Cypherpunk ethos.

*Feel free to ignore, I just want to sign for this with redundant sets of keys for the future*

Based on her recent posts, @AstrayaNthemoon (who goes by "gel") appears to hold a staunchly pro-consensus, privacy-centric view of Bitcoin that aligns with the "small blocker" philosophy from the 2017 scaling debates. At its core, her stance criticizes "big blockers"—those who advocated for increasing Bitcoin's block size to handle more transactions on-chain—for prioritizing their vision over established network consensus, which she sees as a fundamental betrayal of Bitcoin's decentralized ethos. In her words, the issue wasn't the theoretical merits of dynamic block sizes but rather that big blockers "chose to reject majority consensus and fragment the network" once it became clear through software adoption (primarily Bitcoin Core with SegWit) that the majority favored a different path. This led to the Bitcoin Cash fork, where she emphasizes that merchants played a pivotal role by refusing to honor the new chain's hash trail, declaring they would not accept "that coin." For her, this underscores a key principle: Bitcoin's integrity relies on alignment between miners (who produce blocks) and merchants (who validate and accept the coin), as "someone mines the coin and someone accepts the coin, and those people control the network."

This position isn't isolated; it ties into her broader cypherpunk ideology, where Bitcoin is inherently "censorship resistant" and designed as "black market money" rather than a sanitized, regulated asset. She argues that attempts to impose filters or "standardness" rules—such as mempool policies that reject non-standard transactions—create a false sense of security and fragment users' observation of the chain, ultimately undermining its resilience. "Filters don’t work," she asserts, warning that they give "the illusion of a safe chain" while enabling potential collusion among miners and merchants to censor transactions, blurring the line between privacy and consensus. In her view, privacy isn't a bolt-on feature but "the entire point" of Bitcoin, and any mechanism that separates it from core consensus risks disturbing the network's foundational censorship resistance.

She praises figures like @callebtc for embodying "true cypherpunk" values, such as refusing to run certain nodes (like libbitcoin) not out of disrespect but to preserve unfiltered, raw network interaction.

This extends to her support for diverse node implementations, categorizing the Bitcoin ecosystem into "5 teams"—Core, Knots, libbitcoin, "not gonna node" (perhaps a nod to non-participants or minimalists), and China (likely referring to concentrated mining power)—to highlight the need for distributed, non-collusive control.

Her critique of big blockers also reflects on how the 2017 debate unfolded amid evolving digital landscapes. She notes that censorship was more pervasive back then, with "walled gardens" and algorithmic shadow bans limiting discourse, whereas today, tools like Nostr enable more robust, decentralized discovery of ideas. This has made current discussions feel "different in layers," less susceptible to botnets or artificial amplification that plagued the scaling wars.

She credits @jack (Jack Dorsey) for advancing this shift, quoting him on privacy's centrality and even referencing his skepticism toward Lightning Network as potentially improvable, suggesting she's open to alternatives that better align with on-chain privacy without compromising consensus.

Ultimately, her stance champions Bitcoin as a resilient, privacy-first system where consensus emerges organically from software adoption and economic incentives, not forced forks or top-down impositions. She warns against illusions of control—whether through filters, centralized discourse, or rejected forks—and advocates for a network where nodes are "as far apart as possible" to maximize decentralization.

This positions her as a defender of Bitcoin's original cypherpunk roots, critical of any deviation that fragments the chain or dilutes its resistance to external pressures.