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