Quote from: alani123 on September 04, 2025, 11:55:38 AM

Quote from: BattleDog on September 04, 2025, 10:04:54 AM

Quote from: alani123 on September 03, 2025, 09:34:46 AM

Jack Dorsey has become extravagantly rich from his run with Twitter.
This is a well known fact as Jack himself tends to publicize about his funding grants to various organizations.

In the last few years, his organization initially founded to support bitcoin core development monetarily, spiral.xyz, has become the most major source of funding for bitcoin developers and related events.

The majority of the developers pushing updates for bitcoin core are now directly funded by Jack Dorsey through Spiral.

More recently, some of these Dorsey funded developers openly declared they'll now be running bitcoin development as a lobby. Founding an invite-only bitcoin core developer group by the name of coredev.tech. They even have the nerve to openly announce that invitations are only extended to ideologically aligned developers.

Here's where it gets nasty though:

The upcoming bitcoin core update, so called "Core 30", has already merged some changes that directly benefit Jack Dorsey's corporations.
For one, Square already entered big in the mining game in 2021 by investing 5 million USD:
https://decrypt.co/72930/square-teams-with-blockstream-for-solar-powered-bitcoin-mining-farm

Jack Dorsey has also invested in chip manufacturing and claims to want to fundamentally change bitcoin:
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/jack-dorseys-block-inc-reveals-potential-upgrade-on-industry-standard-bitcoin-mining-rigs/

Well, what better way to instate your own will on an open source project than to directly place your favorite people on top of it?

Jack's vision of bitcoin seems to be full of off-chain transactions. Where he'll be a major player of permissioned "bitcoin payments" through his company. Obviously bitcoin's blockchain is the only way to create truly immutable transactions taking advantage of bitcoin's decentralized infrastructure. But sadly, this can't be monetized. But if the only viable way to transact BTC becomes through permissioned layer 2s like the ones Dorsey is trying to promote, they would have successfully managed to monetize bitcoin for just existing.

Jack was hopeful of also dominating chip manufacturing and even tried to cozy up with the Trump administration touting "American made chips". Thankfully the Trump admin hasn't bought into this fraud (yet).

What could be done from now to prevent this?
If you're a miner ask your pool if they're going to support Core 30. If there's no response, switch to a pool that clearly won't support this craziness.
If you run a node, you can symbolically run bitcoin Knots as an alternative. Mining is what makes a difference so keep in mind that node running is just symbolic.

Funding is not governance. Bitcoin Core changes land only after public review, test coverage, and multiple ACKs from independent reviewers. Maintainers cannot merge consensus changes unilaterally, and miners cannot change your node's rules. If a proposal would alter consensus, it is visible months in advance and dies without broad agreement.

Did you see this public review process being able to protect bitcoin?
The changes were merged and are about to go live. Every miner will probably run core 30 without hesitation.

Now these core devs supporting these changes even started a lobby to develop and make suggestions behind closed doors.

Soon there will be 0 ability by the public to have any say.

What part of bitcoin's development process seems to be public anymore? It's just open source. Not a public process at all. Tell me if I'm wrong.

I hear you, but "Core 30 merged, game over" isn't how Bitcoin works.
A version bump is not a rule change. Releases ship lots of policy/RPC/GUI fixes. Consensus changes require a BIP, months of public review, and an explicit activation mechanism. If you think v30 alters consensus, point to the BIP or PR that flips a rule and we can read it line by line.

"Closed-door lobby" can't merge code. Private workshops happen; the code, tests, and review are on public repos and mailing lists. Maintainers can't slip in a consensus change without everyone seeing it.

You still have a say: run the client you trust, set your own policy, and review. Also, nodes are not symbolic, invalid blocks are ignored no matter who mines them.