Stay the Course vs. Hard Fork (with Desert Dave)
Ideas to take with you.
- 01
The two obstacles a hard-fork chain has to overcome to become money are the same two that make most forks fail: it has to earn a shared name people can converge on, and it has to have no figurehead people can point to as its controller.
- 02
BIP-110's failure to activate showed that a vocal minority of nodes cannot force miners to accept a soft fork; it did not show that a supermajority of nodes lacks defensive power against a hostile change miners try to push.
- 03
Mining capture is not a stable state because the profit incentive keeps pulling new entrants toward the cheapest energy on earth, and halving cycles wipe out miners locked into long-dated energy contracts.
- 04
Fiat cannot capture Bitcoin permanently because fiat as a system cannot be at rest – debt claims must keep expanding, and every unstable expansion leaves an open door back to self-custody, permissionless mining, and peer-to-peer transaction.
- 05
Two people can start from the same North Star and take opposite actions from it – the honest work is naming the underlying disagreement rather than dunking on the other camp.
