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  1. -----BEGIN BITCOIN SIGNED MESSAGE-----
  2. Hello. I am the BearWhale. After a series of bad experiences with
  3. the banking system, I invested most of my life savings into bitcoin
  4. when the price was fairly low, around $8. For years I was a HODLer.
  5. I was holding when Trendon Shavers ripped everyone off. I was holding
  6. when the price was over a thousand, and I held after MtGox imploded.
  7. I believe strongly in Bitcoin’s decentralized promise of displacing
  8. immoral national currencies.
  9.  
  10. The price kept drifting downwards until finally at a little over $300
  11. I had enough. I sold off everything, based on an accumulation of
  12. information I gathered mostly from social media such as bitcointalk.org
  13. and reddit:
  14.  
  15. * The block size limit of 1MB was a threat to bitcoin’s future
  16. * “Satoshi’s vision” was unlimited block sizes
  17. * Gavin was ousted by a cabal of self-interested engineers, a.k.a. “Blockstream”
  18. * Blockstream took control of bitcoin’s source code repository
  19. * Theymos colluded with Blockstream to censor block size increase discussions
  20. * The subreddit r/bitcoin heavily censored block size increase discussions
  21. * Blockstream wanted the block size low to promote its proprietary Lightning Network
  22. * Gregory Maxwell was a bad actor and Luke-Jr was a religious nut
  23. * The market agreed with the above, leading to the then-decline in price towards $300
  24.  
  25. At this point I should state that I am a highly technical person.
  26. I understand all of the math behind the bitcoin whitepaper and the
  27. software that powers it. Although, I am not a security expert nor
  28. am I a cypherpunk - only a little experience in the type of adversarial
  29. thinking necessary to be a competent steward of the technology. I don’t
  30. regret selling, as I made an enormous profit. The decision was a rational
  31. one based on available information. However, in 2017 I went all-in on
  32. bitcoin again and here’s why:
  33.  
  34. None of the supposed facts which motivated my decision to sell were
  35. correct. It was all a carefully crafted and funded disinformation
  36. campaign launched by Roger Ver and his cronies, perhaps Jihan Wu, to
  37. discourage improvements to the bitcoin protocol to achieve financial
  38. gain at the expense of the community.
  39.  
  40. Once I recognized the moves to discredit the core developers for what it
  41. was, a covertly operated smear campaign fought on social media, funded by
  42. enormous enrichment from bitcoin, carried out with sock puppets and appeals
  43. to emotion, I looked at bitcoin and the greater community again with a more
  44. critical eye and I came to the following conclusions:
  45.  
  46. * Bitcoin is working great: look at the fees people are willing to pay
  47. * Resistance to poorly thought out protocol changes is a feature not a bug
  48. * Core developers are highly competent, from reading the mailing list
  49. * SegWit is incredibly well engineered to create the least network disruption
  50. * The subreddit r/btc is filled with negativity and meaningless attack
  51. * Roger Ver is a con man who uses his bitcoin.com domain to push his agenda
  52. * Bitcoin mining is centralized due to Bitmain’s temporary monopoly on retail hardware
  53. * ASICBoost is an exploit which has broken some economic incentives of bitcoin
  54. * Absent Bitmain, bitcoin the currency is far superior to altcoins
  55.  
  56. Although I am of course an adult fully responsible for my decisions,
  57. I want to make it clear that Roger Ver’s agenda was successful at
  58. convincing me that bitcoin had a “governance crisis” and was at risk
  59. of being overtaken by altcoins.
  60.  
  61. My reason for this open letter s simple: I want the community to know
  62. that I fully support the core developers. I am strongly in favor of UASF
  63. as a mechanism for liminating the centralizing effect of miner control
  64. illusions. I support SegWit as a sensible technology for moving Bitcoin
  65. forward. I reject a block-size increase hard fork at the present time.
  66. I reject a phony “compromise.” And I especially resent and reject a
  67. consortium of suits coming to an “agreement” on what source-code base
  68. will be named “bitcoin” without that code base being thoroughly vetted
  69. over a suitable long time-frame by industry professionals. Those industry
  70. professionals include Gregory Maxwell and most of the people who
  71. participate regularly on the bitcoin developers mailing list and contribute
  72. pull requests to the bitcoin-core repository.
  73.  
  74. tl;dr; I am the BearWhale: I sold Bitcoin for the wrong reasons,
  75. and now I am all-in and long bitcoin again.
  76. -----BEGIN SIGNATURE-----
  77. 159SCycgn8weAy2XGUEhD6V1RTFni7E3iq
  78. G3vLGiiDFjnDM0xzGSDMk4Ub0CX3Y4AJ8cde9gS+xE23kWmKQME1iToNiP9PudJIA84YDZGKvroJxQOib5DXWwk=
  79. -----END BITCOIN SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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