This post will recap the events of the last six months as regards Bitcoin’s latest and most fractious scaling debate and how the exertion of leverage within Bitcoin’s community means that the balance has irrevocably changed, and significant shift in power and perception from the miners toward the developer and user community, and why this allows for the faster development and implementation of innovation and upgrades to Bitcoin going forward… SegWit in my opinion will turn out to be a major milestone and crossroad looking back in the development of not only the Bitcoin network, but also the internal governance and game theory connotations for the competing and collaborating factions that make up this amazing, crazy and noisy community…

Recap Of The Last Six Months

In the constant emotion, insanity and general noise in the Bitcoin community everyone could be forgiven for getting sucked in to day to day events while losing the longer term meanings and lessons of the last six months, of which there are quite a few… I will begin with my Bitcoin Scaling Debate post published on April 9th that has predicted many but far from all of what has happened since, however I did predict the game theoretical end point of an User Activated Soft Fork that would force the miners to activate Segwit by Miner Activated Soft Fork, which is exactly what has happened in the last six months… For a brief chronology and timeline of events we start not with Bitcoin but with younger brother Litecoin, and Charlie Lee’s ploy to accelerate Bitcoin scaling by using Litecoin as a template by instigating talk of an User Activated Soft Fork (April 10th) in Litecoin to activate Segregated Witness… As crypto brothers Bitcoin and Litecoin to some extent also share and have connections within mining communities and pools, in my opinion Charlie to his credit brought UASF into public discourse, and lo and behold somewhere out of nowhere was hastily convened a Litecoin roundtable (April 21st) at which it was agreed that SegWit would be activated by Miner Activated Soft Fork by all parties in agreement, which I found quite curious at the time…

As soon as SegWit was activated pretty much without a hitch on Litecoin this lead to a growing movement for the same on the Bitcoin network… One of the biggest advocates and early pioneer within Bitcoin for an UASF was pseudonymous Bitcoin developer shaolinfry (co-author of BIP148 created March 12th) and his reflections of the Litecoin roundtable (April 26th) and the movement grew from there with Luke Dash Jr (another Bitcoin core dev) leading the charge but also many others too numerous to name in bringing the UASF concept to the wider Bitcoin user community over the following months…

In my Bitcoin Kills Banking post and stand alone BIP 148 UASF Game Theory post (both published June 11th) I predicted that SegWit would activate before August 1st by Miner Activated Soft Fork at a time when things were maybe looking in doubt, with a rising minority of users going UASF full retard but also the mining community maintaining the poker face with threats of all sorts regarding the stalling in activating Segwit, however it has turned out in posterity to be the miners that were really bluffing and exactly as I predicted using simple logical deduction… The only thing I couldn’t foresee at that time was how the mining community would attempt to save face and not make it so blatant who had really capitulated in the Mexican Standoff or how fast they would capitulate, but on June 20th we got both answers when miners agreed overwhelmingly to support the Bitcoin Roundtable or the so-called New York Agreement (May 24th) as a way for miners to signal for a SegWit soft fork, contingent on the further doubling of the blocksize in time to 2 mega bytes, or in short SegWit2x… By a roundabout and convoluted way the miners first signalled for BIP 91 for SegWit on 17th July and by the following week (24th July) we had 100% consensus for the activation of SegWit by BIP141 and thus critically importantly cancelling the BIP 148 UASF being enforced by user nodes… SegWit locked in activation on the 8th August, and we are currently in the two week “grace period” and SegWit should finally be enshrined around August 22nd 2017…

BIP 148 Led To SegWit By MASF – “Conspiracy Theory” Is “Conspiracy Fact”

While the corporate backers of the New York Agreement and especially the miners that have been the real stallers and blockers of SegWit over the past 12-18 months will tell you without a hint of irony that the BIP 148 UASF had nothing to do with SegWit activation by Miner Activated Soft Fork, this is of course fanciful nonsense and face saving drivel pumped out to try and conceal the obvious, SegWit only activated by MASF because of the UASF movement exactly like what happened on Litecoin a few months previous… While the miners and small subset of Bitcoin Users that have forked off a new altcoin in Bitcoin Cash and work is apparently progressing via the New York Agreement for a further 2MB hardfork in the coming months to complete the SegWit2x agreement that may in due course create additional convolution and confusion, the only thing we know for sure for now is the long prepared and long awaited substantial software upgrade of SegWit is coming to Bitcoin…

The one thing that should really be gleaned from the last six months of development and debate within Bitcoin (and Litecoin) is that any discussion of User Activated Soft Forks creates chaos and utter terror within some mining companies and corporate interests as it brings to centre stage the real truth of the Bitcoin protocol and exposes the big secret that miners and some too influential or even malevolent players in Bitcoin just do not want to be revealed, and that is where the real power and leverage of Bitcoin lies, with the users not the miners… This is the dirty little secret that I feel has been exposed and blown wide open these last few months and this will fundamentally change how Bitcoin and its governance is understood and analyzed going forward…

Bitcoin – A Brief Guide To Factions

Bitcoin is now eight years long and the first generation of Bitcoin operations and operators are now firmly entrenched, from core developers to bitcoin business operators to Bitcoin miners and infrastructure, and naturally these differing factions will have differing ideas and opinions on the direction and future of Bitcoin, so there is bound to be friction and collision of ego’s and financial interests on what is best for Bitcoin…

For example a significant amount of Bitcoin’s mining community is pushing for big blocks (whether it be Bitcoin Cash or SegWit2x) because a larger block size means more transactions means more bitcoin fees that go to miners, and thus scaling is resolved by on chain block enlargement which hurts security and the average user (and miner) in many ways and undermines the decentralized nature of Bitcoin’s blockchain, but it seems all the miners see is the blockchain itself…

A significant minority of Bitcoin’s business sector signed up to the New York Agreement to back SegWit2x as a “compromise” to placate developer and miner factions of Bitcoin and then sought to claim that it was this “Agreement” that has led to SegWit activation and that the UASF had nothing to do with it! Bitcoin’s business faction while always seeking some degree of control, overall care more about making money and so they will always seek the middle lane and halfway house in terms of scaling so that they get as little disruption and delays as threat to their wealth as possible, and if this UASF has demonstrated one thing at least in the last two months of fractious social media debate and opinion, it has opened the eyes of many within this space to the arrogance and cluelessness of many of Bitcoin businesses top CEO’s, and the backlash to the New York Agreement and corporate compromise of Bitcoin has I hope and believe shook up corporate Bitcoin and steeled user attitudes to be highly suspicious of the motives of any established business or media outlet within Bitcoin, the only lesson of history is business that gains control becomes big business with no controls, and backroom deals brokered by a few rich men in suits in private meetings on behalf of everybody else is not a future in Bitcoin I want to see…

The other major faction that I would lump together are the average user and the developer community in general, and while these groups are far from monolithic and do not uniformly share the same visions and goals (see BitcoinCash UAHF and proposed SegWit2x UAHF), the vast majority of users and developers utilize the Bitcoin Core protocol and software applications, the same core developer protocol and software that has gotten us here after the last eight year slog… Bitcoin users and core developers are on the whole intrinsically conservative with a libertarian bent and will fight to preserve the status quo that has got them this far and have more than anything an incentive to fight against the corporate power grab of both Bitcoin businesses and mining business factions… Users will naturally tend to believe and be influenced by the mostly volunteer and unpaid core developers (although there is now growing attention being brought on some of the core devs that work for companies and businesses within Bitcoin and their corporate backers), and it is this influence that led to the threat of UASF that finally got us SegWit, so we can get more to the nub of what the UASF actually was…

UASF – Users Assert Sovereignty Over Bitcoin

As has just been demonstrated over the last few months in the propaganda war for the future direction of Bitcoin, a small minority of Bitcoin users have pledged their trust and resources in favour of Bitcoin core developers, they have shot down the “compromises” of the pliable and increasingly corrupt minority of first generation of bitcoin businesses, and shot down the big blocker attempt of some mining cartels in increasingly centralizing on chain scaling solutions, and have instead voted by running their nodes for core developers and software and their vision for Bitcoin’s future which is conservative scaling solutions to Bitcoin on chain scaling and for optimizing off chain scaling solutions that will take innovation and development into second layer effects such as lightning networks (micropayment layer) and drive-chains (smart contract layer)… By forcing the miners to activate SegWit users have spoken on their future vision of Bitcoin, the decentralization and removal of development from on chain to off chain that will lead to an interesting next twelve months of what happens in Bitcoin…

Bitcoin Cash – The Miner Fork

Bitcoin Cash although an User Activated Hard Fork was heavily backed by sections of Bitcoin’s mining community as a big block alternative to Bitcoin Core, and is currently approximately 5% of Bitcoin’s market cap and currency value, so keeping an eye on Bitcoin Cash, its development team and user base to see how it performs the next few months and how it will survive having forked off from Bitcoin proper will be interesting, and may well serve as an invaluable guide for further future planned forks (Are you watching closely SegWit2x?)…

SegWit2x – The Corporate Fork

Another User Activated Hard Fork due in November 2017 will be the SegWit2x proposed hard fork supported by the big Bitcoin corporations and non-core developer team that will seek to double the blocksize as the method of scaling, diluting Bitcoin into a possible third fork that again will need to be monitored to gauge its success, and only at this time will we be able to gauge if a minority of Bitcoin corporations will have the balls to actually follow through on their “agreements” and remove backward compatibility to core developers, software, infrastructure, user base and roughly $70 BILLION in network effect, or will they capitulate to core’s version of Bitcoin when the propaganda war is unleashed? Maybe the first generation of corporations which Bitcoin has made filthy rich have become so deluded that they think that what is good for them is the good of Bitcoin? Well they are about to find out (mostly through social media, LOL) how corporate control over reach is viewed in a distributed and a painfully direct democracy… Follow the circus on Twitter!

SegWit – User And Core Developer Fork

It is perfectly possible for Bitcoin Cash and SegWit2x to gain some measure of acceptance following and community and user base, but as the longest and most trusted and original Bitcoin (Trade Mark and Brand), the Core Bitcoin protocol post SegWit activation will still be by and far the most popular and valuable Bitcoin out there and so this increasingly looks as the beginning of a great schism between Users/Core Devs and Businesses and Miners (and users and devs), leading to new opportunities for second generation miner and business enterprises to disrupt and replace the old order of increasingly entrenched interests attempting to hard fork the future of Bitcoin… Maybe this cathartic multi fork period is exactly what was required to clean out the mining and corporate interests who care more about money, power and control of Bitcoin than its future as a decentralized peer to peer ledger and monetary system to end the central bank enslaved matrix destroying the world around us…

SegWit And Scaling Bitcoin – What Users And Developers Can Expect

What SegWit means for Bitcoin (H/T @Beautyon)

After all the disinformation and the FUD of the last couple of years of conception and development of SegWit, it would be prudent to give a brief description of the capabilities that can be delivered following this Bitcoin upgrade… SegWit was developed as a fix for transaction malleability that has been a plague to Bitcoin network users and businesses as it has been used to cause confusion, persistent spamming and DDOS attacks by targeting and malleating the transaction signature, thus by removing the signature from the block (segregating the witness or signature) transaction malleability is nearly entirely solved… As the transaction signature can also take up to 75% of a block’s capacity, segregating or removing the witness will also increase the effective blocksize to between 2.2 and 2.5 megabyte (the current blocksize is fixed at 1 megabyte) so SegWit is more than a 2x increase in transaction capacity while not changing the actual blocksize at all… SegWit is a substantial on chain scaling increase while also solving many of the issues around malleability and so Bitcoin users can expect faster transactions, lower fees while also significantly increasing the cost of spamming attacks against the network in general and burning even more resources of those involved in trying to fool the community into bigger blocks… We will find out soon enough…

SegWit And Upgrading Version Scripts

Another part of the Segwit Upgrade is an upgrading of version scripts that allows the more flexible upgrading of the Bitcoin core software through soft forks as opposed to previously through hard forks, and so this increases the scope of what can be done with the underlying ossifying and limited core software… If you have followed the fight for SegWit then you will understand how difficult it is has been to get the miners to soft fork the upgrade and how difficult it is in general to obtain consensus because of Bitcoin’s leaderless structure, and so you might think that any soft forking upgrade from here on in will be another long hard and possibly fruitless endeavour… However the leverage within Bitcoin I would suggest has decidedly shifted from Bitcoin’s mining and corporate factions toward the user and developer factions, and it is they that will now have far more control and leverage over the future of Bitcoin’s direction, and that I would argue is how it should be…

As opposed to the financial incentives of businesses and corporations and miners who will naturally seek to control the direction of Bitcoin for their own benefit that is nearly always antithetical to the average user and Core developer vision of the future of Bitcoin, that of on chain security and stability, and the immutable, decentralizing and censor resistant properties of Bitcoin to ward off attempts to centralize it by vested interests… More importantly the last six months of Bitcoin development also makes it pretty clear how user and developer sovereignty can be exercised as has just been demonstrated with SegWit… You merely have to dangle the User Activated Soft Fork leverage in front of the rival factions within Bitcoin and the majority will sooner or later capitulate rather than threaten a contentious split of Bitcoin as the majority of Bitcoin businesses and miners have a lot more vested interest and capital tied up in the success of Bitcoin than your average user or developer who only holds the currency… For that reason I believe that following SegWit’s activation the speed of innovation of Bitcoin on chain development will now be accelerated and in my opinion the next frontier for radical innovation on Bitcoin is in privacy, anonymity and fungibility…

SegWit And On Chain Privacy Development

A noticeable trend of the last few weeks has been the pyrrhic proclamations of law enforcement to be cracking down on crypto-currency black markets as most glaringly seen with the take down of Alpha Bay and Hansa dark net and illicit drug sites, and of Bitcoin exchange BTC-E that had allegedly been used to launder billions through Bitcoin since 2011, so US spooks and enforcement goons along with the EUSSR’s Interpol goon squad are gearing up efforts to both shut down illicit activities and laundering on Bitcoin and to ramp up surveillance, both of which I have predicted in past posts and in which I also predicted that privacy development would have to ramp up on Bitcoin, as this game of cat and mouse will inevitably ramp up as the market cap and value of Bitcoin and crypto-currencies in general will increase the threat to the REAL worldwide criminal networks, the US Petrodollar and EuroDollar constructs of the financially and morally bankrupt Western ruling crime dynasties and elites…

Now that SegWit is about is about to activate, then I expect that privacy and anonymity will become the new obsession and holy grail of Bitcoin development over the next year or two, and the SegWit software upgrade aligned with the shift in leverage from corporations and miners to users and developers, with Bitcoin’s future moves further away from dystopian surveillance and enslavement and toward utopian anonymity, privacy and liberty… With this race for privacy now on, here are some of the features and upgrade as regards to Bitcoin’s ON CHAIN privacy in the next 12 to 18 months, and possibly far sooner:

CoinJoin – Combining Bitcoin transactions to obfuscate trails and increase privacy and fungibility… This privacy and fungibility enhancing technology will be significantly more feasible and lower cost following SegWit implementation allowing Schnorr Signatures, increasing transaction scaling and privacy…

TumbleBit – Bitcoin on chain tumbler service which mixes coins and obfuscates links between transaction addresses, effectively laundering Bitcoins, and again SegWit will severely enhance the scalability and lower the fees and costs of TumbleBit…

Confidential Transactions – Using cryptographic tricks and ring signatures to hide certain information within Bitcoin transactions from on chain surveillance attempts…

MimbleWimble – How a Stripped-Down Version of Bitcoin Could Improve Privacy, Fungibility and Scalability All at Once

SegWit And Off Chain Scalability And Privacy

As much as SegWit increases Bitcoin’s on chain flexibility for many more enhancements in scalability, privacy and fungibility, SegWit arguably does far more for Bitcoin’s scalability, privacy and fungibility off the chain, and this introduces the concept of promissory networks or otherwise stated pegging external transactions to Bitcoin’s secure and immutable underlying network effect… For a similar analogy in the world of physical money, I would compare gold or silver as the underlying wealth in a monetary system, and second layer solution being the banking system that leveraged the underlying monetary base of physical precious metals with paper money, or promissory credit notes for the underlying money that scales as a more efficient medium of exchange… As paper was cheaper and more efficiently sub-divided for medium of exchange and unit of account purposes than gold or silver coins or bars, off chain second layer solutions in Bitcoin such as Lightning Networks scale virtually anonymous, instantaneous, near zero cost transactions while only having minimal contact with Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain… Lightning Networks are essentially smart contract applications that utilize three basic technologies on Bitcoin’s blockchain, multisignature (multisig) that distributes trust and risk over multiple decentralized parties as opposed to one centralized counter-party (e.g a bank), CheckLockTimeVerify and CheckSequenceVerify which allows temporal promissory or smart contracts (based in time) on the underlying network, and HashLockTimeContracts… What these elements contribute to is allowing payment channels and transactions in time, anchored by Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain and prohibiting or rendering mute fractional reserve payments that has plagued the banking industry and its account holders over the last five centuries and instituting a Full Reserve Banking concept with payment channels requiring anchoring transactions on the Bitcoin main chain for both opening and closing payment channels, any payments in between (that could be tens, or hundreds, or thousands) are processed off chain, severely increasing privacy (no transactions would be visible on Bitcoin’s blockchain) while also reducing the amount of low cost and micro transactions processed by Bitcoin reducing on chain congestion and improving speed of transaction processing, reducing mempool bloat and lowering fees…

These second layer scaling solutions which will be an easily downloadable Bitcoin app (like today’s mobile or PC Bitcoin wallets) that will contribute greatly to scaling Bitcoin more as a medium of exchange and unit of account as well as a store of value, and as we still are in Bitcoin’s first Act of currency speculation, scaling Bitcoin as an instantaneous and near zero cost payment channel will make transacting in Bitcoin far more attractive for both producer and consumer, and will likely be pioneered and heavily used in the current currency test cases for Bitcoin, the dark market drug and illicit goods trade, but would also eventually extend to Bitcoin’s perceived achilles’ heel, that of buying a cup of coffee as convenient and quick and cheap as Visa, Paypal or Cash… This scaling of Bitcoin as low cost medium of exchange would also increase the economic backing and value of Bitcoin (goods and services being exchanged directly in Bitcoin) would also increase the demand for and therefore increase the price of an unit of currency which would benefit all holders of currency, increasing Bitcoin mining revenues to more than offset what the miners would lose in on chain transaction fees now that transactions are off chain, so everyone will gain from second layer scaling solutions and Bitcoin can transition from Act I (currency speculation and store of value) into Act II as medium of exchange and unit of account for bartered (exchanged) goods, services and labour…

SegWit And Smart Contracts (Act III – Exchange Of Property And Private Contracts)

As described above micro transaction payment channels utilize smart contracts, but micro transactions and medium of exchange status is only the first and obvious application of smart contracts, another future and far bigger boon for Bitcoin market cap and currency value in the long run will be the development of smart contracts (drive-chains, sidechains) for assets and property, and in conjunction with uploading property deeds (car, land, house, etc) will lead to the exchange of property and a decentralized legal system, asset ledger and registry for private property worldwide, and with big ticket items such as automobiles, real estate, capital goods and businesses now bought and sold in Bitcoin and thus backing Bitcoin’s blockchain, one can only imagine how much a demand this would drive for only 21,000,000 bitcoins in the future… And while this development maybe a few years in the future currently, you should at least consider this when gauging the future success and reach of other altchains and coins that Bitcoin’s network would be competing for… The last year of SegWit blocking and scaling stagnation has seen the rise of many competing alternative blockchains and currencies that have been pumped up as the new and improved Bitcoin, such as Litecoin in the realm of micro transactions and Ethereum in the realm of smart contracts and ICO launchpad… If Bitcoin can scale micro transactions sooner and smart contracts and coin offerings later while working from a far more secure and mainstream blockchain and currency than either Litecoin or Ethereum, then are Litecoin and Ethereum short term flashes in the pan or long term sustainable and credible opposition? Time will tell…

Conclusion

Bitcoin is an open source piece of software that is and always has been open to change… The shadowy programmer and possibly the greatest genius in human history with the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto first imagined then created this open source peer to peer value transfer protocol, he released this software and nurtured and maintained Bitcoin until he determined that it was sufficiently developed and had enough developers and user community for it to survive out in the wild, then Satoshi disappeared into the ether leaving this experiment in our hands, an open source and open ended pliable protocol that would never be moulded by a single individual or group of controllers or rulers (and unique among hundreds of centrally controlled alternative blockchains and currencies)… Satoshi decided that the future and direction of Bitcoin was not down to him, but down to everyone except him, and why Bitcoin evokes so many different meanings and things to so many different people… To rabid and radical cypher punks and Libertarians Bitcoin is a decentralized ledger and monetary system for individual liberty and private property and best hope to destroy the bankster matrix that feeds the tentacles of the unhinged and degenerate modern state and ideology, to enlightened Austrian economists (a rare phenomenon in a world of Misesian Regression Theorem and “Intrinsic Value” religionists) it the best and most purest and beautiful demonstration of free market economics and decentralized governance structures and invisible hands, of voluntary co-operation and open competition in the field of value communication and privately (or publicly) issued currency through Public Key Cryptography, and so to the liberty minded Bitcoin is our best hope for ending money printing, inequality, welfare, warfare and the psychological war and social engineering that is currently destroying Western Civilization… For blind and clueless gold bugs Bitcoin is a dystopian ponzi scheme created by banksters and intelligence spooks to enslave humanity in a cashless gulag while having no “intrinsic value” unlike the bankster controlled gold standard they all yearn for its “inevitable” return… For mainstream economists Bitcoin’s quaint use of economic scarcity of issue and increasing purchasing power and dreaded deflation brings back painful memories of the evil gold standard that plunged the world into the great depression, and therefore cannot possibly compete with centrally planned fiat currencies… For a minority of Bitcoin miners and businesses it is a tool to concentrate corporate power and consolidation of vested interests that they believe they have a right to after contributing so much to the rise of Bitcoin over this last decade… Bitcoin is indeed all of the above, depending on which faction you believe in and belong to in the informational propaganda war that modern life has become…

All the factions that are working to credit or discredit Bitcoin from inside and outside have their own ideas and dogma, and Satoshi would not have had it any other way, so this is the real genius of Bitcoin, that its future is not predetermined or destined, yet… Bitcoin’s future can be liberty or slavery, utopian or dystopian, this is down to the individual user and node to decide in this communal monetary experiment and the purest form of direct democracy the world has ever seen… As we are currently seeing the meltdown of both public and corporate mainstream propaganda, governments and the central banking and financial systems in general, I don’t think that Bitcoin by this stage can or will be controlled or destroyed from outside, but it can still be destroyed from the inside, the community that Satoshi left to its own devices and destiny is now counted in hundreds of thousands or millions, so to try and control or destroy Bitcoin you must first have at least skin in the game, directly or indirectly… All the diverse views of hundreds of thousands of people within Bitcoin can be distilled into factions, and to selective dogma and propaganda in controlling the future narrative of “Satoshi’s Vision” and “what is best for Bitcoin”, and is roughly distributed into miners, corporations, users and developer factions…

What the last two years have been within Bitcoin is an internecine struggle that has escalated and reached its short term conclusion in the last six months, and to be sure the struggle was over a libertarian or authoritarian future, with the earliest cypher punks and libertarian oriented users and supporting a decentralized and privacy focused blockchain (with second layer solutions) as is the vision of most of Bitcoin’s Core developers and the libertarian user base in general, Bitcoin’s mining and corporate start ups who support bigger blocks and on chain surveillance (which makes you wonder who is ultimately behind some of these Bitcoin start ups) and would move Bitcoin toward centralization and increasing control by vested interests which is the history of any monetary system over time, Bitcoin is no different… In 2015 we had Bitcoin XT, in 2016 we had Bitcoin Classic, and in 2017 we have already had Bitcoin Cash, with a further SegWit2x hardfork and altchain to come as per the New York Agreement… For the last year we have had big blocker propaganda to try and sway the average Bitcoin user, we have had targeted and surgical spamming of Bitcoin’s network with low value transactions to create the illusion of full capacity and mempool bloat that could only be solved by a bigger block size, while blocking SegWit as a scaling solution developed by the core developer faction to increase block size without increasing the blocksize and without the need to hard fork while also weaponizing low cost anonymous second layer solutions, another reason I think SegWit has been blocked and why again you have to ask the question of who would want to block Bitcoin privacy and fungibility upgrades?

After eight long years it seems Bitcoin has reached its crossroads… While the big blockers and compromizing corporate interests move toward Bitcoin as a competitor to Visa and Paypal through BitcoinCash and SegWit2x and ultimately altcoin obscurity as these are forking off new chains and coins that have no backwards compatability to Bitcoin, the brand, the market cap, the currency value, the hardware and software infrastructure and network effect of the last eight years, the libertarian fringe of developers and users who propagated, threatened and ran BIP148 nodes got the future we desire not by contentious hard fork but by the consensus of a Miner Activated Soft Fork, therefore maintaining the roots and tradition of Bitcoin history of governance by agreement of all factions on the future of Bitcoin… SegWit takes Bitcoin further down the path of decentralization, of privacy and anonymity, it dis-intermediates a lot of on chain transactions and surveillance possibilities and leverages them off chain and away from prying eyes… The Libertarians took back Bitcoin, the average user and voter in this decentralized governance have asserted their democracy in guiding Bitcoin’s future… Skin In The Game…

Bitcoin Donations Gratefully Received:

1FmtrmYu3b4kAbezwVudpXbi5fHSP9kGLH