whaack

Did you ever realize that the word upgrade has a counterpart, downgrade, but the word update has no counterpart downdate? Because progress only goes forward ...right?

The Bitcoin network has remained backwards compatible ever since Bitcoin's release on January 3, 2009.¹ This is despite numerous attempts to fork the chain. This great feat of Bitcoin is recognized by many, segwit users included. But segwit nodes, while having maintained backwards compatibility, have also introduced new rules into the system. The real bitcoin does not recognize these new rules. What are the consequences of this, and how will any future fork wars play out? I foresee three possible outcomes.

The 1st possible outcome is the status quo is maintained, meaning that all future blocks in the current chain remain compatible with both segwit and trb nodes. Segwit coins and trb coins remain with their expected owners and the two networks coexist in symbiotic fashion.

The 2nd possible outcome is that at some point in the future a segwit-incompatible block is mined where the miner snags a segwit user's coin. At this moment we fork into two chains, trb-chain (with height h+1) and segwit-chain (with height h). Segwit nodes see trb-chain as invalid, and thus remain on segwit-chain. Trb nodes see both chains as valid, but switch to trb-chain owing to its greater height. If the trb-chain grows faster than the segwit-chain, the fork persists. If the segwit-chain manages to catch up and surpass the trb-chain, trb-nodes will reorg and adopt segwit-chain, putting us back in a post-hiccup version of outcome 1.²

The 3rd possible outcome is trb becomes economically irrelevant. Perhaps the segwit users/bitcoin core team manage to pull off a hard fork that wins in the market place, or trb nodes all go offline. Revisionist history wins, and the roots of Bitcoin fade away into the cosmos.

Given the information I have, all three of these scenarios seem equally likely. The first is the status quo, but it is in an unstable state while both trb and segwit nodes are online. The second scenario can happen at any moment, but it requires the active move of a miner, and it may require a coordinated effort of 51% of the hashing power. The third scenario is the ultimate objective of the enemy, and thus may come to fruition despite its negative consequence for everyone using bitcoin.

No matter how things play out, the best decision today is to move your coins out of "3" and "bc1" addresses and into a p2pkh address aka "1" address. Why would you put all your bitcoins at risk? To save a couple of mbtc on transaction fees?

1. The first block with height 0 is hard coded into trb and is dated Jan 3, 2009. The second block, which is the first block not included in the source code, was mined on January 10, 2009. [↩]
2. History has shown that miners like to SPV mine. This means they sometimes forego validating transactions in blocks mined by other pools in order to get a slight head start in mining the next block. So if the segwit mining cartel does not validate its blocks, it is possible that a solo miner could throw a wrench into the segwit system by mining just one non-segwit-compliant block. [↩]

Let's list some of the many reasons why one should buy bitcoins instead of shitcoins.

1. Bitcoin is the only coin protected by proof-of-work and thus the only coin that actually offers sovereignty over your money Any shitcoin that attempts to copy Bitcoin's PoW system can be economically sabotaged by the bitcoin miners.¹ Bitcoin's energy consumption is world-eating, block 716521 has a sha256 hash of

0000000000000000000ae0a5b1c8c71e94112a6082fb18b5f351673217c24142

If the number of 0's at the front of that hexadecimal string doesn't mean anything to you, go on some sha256 calculator and see how long it takes you to guess an input that gives you at least 3 leading 0's.² Since shitcoins are unprotected by mining³ they always resort to being "protected" (i.e. controlled) by some authority, usually their creator.⁴

2. Bitcoin is the natural Schelling point. Let's say that all the shitcoiners were well meaning folks and there was no difference between the technical merits of shitcoins and Bitcoin. It would still be advantageous for the world's investors to agree to use one coin so as to facilitate business. Bitcoin would be/is the obvious choice: it came first, it has the economic majority, and it has mathematical evidence that a large amount of energy is being inputted into the system.

3. Minting bitcoin incurs a cost to the miner, whereas creating a shitcoin is ~free. New bitcoins are issued when a miner mines a block. It is expensive to mine a Bitcoin block, as made apparent by the astronomically high hashrate. Thus, it is expensive to mint a bitcoin.⁵ Meanwhile an infinite number of shitcoins can be created at ~no cost.

4. Bitcoin was created before all others and sucked up the freedom loving anarchist community, whereas shitcoins absorbed late-to-the-party scammers. Before bitcoin existed there were people looking for alternatives to the current financial system and others content with the status quo.⁶ When Bitcoin was created, a number of anarchists⁷ found what they were looking for and got into the game. Only later when this community gained wealth did others start to notice wtf was going on. Jealous/unsatisfied with the fact that they could never get as rich as the early bitcoin adopters, a few brazen scammers decided to take the Bitcoin code, make a few changes, and sell their shitcoin as the next Bitcoin.⁸

5. Bitcoin is liquid and has an OTC market, whereas the others...? You can come to Costa Rica and get a bag of colorful cash for your bitcoins. When you use a shitcoin you are constrained to a poorer community and KYC exchanges.

6. Shitcoins attract suckers with statistics like market cap that make the shitcoins seem more liquid/useful than they are. I can create a shitcoin with 1 trillion units, trade one of those units to a friend for $1, and then voila, the shitcoin has a market cap of $1 trillion. mEthereum tards apparently sacrifice mEthereum (i.e. register some units permanently unspendable) in order to increase the value of other mEthereum units. While this may benefit individual mEthereum holders, this hurts the mEthereum economy. Burning coins means there are fewer units in circulation and thus the network has less ability to fund real world projects.⁹

7. Smart contracts and other "blockchain inventions" are useless marketing schemes created to pump shitcoins. Smart contracts are only useful in highly contrived and unrealistic nerd fantasies. If you need some money to move based on a certain condition, you can do this with *any* financial system, even the old faithful USD.¹⁰

If received_electricity() then
send_btc_to_power_company(PRICE_PER_KILOWATT_HOUR * get_kilowatt_hours_used_this_month())
endif

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the reasons why one should use Bitcoin over shitcoins. One can never create such a list, because no matter how many reasonable arguments one makes against using shitcoins, their creators always find a new way to market their scam.

1. Some shitcoins market themselves as ASIC-resistant, i.e. resistant to hardware made to specifically mine their coin. This claim by itself should raise alarms to thinking persons. [↩]
2. This is essentially what the miners do, they fiddle with the input to a sha256 function until the output has a certain number of leading 0's. That same input contains meta data about the bitcoin block as well as the list of transactions included in that block. [↩]
3. Shitcoin creators often keep up the pretense that their coin is mined, but this is only security theatre - the hashrate of shitcoins is always some epsilon percentage of bitcoin's. [↩]
4. One scheme used for securing shitcoins is PoS, which stands for piece of shit proof of stake. One of the many issues with this scheme is once a stakeholder has sold his coins his private keys remain valuable to anyone trying to rewind the block at the height where the coins moved. So after selling his coins, he is incentivized to sell it to attackers trying to double spend. If that makes no sense to you, I don't recommend spending time learning about it, another problem with the creators of shitcoins is that each one finds a new way to waste your time studying their new nonsense scheme. [↩]
5. To be fair, bitcoins were cheap to mine at the start of the chain. There is no cure for this initial premine, and afaik satoshi released his source code and announced his project even before he started mining himself. [↩]
6. Or at least had their head so far up their ass that they didn't see a problem with inflation. [↩]
7. I use the term anarchist to denote those who want to live without being ruled, i.e. 'an' - without 'archon' - rulers. [↩]
8. Of course I can't really say why shitcoiners shitcoin, their intentions are known only to them. Maybe they actually believe that they are improving on bitcoin with their changes. But I doubt it. [↩]
9. This also means that until the Bitcoin block reward reaches 0, everyday the bitcoin price stays the same the Bitcoin network gains more economic power since new coins are added into circulation. [↩]
10. I'm sure some mEthereum dude is going to respond to this "well yes but see you need to have the code on the blockchain itself" for god knows what reason. [↩]