Bitcoin, once again, shows off its anti-fragility.

After the emotional rollercoaster provided by the OP_RETURN debate, it has slowly but steadily dawned on me that I am, in fact, more optimistic than ever before about Bitcoin’s future thanks to the fundamentally anti-fragile behaviour it continues to exhibit.

This whole debate started with Bitcoin Core's nonsensical and clumsy Pull Request published on the 8th of April, 2025. Standing here 36 days later, my honest assessment is that Bitcoin is now more decentralized than it was prior to that date.

We have had an extremely messy and healthy debate, and its tangible outcome is that Bitcoin has decentralized further along a previously problematic dimension: Implementation Alternatives. Bitcoin Knots' market share is rising; I expect it to stabilize around 15-20% of nodes. nostr:npub1qny3tkh0acurzla8x3zy4nhrjz5zd8l9sy9jys09umwng00manysew95gx has published an Open Sats grant for a Bitcoin Knots developer. Most importantly, I have no doubt that in the next 6 months, more implementations will emerge and compete.

This is anti-fragility in action. Bitcoin has demonstrated this again, and while I shouldn’t be surprised at this point, I still can’t help but marvel at it.

Thanks to this meteoric rise of Bitcoin Knots adoption, ironically, as of today, I would argue it is actually slightly harder to get spam accepted by mempools than it was before the pull request was published. This is the market speaking and I believe that's the trend we are ending in.

I have some sympathy for the Bitcoin Core team, as they made a misguided change they clearly thought was minuscule and inconsequential, backed by some technical rationale. Core’s dominance in the implementation space led them to grave complacency around communication.

The problem is not the PR itself, of course, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I completely agree in practice that OP_RETURN Limit is a weak spam filter. The conclusion to that, however, should not have been to remove it, but instead to implement better spam filters, such as those on Bitcoin Knots. Crucially, under no circumstances should user configurability be sacrificed—a direct attack on their sovereignty. Ultimately, Bitcoin Core shipped a shittier product, and now its main competition is gaining traction. People vote with their nodes. The free market works. Bitcoin overall benefits. Anti-fragile.

Bitcoin Core’s PR and how they handled it exposes their underlying problem of tolerating arbitrary data, weakening Bitcoin’s monetary use case. As nostr:npub1wnlu28xrq9gv77dkevck6ws4euej4v568rlvn66gf2c428tdrptqq3n3wr rightly puts it, we had to draw the line somewhere, and it just happened to be around this OP_RETURN issue. Drawing that line was always going to be absolutely arbitrary, and the resistance against OP_RETURN is actually more symbolic than anything else.

The overwhelming majority of my sympathy, however, goes undoubtfully to nostr:npub1s33sw6y2p8kpz2t8avz5feu2n6yvfr6swykrnm2frletd7spnt5qew252p and nostr:npub1wnlu28xrq9gv77dkevck6ws4euej4v568rlvn66gf2c428tdrptqq3n3wr , who have had to spend ungodly amounts of emotional energy for weeks on end to make their points heard, and to get the community to take notice. In essence, it fell on them to set Bitcoin’s anti-fragility process in motion.

The pressure to embody and temporarily become the face of Bitcoin’s anti-fragility fell entropically onto you guys, and you answered the call extremely diligently. I have nothing but praise and admiration for you. In so many ways, Bitcoin is a selfish gene, having absolutely no consideration or empathy for its hosts.

Anti-fragility, as Taleb himself said, is such a hard concept to grasp—the sort of concept you can go your whole life without even knowing exists, yet once you see it, you can’t ever unsee it.

The more we bicker in Bitcoin—and more importantly, the more that bickering forces decisive, opposing actions—the stronger Bitcoin as a whole becomes, the more decentralized Bitcoin becomes. It is so deeply counter-intuitive. Yet this has been achieved here once again.

On an individual level, I have deepened my understanding of Bitcoin’s protocol and its different implementations, and my seamless switch to running Bitcoin Knots now makes me a more sovereign and educated individual. nostr:npub1s33sw6y2p8kpz2t8avz5feu2n6yvfr6swykrnm2frletd7spnt5qew252p and nostr:npub1wnlu28xrq9gv77dkevck6ws4euej4v568rlvn66gf2c428tdrptqq3n3wr might have been the mechanisms through which I achieved this, but it was Bitcoin Core’s lousy decisions that were the actual trigger. As a wise Suddock once said, everything is good for Bitcoin—even the blunders of its most prolific developers.

The ability for individuals to easily run a node is all that matters; it is the fundamental and defining aspect of Bitcoin from which everything else stems, even its scarcity guarantee—something the MSTR fanboys and TradeFi seem to never understand.

I would like to think this latest show of Bitcoin’s anti-fragility is what has enabled the recent 26% price run over the last 30 days. I know this is naive and oversimplified, but you gotta admit it’s comforting.

If you don’t believe that there are over a dozen technical analysts at BlackRock tasked exclusively with monitoring the technical ecosystem from the shadows, you are even more naive than I am. These technical analysts are paid full-time by BlackRock to constantly re-underwrite Bitcoin's technical risks by constantly monitoring the developer landscape. The fact they have raised no alarm bells—but rather appear to have doubled down on their allocation—speaks volumes. Perhaps they reached the same conclusion that I have: somehow, some way, Bitcoin always converges on the most decentralized and anti-fragile path forward.

The more chaos there is, the stronger Bitcoin grows. And the one thing you can take for granted in this universe is chaos.

Bitcoin’s anti-fragility is an “always-on” flywheel, operating quietly in the darkness, usually via the inexorable growth of its hash rate or the merciless issuance of its scheduled supply. But several visible episodes throughout its lifetime have made its anti-fragility property bubble up to the surface, becoming observable to human cognition.

Here are the examples I have in mind (feel free to skip these if you already know them off by heart):

2011: Wikileaks adopted Bitcoin to receive donations out of desperation, without Satoshi’s permission, stress-testing its censorship-resistant properties in the open market. Bitcoin ended up stronger and more decentralized.

2013: Bitcoin was targeted by government intelligence agencies in the Silk Road bust, inadvertently raising awareness about its unstoppable nature. Bitcoin ended up stronger and more decentralized.

2017: Vested interests tried to co-opt Bitcoin by in essence wanting to dilute its mining rewards; users forked off and resisted, destroying (or absorbing?) millions of dollars in capital. Bitcoin ended up stronger and more decentralized.

2021: China’s Communist Party imposed a nation-wide Bitcoin mining ban. Short-term hash rate turbulence occurred, but miners relocated insanely rapidly, spreading out globally. Bitcoin ended up stronger and more decentralized.

2025: Due to this contentious pull request and the internal debate on how to discourage non-monetary transactions, we are beginning to see the earliest signs that Bitcoin will become more resistant to spam transactions in the long term. Bitcoin will end up stronger and more decentralized.

Once more, Bitcoin has shown its irrevocable tendency towards anti-fragility, and though this isn't the first nor the last time this happens, I can’t help but pause and marvel at it in awe. Thanks for taking this pause with me.

Now back to acting. Back to building. Follow your beliefs and turn them into concrete actions. Whichever side you're on, you'll be helping Bitcoin, whether you intend to or not.