Bitcoin Captured? The Battle That Changes Everything! | Truth Block

**Hurley** (0:00)
Bitcoin just split in two this weekend. Two chains, two sets of rules. And a serious argument that the one you're holding is the corporate captured one, with Michael Saylor cast as the man who took it. And these aren't trolls. These are people who've been here since the beginning. Warning, there are intelligence agents inside the gates of Bitcoin right now. So is Bitcoin being taken from us? And while the Bitcoin Civil War has been raging, Scott Besson in the Bank of Japan burned an estimated $87 billion in 48 hours, propping up one currency. And Jamie Dimon went on PBS and said out loud what the dollar's reserve status actually runs on. So which fight decides the next 10 years? The one inside Bitcoin or the one nobody in Bitcoin is watching? This is TruthBlock. I'm Hurley. Let's mine truth.
Quick favor before we get into it today. Most of you watching are not subscribed. And that one tap is the best way to support the channel. We appreciate you. Okay, let's start with what actually happened over the weekend. Because it's easy to get lost in the noise. On Saturday morning, Bitcoin had one chain. On Saturday afternoon, it had two. And the whole thing turns on one word that got thrown around all weekend by people using it three different ways. That word is fork. A soft fork tightens the rules. Some blocks that used to be legal become illegal. But anything legal under the new rules is still legal under the old ones. So old nodes keep following along.
Segwit and Taproot were soft forks. A hard fork loosens them instead. So old nodes reject the new blocks outright. That's a permanent break.
Two chains. Two coins forever. That's how Bitcoin Cash was born in 2017
BIP 110 was a soft fork. The basic idea was to cap certain data fields for about a year to make it expensive to stuff pictures and tokens into blocks. Then to let the rules expire on their own. The problem was miners. In the last difficulty period before the deadline, 51 blocks out of 2,116 signaled support. Call it 2.5%.
So the proposal had a backstop built in. At block 961,632 on Saturday, BIP 110 nodes would reject any block that didn't signal. Antpool mined one that didn't. Most of the network took it. BIP 110 nodes threw it out and followed a block from Ocean instead. And right there, Bitcoin had two chains. The new one mined a second block, then stalled.
It inherited Bitcoin's full difficulty with almost none of the hash rate. And this morning, it's more than 80 blocks behind and falling further every hour. Here's why this battle isn't over. That chain is frozen. Not because anyone attacked it. As I said, it inherited Bitcoin's full difficulty with almost none of the hash power. And difficulty only adjusts every 2016 blocks. So it has to mine over 2000 blocks at big network difficulty with a rounding error of the hash rate before it gets any relief. That would take years.
The only way out is to change the proof of work entirely, which resets difficulty and makes every existing miner useless against them. And that is the hard fork. That's when a new coin is created. A permanent split. And the miners behind it have already floated pausing on the current algorithm. A few weeks ago, we said that $16 million can't buy a consensus rule. Turns out a minority of nodes can't buy one either. So let's take the other side seriously because it's earned at least that. Matt Cratter traded at Clarium Capital, which was Peter Thiel's old fund. And he now runs Bitcoin University. He sat down with Natalie Brunel on Thursday, the day before the deadline, with signaling stuck around 2%.
He could read those numbers as well as anybody. But he said this anyway.
And the grievance underneath it is real.
Mining pools get paid to put spam in blocks.
Node runners store that data from now until the end of time. Whoever profits is not whoever pays.

**Matt Cratter** (3:44)
I think the reason you and I haven't experienced this before is we got into Bitcoin after 2017 And so 2017 was a real civil war.

**Jamie Dimon** (3:52)
For the block size wars?

**Matt Cratter** (3:54)
For the block size wars and competed, yeah, the various forks that came out of that. And I spent my early years in Bitcoin attacking the scammers who were in the crypto space, the Ethereum and Cardano people, for example, and all the different scams. And so we had sort of a period of peace from 2017 until, I'll call it 2023 or 2024, because Bitcoin maximalism was raining. And they were sort of the winners from the previous war. But what we're experiencing now, Bitcoin's in a very bad place where it actually is a civil war, and the enemy is within the gate. We have many, many different enemies. And so the community is trying to, and we have a situation where conference promoters are investing in these companies that put spam and then promoting them at their conference, for example.