Response to Matthew Kratters new role as a shitcoin shill

In the spirit of honest review and consideration of different views, I just watched this defence of what I consider the new shitcoin, BCashJr from Mat Kratter.

Mathew definitely deserves his qualification in English literature, achieving a PhD in it, as he is definitely a good orator and very articulate. If anyone was going to make a good case for someone who’s been an avid Bitcoin maxi to now a shitcoin shill, it would be him. But he does make a few good points in this video I wanted to raise, as it they are good questions, and worthy of consideration, before I’ll give my idea of a rebuttal to his case.

“If making a hard fork against malicious miners constitutes a shitcoin, then when or how would we ever use that option?” This is the kind of question that should cause one to really think about this, as what Luke et al did isn’t by definition a ‘wrong thing to do’. What made it wrong was the justification for it. There is a phrase in Arabic كلمة حق أريد به الباطل A statement of truth that one intends by it falsehood

What drew many to the bip110 side, I believe (which includes myself by the way, for full transparency) is the idea that it is us (node runners) against them (the miners) and the miners are supposed to do what we say. We are the ones that gave them the job, the ones that validate their blocks and subsequently they get paid. This narrative appealed to all node runners, gave us inspiration and power that we were, by running a node, doing something significant and powerful. It wasn’t just the miners who spend millions of dollars on bills, wages, infrastructure, hardware and other commitments, it’s also us; who spun up a node for $400 4 years ago and uses $34.65 of electricity each year to keep it running. But on the lead up to the event of 8/8, I began to start seeing things differently, and I would say, see things as they are. It’s not about the node runners, or the miners, it’s about everyone. And there’s a lot of us. Let’s go through the list:

We have the node runners. But they aren’t all one blob. Some nodes are run by miners, some by companies, some by service providers, some by governments and finally all of us. Every one of them holds Bitcoin, sends Bitcoin, receives Bitcoin, and use their nodes for various things. Decisions about Bitcoin affect all of those people, and often these financial decisions have a trickle down effect to others. Individual node runners only have to consider themselves, but lightning router nodes also have to consider their partners who they have channels with. Governments and companies have to consider what their constituents and customers want, or dont want. Miners, we all know them. They don’t dictate to everyone else what Bitcoin is, as they have to take their mining rewards and sell it to someone else. Will they take their coin or not? Such questions means that miners are beholden to those they have to sell the Bitcoin to, and ultimately determines how much fiat they will get for their coin.

Exchanges, and they have to answer to their customers. They have to answer to the law, and they can’t sell people BCashJr coin and tell them its Bitcoin and visa versa. So they have things to consider.

And the list goes on, at every level of the tree. So it’s not just ‘the miners decide’. Miners cannot decide.

So the return back to that question “how do we, node runners, resist miners colluding?” Is a false premise. What makes Bitcoin such an unstoppable force is that what it is is almost impossible to change, and can only happen if ALL of the constituents of Bitcoin users agree to the change. That INCLUDES moving policy rules for OP_RETURN into consensus.

Now to be clear, I’m not against the specific changes that were proposed in BIP110, be it the OP_RETURN limits etc, but what is clear is that there was no consensus around that change. It’s as simple as that. It wasn’t that miners didn’t want it, the fact is MOST PEOPLE didn’t want it. As a personal node runner, that nuance may be lost on you, but for someone who engages in the Bitcoin industry, from a high value lightning node runner, Bitcoin programmer or service provider, exchange company, whoever…very FEW showed any interest in changing Bitcoin. That’s it. It doesn’t require a conspiracy to see that fact. You just have to speak to anyone outside the BIP110 bubble to see it.

So in conclusion, I would say that Matt Kratter raised a good point. When would be a good time to resist bad miners? And I would say, it would happen when miners try to sell their coin. When they try to interact with the wider community. They will find that their ‘changed Bitcoin’ is simply not what everyone else considers Bitcoin. As long as miners cannot force YOU, or any company to run a node or interact with their new network, then there really isn’t much miners can do. And if some miners misbehaved, it won’t only be the small scale node runners who resist, it would be everyone up the stack.

So I wish the BCashjr’s out there all the luck with their new coin, and if it’s cheap and mineable on a desktop, I might even mine a few coins. But the reality is, theres simply no demand or market for it and I suspect they will find that out soon enough. If they were asking me, I would suggest they scrap all the history and start again, because the same people and institutions they wish to fight against, by definition have a huge bag of their coin, and I assume they will dump the crap out of it and render it even more worthless than we all know it is.

The fact is, the value of Bitcoin is contained in the network of users who use it, and nobody wants to move it to an entirely new coin thats going to be offline for the next month or so.