I had written my prior post at ~10pm for me after being awake since 6am which is means I could barely hold my eyes open (recovering from liver disease at age 52 is like this). Upon awaking, I added the following to my prior post (because I was thinking about what I had written while laying in bed) before I read your comment:


Your research (I had not had time/energy recently to go back over the Trilema) seems to indicate that an attack taking BTC back to 1MB with Satoshi’s protocol might still be a possibility. Or as I was thinking recently, maybe such an attack removes SegWit (by stealing it so no one wants to run SegWit clients anymore) while adopting a larger block size. I doubt the TRB supporters would object to a reasonable increase in the block size, if it enabled the destruction of SegWit.

And I can contemplate that Jihan Wu may just be using BCH to gain more TRB (aka BTCSatoshi) in the end game (which was my original theory). When and if BTCSegWit is attacked with a rollback stealing all the SegWit booty (and my theory about possibly double-spending derivatives of BTC that had been spent by the attacking miners for buying BCH but not other BTC spent since ~Aug 4 where they do not have your private key), then presumably BCH will skyrocket enabling the attacking miner cartel to trade BCH for TRB at fire sale prices to reset a new bull market in the future. A pump of BCH could possibly start before any such attack.

My thought/theory this morning is that an illusion of consensus around BTCSegWit is I posit based on the fact that everyone who disagrees has STFU waiting for SegWit to blow up. Why not reap the benefits of the pump in the price first. I’m thinking that community consensus is tenuous and loses any foundation when the security flaws of SegWit become apparent in an emergency scenario wherein talking about community directed paths forward is impractical because that insecure trash would be under active attack. Additionally as I stated, I believe mostly only minnows supported SegWit and any whales who have been hoodwinked by Blockstream will quickly get a re-education about reality, wake up, and adopt a sane strategy that Bitcoin has no lasting value if it continues to fork-off. All contentious forks should fail, which means SegWit, BCH, and everything fails, then TRB wins. Of course those who want transaction volume scaling are appalled by such a proposition, but Bitcoin does not need transaction volume scaling in order for the crypto ecosystem to scale. The altcoins will provide the volume scaling and Bitcoin is the reserve currency and widescale unit-of-account that provides economic scaling. Destroying the security of Bitcoin to add dubious Rube Goldberg-ish offchain volume scaling does not make any sense (other than as a deception to pump up the price and enable the whales to buy back at fire sale prices and steal a lot of BTC from fools).

As I said, I do not have any particular affinity for BCH (or even TRB), but I will not continue to use BTC while that SegWit crap is on it. I will transition to holding a different token as my reserve currency (unless I can find a reliable way to buy and sell BTC without the BTC ever having SegWit nor BTC spent for BCH in its lineage). No way I am going to hold as a reserve currency a coin which an insecure transaction format which creates a massive booty incentivizing miners to fork off and steal it. And which alienates whales who want security to be the first priority. The ecosystem depends on BTC to be secure, as it is used for everything from holding ICO funds raised to being the backing for exchanges, etc.. Blockstream looks to me to be an intentionally planted Trojan Horse (even the devs might be oblivious to their role). Possibly that behind the curtain, the financiers of Bitmain are the same financiers of Blockstream, employing an Hegelian dialectic (aka manufactured crisis or false flag) to achieve their aims of aggregating most of the BTC on the mountain in Israel. (okay the conspiracy angle isn’t required, just a thought)


They expect the miners to steal the SegWit booty once it becomes large enough to finance a long-range reorganization of the BTC chain.

There seems to be some misunderstanding by some n00bs who think incorrectly that this means most BTC will be stolen. No. Only those foolish enough to send or accept SegWit transactions, and per my other theory, perhaps those who purchase BTC which has a BTC -> BCH trade in its lineage (which might possibly mean obtaining Bitcoin from exchanges is risky).

The attacking miners can’t steal that which they do not have private keys for. SegWit is different because ”pays to script hash” which means pay to anyone and the miner decides (if viewed from a Satoshi protocol immutability perspective).

The inability of 51% attack to steal is fundamental to Bitcoin security and SegWit breaks that. That so many n00bs do not understand this is IMO evidence of Blockstream’s deception.

I posit that Bitmain is a likely the player to orchestrate this, but perhaps in a surreptitious (plausible deniability) manner. Tangentially, I note @Dorky wrote he thinks the financiers of Bitmain may be in Israel, based on some news story he read.

Note Trilema is against centralization and they have been discussing a new hash function which employs an unbounded amount of DRAM memory to defeat ASICs, but afaics they are incorrect. That can’t be employed because it can be DDoSed to hell and/or asymmetrical advantage to miners who have more DRAM than other miners. Their technical acumen may not be as high as their boastfulness, although they do have some very smart guys over there. Blockstream apparently has some smart mathematicians, cryptographers and engineers (e.g. more expert than me in their specific areas of focus). But IMO those guys were given the wrong set of goals (e.g. transaction voluming scaling) and they lack adequate peer review on game theory and mechanism design. They’re moving too fast and in the wrong direction and they also do not adopt the K.I.S.S. principle. Bitcoin was designed by uber high IQ individuals with man-decades invested in design and modelling. It was not some Japanese guy in his garage who created Bitcoin.


Hey I appreciate the frank feedback and discussion. That is how we try to arrive at the truth. But sorry I do not see how you can claim you are objective.

BTCSegWit is not the same protocol as BTCSatoshi (aka TRB = The Real Bitcoin). Do you deny this fact?

My understanding is that SegWit creates transactions that when viewed from Satoshi’s protocol are “pay to anyone”. Do you deny this?

Since version 0.5.3, the same key developers who now mostly work for Blockstream have hijacked the protocol and added complexity and possibly insecure experiments without economic feedback from the whales. I argue that the economic feedback (slap down) is coming and it will be very harsh on those who fail to understand that SegWit is an altcoin. Up until SegWit it was apparently basically possible to run a TRB (v0.5.4) client and pretty much side-step the crap that Blockheads have done to basterdize Bitcoin. But SegWit crossed the line of no return in terms of the whales needing to take action. So I think this is why BCH was created as the leverage for what is coming.

Perhaps I am entirely mistaken about the level of immovable whale support for SegWit. And perhaps I am mistaken about the propensity for a mining cartel attack on the SegWit booty. That is why I said, I am not even 80% sure that any of this will transpire. But my popcorn is ready.  


P.S. note what prompted the creation of this thread was a thread in Altcoin Discussion about BCH bleeding to death and I was concerned that n00bs were going to sell all their BCH without having all arguments presented to them. So I decided to create a poll here in Speculation so that we can all collect the community thinking on this issue. Other than those who want to politicize this issue and will use any tactics they can to belittle discussion, I think most readers are interested in open and civil discussions. That is presuming we are mature adults around here. Ban then LTC goes from $6 to $80 as predicted. Ban again then the SegWit attack occurs as predicted?


EDIT: it should be pointed out that miners have an incentive to support a non-segwit chain even if there is no chain reorganization, because they can attempt to take that ongoing SegWit value for themselves, because as viewed from Satoshi’s protocol, this is a “pay to anyone” transaction. A chain reorganization is a way to capture historic booty and lock miners into the fork with the incentive of the booty to jumpstart the consensus around taking SegWit for the miners. So it is not quite accurate to state that SegWit requires a contentious fork. It merely requires that miners act in their best interests to protect Satoshi’s protocol and the immutability and security of Bitcoin for the maximum long-term value of their hardware investment, as well as maximizing their profit in the short-term. SegWit supporters argue that this is an attack on the community, but rather SegWit enemies argue it a protection against the SegWit attack on Bitcoin.

Another very important factor to consider is that I explained why the miners are owned by the whales and others explained that mining is a horrible business to be in unless you have a plan for world domination. Tie that together with my exposition on why proof-of-work has to become run by a mining oligarchy else it fails to converge as transaction fees increase. Then you can analyse who is into mining and why.