Bitcoin's Second Civil War Has Begun! Did Wall Street Just Pick Its Weapon? | Truth Block

**Hurley** (0:00)
While you were sleeping, the most powerful institutions in Bitcoin signed their names to a single document. Michael Saylor's Strategy, BlackRock, Fidelity, Coinbase. Nine companies in total. $15 million and one mission. Fund the developers who write Bitcoin's code. And this alliance dropped just weeks before a faction of Bitcoiners will try to force a fork of the network to take Bitcoin back from these exact corporations. Some are calling it stewardship. Others are calling it the dreaded corporate capture of Bitcoin. In the last time Bitcoin fought a war like this, the network split in two. So is this the suit coin or takeover Bitcoiners have warned about for years? Or is an older question resurfacing, one we thought was settled? What is Bitcoin? This is TruthBlock. I'm Hurley.
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I appreciate you. Okay, let's get into it. So how did we get on the brink of Bitcoin's second civil war? Here's the 60 second version. Last October, Bitcoin Core, the software most of the network runs, shipped version 30 and raised a default cap on arbitrary data in transactions from 83 bytes to 100,000. To the developers, this was simple housekeeping. To a huge chunk of node runners, it was an open invitation to stuff the world's hardest money full of JPEGs and spam forever. Thousands switched in protest to Bitcoin NOTS, a version of the core software maintained by veteran developer Luke Dash Jr. Bitcoin NOTS has strict span filters built in. And out of that revolt came BIP 110, an emergency rule to cap non-monetary data for one year, enforced by fork if it has to be. Today, only about 1% of mining power is signalling support for BIP 110, and roughly 1 in 5 public nodes runs NOTS. And the mandatory signalling window opens in about 16 days. Dante Cook did an excellent breakdown of the full mechanics of BIP 110 right here on Simply Bitcoin on Tuesday, so be sure to watch that video here for more context. Today, I want to take it deeper into what this war is actually about under the surface. Because Bitcoin has been here before.
From 2015 to 2017, we fought the first civil war, dubbed the Block Size War, and it ended with a network splitting and Bitcoin Cash walking off into irrelevance.
Jonathan Beer's book, The Block Size War, is the definitive history, so be sure to pick it up and give it a read if that tickles your fancy. Right now, we are on the brink of a second civil war. And underneath the spam debates, it's the oldest question in this space.
What is Bitcoin? Whoever defines that question shapes who Bitcoin serves. That's why grown adults are threatening to split a trillion dollar network over a data filter. Money is never neutral, and neither are the people fighting over it. Let's look at the two opposing sides quickly. The monetary purists, led by voices like Luke Dash Jr. and Matthew Cratter. Their argument is that Bitcoin is money, full stop, and anything diluting that purpose is an attack. Against them is the neutrality camp, that would say a fee-paying transaction is a valid transaction, and adoption comes through builders and institutions. In that camp is Michael Saylor, Adam Back, Jameson Lopp, and Samson Mao.
First, an honest read from someone with no army in the fight. Lynn Alden is respected across both camps, and she co-wrote the definitive study of how Bitcoin's consensus rules actually change. Lynn sat down with Stefan Lavera and laid out what she expects in August.

**Lynn Alden** (3:26)
I'm certainly in the camp that Bitcoin is money, and anything that detracts from it is money or complicates, introduces a tax surface. I mean, I'm not really in favor of any of that.
But when you have a set of things that already exists, already is consensus. And there's a pretty established complexity of how to mitigate spam in any system. I mean, that goes back decades of research, because spam can disguise itself and is even hard to define at times.
And just kind of reviewing everything that exists about that software proposal, it mostly just kind of rearranges where non-monetary data can go. Some people have very strong opinions on precisely where in the blockchain, more appropriate types of places to put it. Even debates about whether or not this is even about spam.
Because some proponents will say we have to cut down spam, other people will say, well, read the BIP. It's actually admitting how limited it is at stopping spam. So my view is that kind of the most powerful attribute of Bitcoin is that it's very hard to change if it was easy to change. So even if you're in favor of fork, there are fork proposals out there that I'm kind of passively in favor of. I don't really expect them to pass anytime soon. But the kind of the key takeaway is that even if you're in favor of a given fork, the fact that it's really hard to get your fork through is also the defense around people that see things differently getting their fork through. So I certainly think that it's noble to try to find ways to optimize, to maybe add frictions, to add non-monetary data into Bitcoin over time. If there's a way that can do that, that builds consensus, I mean, I'm all ears. But kind of for me, I think the main thing is the marketing around this particular fork, how it seems to differ from what the fork actually offers, and it's become this kind of cultural moment, I think more so than a technical solution. My base assumption, unless things change between now and a few weeks from now, is that it'll be a minority fork attempt. So if it's not aborted or otherwise changed, then it could potentially result in a chain split. Basically, as soon as miners try to put something in, that meets current consensus but then doesn't meet the consensus of this other chain, there's a high risk of a chain split. So I would probably...