My conclusions regarding Craig Wright – Jason Smith
I recognise the argument from the BSV camp is not that “decentralisation is holy”. It’s more along the line of “miners should be the decision makers”, because they’re the ones who benefit most from Bitcoin’s success, have the most skin in the game, and they should be funding the development.
Ironically, since it came out that Blockstream has in fact been mining on BTC, putting plenty of skin in the game, instead of celebrating the fact that they are actually doing EXACTLY what Craig Wright said should be happening, i.e. miners funding devs and influencing decisions, they’re lambasted by the BSV folk for trying to control Bitcoin. Coming from BSV where only one miner, Coingeek, essentially decides what will happen, the logic is absurd and hypocritical.
BSV works fine. No one tries to run a node except service providers and miners, so no one cares if their machine can’t do it. Everyone trusts that Coingeek’s and Nchain’s incentives align with the users. Tx fees will always be low… etc etc.
But there’s a serious problem with the inconsisentent thinking in BSV. The narrative Craig pushes is that BSV is to be a global database for everything. All manner of apps will write data to the BSV blockchain. This will in turn create copious amounts of transactions, ergo transaction fees, which will ensure miners are incentivised to mine forever, even after the block subsidy has disappeared.
Fine. I guess that’s possible. I believed it for a while.
Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin SV have this thing called OP_RETURN, which is a script opcode used to mark a transaction output as invalid.
In BTC’s op_return only a tiny amount of data is allowed. BSV allows lots more data to be included in op_return outputs.
In layman’s terms, it means by sending a transaction you can include some arbitrary data and have that data written to the blockchain.
This has resulted in numbers of people building blockchain based apps on BSV. Bitstagram is, as you might guess, like Instagram but it’s all stored on Bitcoin. You pay to upload, and you can tip the publisher. Twetch is like Twitter, but on the blockchain. You pay to post, and you also get paid via tips. All the data is posted as an op_return output and stored on the BSV blockchain. It’s supposedly immutable, as no-one can ever delete your transactions which hold your posts’ data, unlike Twitter and Facebook.
Clearly the problem with anyone being able to publish anything to the blockchain is the obvious concern that people are going to publish illegal material.
“No big deal!” say defenders of BSV. Op_return outputs are prunable because the outputs are provably unspendable. Miners don’t need to store them at all for the blockchain to remain valid!
soooo….
We’re told that op_return outputs are somehow both
i) prunable by miners and don’t need to be stored, but also
ii) immutable and will be stored forever
?
Honestly, it can’t be both. Either the data is at risk of deletion, or every miner or full-node operator is going to host content that will land them in jail.
Which means there’s no advantage to paying copious amounts for blockchain storage when there’s zero guarantee it will even be accessible in the future, and the cost to spin up your own node will be too prohibitive for the average Joe who just wants to access old episodes of Prison Planet.
I’ve mentioned this several times to people telling me that their on-chain storage is immutable. They either go silent or come up with a Craig-esque convoluted prophecy about a future industry that will exist to charge people access to old op_return data. Somehow I’m expected to overpay to store stuff on-chain, and THEN in the future I’ll still have to pay for it to remain hosted or accessible. I struggle to see what advantage such a convoluted scheme has over AWS or Dropbox.
Remember, Craig Wright categorically says they will co-operate with government. So there’s no “hey this is useful for storing stuff you’re not allowed to store on AWS” argument. If Mr Govt says it’s illegal on 8chan, then it’s going to be illegal on BSV too, and removed from BSV too.
My conclusions led me to divest completely from my BSV holdings, and put everything back in to BTC, where it will remain.
I refuse to be involved any longer in a project run by someone as toxic as Craig Wright. Craig’s mistreatment of anyone unconvinced he’s Satoshi, or even anyone politely asking for an iota of evidence, leaves those who argued for his ideas with egg on their face. I realise he’s admitted he’s autistic and I sympathise with his mental health struggles. But we all already knew that he suffered this way. And despite him knowing that, he and his colleagues continue to put him in situations he simply can’t handle. Moreover, they incessantly insult the intelligence of us, the investors, by claiming piles of supposed evidence exists proving Craig’s identity as Satoshi. It doesn’t.
Apologists for CSW will tell you he’s playing 5D chess, deliberately providing fake evidence to drive away all the unbelievers and dumb people so that all that is left is the cream. It’s classic cult-like behaviour. Evidence that he IS Satoshi is cheered. Evidence that he ISN’T Satoshi is proof he’s smarter than everyone and is playing 5D chess. There’s no ability to way to reason with most of the people I’ve interacted with in BSV who hold Craig Wright in esteem. (most, not all, plus there are a handful who think he’s satoshi and still dislike him a lot.)
But it no longer matters if Craig Wright is Satoshi or not.
At this point, Craig Wright could sign something with Satoshi’s keys and market dump 1 million BTC and BCH, and still very few would come to him grovelling, crowning him King.
It turns out, even if you’re the inventor of Bitcoin, if you treat people like trash, they don’t want to do business with you.
I will use BTC for my business needs moving forward.
I would like to extend my apologies to anyone in BTC that I insulted in the past few months. And to anyone that insulted me, no love is lost, everyone has been unblocked on Twitter.
Published at Sat, 10 Aug 2019 06:15:18 +0000
Bitcoin Pic Of The Moment
From Instagram Being interviewed by Léa Jacobiak from Saxo TV about #bitcoin at #smwcph #smwbitcoin event.
By karmel80 on 2014-02-17 14:33:15
