Yes, apologies.  What I meant is that some of us are not in favor of a "mandatory migration", but rather an optional one.  To not freeze any coin, but leave them on the fate of their security. 

I don't see anyone proposing a "mandatory migration", nor can I see how this is possible in practice.  You can't force people to migrate to quantum-safe addresses.  You can only point them how to do it, after a soft fork is passed.  The "dilemma" is whether to freeze coins that do not migrate after year 20XY, or leave them in their fate.  I would find many reasons why the former would result in a much worse network that people would lose trust to.  In either case, people who do not get informed about the emerged threat, years into the future, will lose access to their coins, in either case, frozen or not frozen. 

But the bank that holds no bitcoin reserves does not interact with the bitcoin market, and thus, when it sells a "wrapped bitcoin", it doesn't suppress the price in any way.  Whoever takes the promise just plays against the house. 

I wouldn't say they "buy" bitcoin.  When you can't put your bitcoin to a bid or ask, nor can you spend it on-chain to some merchant, then you don't have it, nor can you affect the price howsoever.  You're completely outside the system.  A "promise" of bitcoin is more like a bet that you would put in a broker. 

Let's say that I open up a bitcoin bank, with zero bitcoin, only dollars in reserve, and I sell bitcoin promises.  If these promises can only be redeemed for the bitcoin price at the time the redeemer decides in exchange for dollars, then he's just placing a bet that bitcoin will go up; does not affect bitcoin economy in any way. 

Now let's say that I open up a fractional bitcoin bank, with zero dollars and zero bitcoin in reserve.  For every dollar I get in exchange for bitcoin promise, I only buy 10 cents worth of bitcoin without anyone knowing (practicing fractional reserve, with 10% in reserve in secret).  If I grant my clients the right to withdraw bitcoin promises for real bitcoin, then it's a betting platform for 90% of the coins, and a custodian for 10% of the coins.  (Of course I risk going bitcoin-bankrupt, but let's ignore it for the sake of simplicity.) 

So, essentially, one could claim that clients in those banks are "tricked" into believing they're buying bitcoin, while they're placing a bet on bitcoin, but I'd counter-claim that since they did not withdraw immediately, they weren't looking to buy bitcoin in the first place.  What they would want, is to bet that it will go up. 

Why would you want to get a loan in paper bitcoin, though?  Why not take a loan in paper dollars, and use them to buy bitcoin?  This way, you don't have counterparty risk (bank going bankrupt, or practicing fractional reserve with no reserves), while you do borrow bitcoin essentially.  You're also increasing the supply of dollars, while decreasing the market supply of bitcoin, driving the price up.

Maybe what I think is an oversimplification of reality, but here's how I explain this reasoning:  There's a perception, perhaps flawed, that what determines the consensus is dormant wallet holders.  This is not entirely flawed, because large holders do move the market value of bitcoin by selling the forks for bitcoin, and thus, play key role by being in the position to determine which fork remains the most valuable.  Certainly they are not the only entities that determine that, because their coins are valued that much, because people want it, and they want it, because it fits their definition of what's the "correct bitcoin" in the free market.  For example, if a few large holders gathered, all holding more than 10 million coins, and decided to introduce censorship on the protocol rules, that wouldn't pass because the demand for coins in a pro-censorship network would likely go down.  (And thus, would likely lose as "economic majority" by selling their bitcoin for their fork.)

I think there's a similar case with Satoshi-era coins and this dilemma.  People with dormant wallets might want to silently remove Satoshi-era coins from circulation, because they try to justify to themselves that those coins are lost, as they have a big conflict of interest.  On the other hand, I'm not sure how good idea it is to them, if many bitcoiners consider it a violation to first principles.  I think this issue requires a lot more discussion. 

My two sats on this:

• Satoshi-era coins are not lost coins, and the fact that we, bitcoiners as majority, have passively accepted them as lost is something that is worth examination.  We have seen some of those coins being spent after more than 10 years of inactivity, and yet we still treat them as "lost".  If "price stability" is what we truly wanted, then why not freezing them at the present?  In the end, it'd be within the realms of possibility that Patoshi woke up and spent his coins.  I think you understand how this opens a can of worms. 
• FALCON-512 seems the best solution, at the moment, but the block size has to increase, otherwise the throughput would dramatically decrease.  My thought is that we should increase the block size by the same order as a regular transaction size is increased.  FALCON's signature verification is also a lot faster than currently, so the idea that the block size increase would result in slower block sync and verification does not hold. 
• I don't like phase C's zero knowledge recovery as a concept.  Based on which standard do we accept zk?  BIP39, Electrum, something else?  It can be very complicated.  Also, Satoshi-era coins are sitting on public keys, and there is no more knowledge the true owner can provide than the quantum attacker.
• I think that finding consensus for this issue should be the highest priority right now.

I interpret his urgency as to "begin finding consensus".  I too agree that it might take a long time until a quantum computer breaks ECDSA, but we must not wait until it's relatively, possibly feasible.  We cannot upgrade to a quantum-safe algorithm the same way that a Windows update can.  It will take many years.  Just imagine that even if we have everything ready, developers done writing code and miners done signaling, we still need at least one year of nearly optimal consolidations in a hypothetical clogged up network to migrate most of the coins to quantum-safe addresses.  (And that's just hypothetical, it'll take many years for most bitcoiners to move to quantum-safe.)

And I'm not even discussing about the dilemma with the satoshi-era coins and whether to freeze them or not to freeze. 

Just by lowering their minrelaytxfee in Bitcoin Core, I suppose.  Here's the pull request: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/32959.

Why don't you post the script in here for everyone to see?

Spiderpool and F2Pool also joined.


They have more to lose if they reject transactions paying less than 1 sat/vb.  My thought is that if pool X starts accepting those, then miners mining at that pool get more money when the mempool is empty.  Miners mining at other pools will eventually realize that they make less than those mining at pool X when the network is not congested.  Therefore, it creates an incentive to switching mining to the sub-1-sat pool. 

Right now, the first sub-1-sat mempool block, pays 0.008 BTC.  That's 0.25% of the block subsidy.  And remember than in 4 years, it will be 0.5%, then 1%, then 2%, etc...  Miners need to be very cautious at some point, and cannot afford the luxury of ignoring possible income. 

Bitcoin game theory rocks. 

It's quite painful to create transaction paying less than 1 sat/vb, but I'm sure developers will start upgrading their clients.  BlueWallet says it's coming on the next release: https://x.com/bluewalletio/status/1945105660594544780.

MARA pool has also joined the party: https://mempool.space/block/00000000000000000000767b42452c3e2b6d13bba006f71a19011b77d451ba1f.

A non-empty mempool is undeniably a step forward.

Try using broadcast:  https://mempool.space/tx/push

I read on X that mining pool Luxor has configured to mine them, but I can't find the post. 

0.1 sat/vb is the new 1 sat/vb!

https://mempool.space/

You cannot mitigate a 51% attack, if there's a very wealthy person with the desire to spend his capital this way.  It just has reached a level that even billionaires wouldn't dare to touch it.  Only someone who can create money out of thin air.  Only if you could print money, you could make this work, but you'd be found in one way or another.  The main obstacle that I see, as far as I try to understand their mentality, is that this operation requires them (or some scapegoat-entity to put responsibility to) to essentially "yell" to everyone who they are and what they're doing.

Even with all the money in the world, you can't kill bitcoin silently, as you would murder a US president, for instance. 

If you replaced the past year with empty blocks, you would most certainly render it worthless, because it would be considered completely unreliable.


KYC is a major attack, correct.  But, bitcoin is still a robust network, even with KYC.  People can still buy bitcoin and "lose them" on boating accidents.  Not to mention that there are solutions that evade KYC, and allow you to trade peer-to-peer.  It's gold, but even better, and I remind you that they even confiscated gold.  If I were "them", I'd feel very sweaty, because it'd be now possible for people to use an alternative, a currency that I hold absolutely no control in its supply. 


The government might realize it's better, but "they" are not the government exactly.  And they definitely have nearly everything to lose if a free market currency with hard cap coexists with anti-free market, infinite-in-supply fiat currency.  The fiat currency can continue operating as medium of exchange (because of legal tender laws), but if the cash balances are held in bitcoin, these money changers cannot effectively steal purchasing power via inflation, and their whole parasitic, shadow kingdom starts breaking apart. 

(Please don't reply with unessential text just to fill your signature campaign post quota.  I'd appreciate it if I only received genuine replies.  Spam will be deleted.)

---

Bitcoin is an extremely important technology of our time, because it restores sound money, at scale.  The biggest economic problem the world faces right now comes from central banks, and primarily from the Federal Reserve.  All other economic problems either stem from this one, or are greatly influenced by it.  I am not going to explain why this is the case, I assume you already know what power one gains if he has a monopoly on money printing, backed by the military.  

Since I figured out bitcoin, and realized that it provides an alternative to the debt-slave system, I was always skeptical about why it can't be stopped; why they cannot stop it.  By "they", I refer to these very few people who have gained centuries-long authority and power over money and credit.  I don't know who these people are (hence "they") and I think this plays key role on why bitcoin cannot be stopped.  If you don't believe that this group of people secretly controls the world, then please change page because this might not be for you.  Otherwise, bear with me.  

Why do I think there's this group of people?  In short, there appears to be a long-term plan that encompasses almost the entire spectrum of human activity, something that organizations, political parties, or businesses alone are unable to organize either individually or collectively, such as globalization.  Therefore, I strongly believe that operations such as globalization, climate change combat, or woke agendas, are only possible because they are funded by one common entity.  This entity must control money in one way or another, and I refuse to believe that it's not someone closely related to the money printer, because otherwise they would eventually run out of money.  (Only if you can print money you can endlessly fund an operation that is not desired by people in the free market, because otherwise you would eventually go bankrupt.)  The same people play key role in endlessly funding wars.  It is not a coincidence that that the introduction of central banking occurred during the same century that two world wars happened, and when endless genocide somehow continues being economically viable to this date.

I recommend reading the Great Taking, for more information, but I won't try to convince you more about the existence of this group.  Ultimately, deep down, I think you do feel it, that something's wrong with the world, and it is rather artificially designed that way, than that it has "naturally emerged".  Some people are just masters of "global chess", and the only weapon that could allow them to go undetected is printing money.  Money really buys everything in the end.

So why can't they just kill bitcoin?  I know, hashrate is very high, and that makes it practically impossible.  But, how much money do you really need to run a 51% attack, and then render it worthless?  In the range of $50-500 billion, I would assume, and maybe I'm even exaggerating, depending on how deep in the blockchain you want to attack.  Remember, if you have a money printer, you cannot go bankrupt.  And, from "their" point of view, such an attack would be clearly profitable, because they stem to lose a lot of power if people wake up and hold their cash balances in bitcoin.  Suddenly, printing money loses power, because you can't steal purchasing power from bitcoin holders.  

I've always had this question in my head, and couldn't find a convincing answer, but I think I recently figured it out:  They can't attack it, because that would reveal who they are.  What I have culminated from my research is that their power in monetary systems comes primarily from:

• Disarray of sociopolitical events, such as wars.  We really have no idea who's causing what, and so do politicians.  Everything in a war is obscurity on steroids.  Politicians tell a number of things, but they frequently lie, because they are easily blackmaillable and lobbied-able.  The financial system is also one big disarray.  It is no coincidence that it operates in a completely complicated manner that most people (myself included) don't fully understand.  
• Ignorance of how money works.  People don't know much about it, neither do politicians.  Some politicians surely do know, but their political careers are heavily at risk if they choose to question a monetary system that even "scientists" and "intellectuals" in universities support.

If people start learning about money, such as recently with the internet and bitcoin, then the only true power "they" have relies on disarray:  They must remain anonymous.  Here's the thing, you can't attack bitcoin and not create noise.  The bitcoin network is currently secured by 905 EH/s.  To reach those levels, you need more than 800,000 Bitmain S19, each delivering 110 TH/s.  Who will make such insane order?  Who will supervise this enormous operation?  You can't just order them for some other purpose (such as for national security, or for climate change etc.) and "incidentally" use it for that purpose.  Making this order sets your intentions clear from the beginning.  How will they launch such an attack and go undetected and untraceable?  

Therefore, bitcoin is threatening the king in global chess right now.  And it is the king's move.  What do you think about it?

A much better and richer place.  Saifedean Ammous has said he's started writing a fiction book about how the 20th century would look like under a gold standard:  https://academy.saifedean.com/product/the-gold-standard-hardcover/.  I believe he'll continue from late 19th century, when Vienna left us in peak civilization, right before the establishment of the Federal Reserve.

A bitcoin standard will look even better.

I don't feel this like a cycle, though.  We've done 7x since 2022, but it felt so fake as a bear market.  We reached $69k, obviously it couldn't last because it got hyped up to death. 

If something close to $125k is the top, then what's the next bottom?  $58k?