Nostr Web Client

The Blocksize War wasn’t a grassroots victory. It was Jihan Wu vs everyone else.

He fought SegWit to protect ASICBoost, tried to bully consensus with hashpower, launched Bitcoin Cash when he didn’t get his way — and lost. Not because the arguments beat him, but because the economics eventually did.

He bet against fee pressure, bet on bigger blocks, and thought miners should dictate the protocol. Turns out the real power came from exchanges and infrastructure — the economic layer that refused to follow him off the cliff.

So when Jonathan Bier says “the users won,” he should’ve added a giant fucking asterisk:

*Users = Bitfinex, Coinbase, Kraken, major wallet providers, and infrastructure operators. Not your uncle’s Raspberry Pi node.

It wasn’t node count. It wasn’t Reddit sentiment.

It was the fact that economically significant nodes aligned with small-block Core, and miners followed the money.

The grassroots didn’t win. They got lucky that the economic layer agreed with them. Some revisionist history will be required once “users” learn this truth the hard way as the current drama unfolds.

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DagzTagz 7mo ago

💯 also an important point is that 2017 was a much different era regarding PoR

Remember the 2019 “were going to use merkle trees reserves” wasn’t until later that we got some zk SNARKS style

Exchanges held so much soft power in 2017- whether that money was really there or not… we’ll never know

Thanks FTX? 🤷🏼‍♀️

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Discussion

Eric FJ 🪬⚡️ 7mo ago

Thanks FTX 😂

Hodlings aren’t really a powerful lever tho… unless you’re planning on dumping and tanking the value of the chain split you don’t agree with or something like that.

Really hard to see the upside of that for exchanges especially since they are incentivized to be neutral.

Even if they didn’t have what they say they had (I agree likely in many cases) the real power was in controlling the settings of the transaction flows.

But let’s talk about POR merkle roots in OP_RETURN..