Honestly, while I've always liked this guy, this is a superficial point of view. 10-13 years ago, do you think it didn't occur to people that popular success for bitcoin would inevitably involve most users not understanding, and not *caring* to understand, its deeper philosophy? That if govts started investing, they wouldn't subscribe to cypherpunk philosophy? The point was, and is, that bitcoin needs to be able to keep functioning as intended, even when it is being used by actors that don't believe in those principles.

Another very typical mistake is this assumption that it's failing because nobody uses it. Particularly with Lightning, but not only, it is actually very widely used for payments. It's a big part of my everyday life, so I get sick and tired of every "expert" telling us it's not used. A bit like desktop Linux ...

And the "I want a pony" fantasies of infinitely cheap infinitely private infinitely scalable bitcoin I'll leave aside for now.

thanks for your time bro. by the end of it, you'll be 6

Someone is going to have to explain the Japanese obsession with avoiding the sun to me.

The Almighty will punish you for this.

Even if #vaccines work, which they don't, is it really worth injecting heavy metal salts into every organ when you can just get natural immunity by catching a cold?

This looks like an attack on safety, not just pricing

If you oppose a soft fork and the majority does not actively reject soft forking blocks then you would be the one forking off of the network.

It's the biggest problem facing bitcoin today. Mining centralization is a systemic risk. The thing about systemic risks is that everyone loves to ignore them right up until it blows up in their face.

How many people were concerned about banking centralization leading up to the 2008 mortgage crisis? Just a couple pipsqueaks on the internet and that weird quant from The Big Short. They were fucking right all along, just nobody gave a shit. And then all of a sudden everybody gave a shit when it blew up and the problem became impossible to ignore.

Mining pools today are like mortgage brokers in 2007. The time to act is now. If you disagree, that's fine. Bitcoin is permissionless. Feel free to fork yourself off the network. We are moving forward with or without you.

This is you right now. Don't be that dog.

That's exactly what I'm doing. I'm not stopping until it's activated. We need CTV to fix mining. We need to fix mining to save bitcoin. That's all there is to it.

"It doesn't feel right" is not a technical objection. It has no relevance to the debate.

> I'm not in favor of a consensus to help people who decided to trust their bitcoins with custodial services.

Where do you think new bitcoiners come from? They come from custodial systems. This line of thinking is like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

James O'Bierne makes the point that the most dangerous scenario is thus: the state gives all custodial services 72 hrs notice that they must start enforcing tax laws or surveillance or multisig spending conditions. The actual wording is irrelevent. The real attack is that there is not enough on-chain throughput for all custodial service users to exit to self-custody in time.

It's like a fishing trawler dragging a net across the entire seafloor. The sea creatures simply cannot escape in time so most of them get caught in the net.

CTV solves this problem the same way it solves mining pool payouts. Put any number of payouts in a single tiny transaction on-chain. Users can unroll it later, but crucially, they can escape the custodial system on short notice.

CTV is a prerequisite to vaults but does not alone enable ergonomic vaults.

Vaults are not a threat to bitcoiners. Governments cannot mandate the spending conditions of your self-custodial bitcoin. This is because your wallet software specifies the locking conditions for a UTXO when it creates the receive address. If you use self-sovereign wallet software (you should) then you are not vulnerable to malicious spending conditions injected into your wallet addresses.

If your argument is that governments can force you to use a particular wallet with malicious spending conditions, this is already possible with multisig. It doesn't happen in practice because governments don't need to do that much work. It is FAR easier to push people into custodial systems. Coinbase, Microstrategy, and bitcoin ETFs are the actual attack on bitcoin self-custody, not CTV.

CTV is an extremely useful tool to have in the toolbox. It is safe and brings amazing capabilities to bitcoin script. Quite frankly, we should have activated it on mainnet years ago. The best time to plant a tree is 100 years ago but the second best time is right now.

Let's activate this thing already.