting against BIP-110. BIP-148 was fundamentally different to BIP-148 in many ways: 1. The overwhelming majority of the Bitcoin economy and nodes supported SegWit, close to over 95%. While BIP-148 itself never had such strong economic backing, the softfork it activated did. 2. BIP-148 was lucky to succeed. It succeeded in part because its opponents were absolutely desperate for a hardfork blocksize limit increase. They wanted a hardfork and fighting and defeating BIP-148 would not have given them the blocksize limit increase they craved. Also, the large blockers greatly overestimated the power of the smaller blockers by the summer of 2017. In the minds of the large blockers, they didn't have larger blocks not because of their own mistakes, but the manipulative and powerful cunning of the smaller blockers. Therefore, the large blockers were successfully tricked by the smaller blockers into being scared of BIP-148, something the large blockers could have defeated if they knew what they were doing. 3. The blocksize war isn't just about a grassroots user movement fighting the industry for the sake of it. SegWit was actually a good sustainable idea on a technical level. It increased capacity, fixed third party transaction malleability, fixed the quadratic scaling of sighash operations and fixed the problem of UTXOs being too relatively cheap. On the other hand BIP-110 was deeply technically flawed and ineffective at doing what it was claimed it could do. There is no point fighting "big bitcoin" politically with a fundamentally stupid idea. Being technically sound actually matters. 4. The story of the blocksize war is a lot more than BIP-148. It was big industry and big miners that wanted to change Bitcoin by changing the consensus rules. Ordinary users rose up and prevented that change in the rules. That is the victory, keeping the rules the same and not changing them. This time BIP-110 was the side advocating change. End users running nodes fighting big industry players is an important part of Bitcoin. But only when the industry wants to change the rules in a detrimental way, then you fight to keep the rules the same and win. That is what Bitcoin is about, the status quo rules must prevail in the event of a material dispute. You had it all wrong. You were desperate to replicate 2017 for some reason, but the circumstances of a hostile attempt to change Bitcoin's rules never came up, so you just fought a senseless battle instead, which you lost. And in 2017 the small blockers were the economic majority. The majority of traders and investors wanted to invest in the small block chain and sell the large block chain. This includes all kinds of investors, like funds and corporates. And people put their money where their mouth was. This time, that didn't happen at all, no exchanges supported BIP-110 because there was no demand from their clients, the traders and investors. Nobody wants to invest in that coin. Rather than emulating the smaller blockers in the blocksize war, you are actually a pathetic shadow of the Bcashers. Except the Bcashers put their money where their mouth was, you guys didn't. Some of the Bcashers had useful skills for Bitcoin that will be missed, like pushing hard for merchant adoption, while I don't think the BIP-110ers contributed much. Finally, the Bcash vision had a lot more coherence than BIP-110. The idea of banning spam in the consensus rules and then waiting for the next spam scheme, and doing another consensus rule to ban that again and then to keep repeating that, is an incredibly poor strategy. Most Bcashers in 2017 would not have advocated for something as preposterous as that. It's just stupid JPGs. Just grow the fuck up, ignore the stupid JPGs and try to make Bitcoin a better money!

1/ During our investigation of the Coldcard drain yesterday, we identified an unusual pattern in the sweeps. That pattern led us to a hypothesis that has since been confirmed: the operator used a paid account at a well-known blockchain-services provider to query the source addresses and perform other related activity during the sweeps.