They Couldn't Ban Bitcoin... So They Bought The People Who Build It! | Simply Originals

**Rustin** (0:00)
Jeffrey Epstein's money reached the institutions that fund the people who build Bitcoin. That is not a theory, that's a paper trail, front page on the record. They couldn't ban Bitcoin. Every government that tried, failed. And the question many can't stop asking is, the one nobody wants to touch. If you can't ban it, can you just buy the people who build it instead? And here's the part that should actually disturb you. It's not that this happened. It's that almost the entire media, the people paid to tell you when something changes in the code, keep you informed on all things Bitcoin, went silent. Why is that? Now hear me clearly, because this matters. I'm not telling you Bitcoin is broken. I'm not telling you these people are guilty. I'm telling you there is a documented money trail, a documented change to Bitcoin's code, and a documented silence from almost everyone who was supposed to flag it. And that's it.
So I'm asking the question, you'll judge the answer. A brain surgeon stood up in Prague and said, if this continues, Bitcoin gets, in his word, extincted, not crashed, extincted. He also said he couldn't give that talk in America because the media wouldn't run it. I spent three days locked in a basement ever since that speech dropped with all the receipts to find out if he was paranoid or right. By the end of the show today, you're going to understand four things, and you will not read your trusted Bitcoin newsletter the same way ever again. One, the change, a quiet limit that protected Bitcoin as money removed. Two, the network, not the machines, the people who funds the developers and who funds the people funding them. Three, the physics, a law from 1961, that explains why this is a slow, gradual destruction by design. And four, the silence, why the outlets whose job it was to flag this said nothing and what you can actually do about it. Four findings, one conclusion. Welcome back. I'm Rustin. Now let's go ahead and open up that box and see what's inside.

**Jack Cruz** (2:24)
And she asked me this question. She goes, Jack, why are you so fired up about this? Is this an existential threat to Bitcoin? I said, it is.
If this attack continues on, Bitcoin will effectively be extincted. That is the ultimate effect of what is buried in Landauer's principle. And in the slide, you can see small little incremental changes. A superfluous inflammation, or I should say information, winds up on the base chain, which is Bitcoin, and it leads to a lack of utility. And he told me that what you did for me the day of the surgery is you need to say something about this publicly. Now, I knew I couldn't do this in the United States because we have a big problem in the United States.
Vents like this, this should be a place that's the immune system. So shit like this happens that we can call it out. But see, in the United States, they control the media.

**Rustin** (3:26)
Let's get into it. And if you're new here, don't forget to click that subscribe button so I don't end up shilling paper Bitcoin under an overpass. We appreciate your support in these trying times. Now, Bitcoin had a guardrail, a field called OpReturn, with a strict cap, about 83 bytes small, on purpose. The point was to keep Bitcoin lean enough to function as money and to discourage stuffing the ledger with unrelated data. Think of it as a deterrent. Kind of like, yeah, you can bomb Iran, etc. But the economic consequences of such action could destroy both your domestic and the global economy.
Economic deterrent. Iran didn't just roll over or stop defending themselves, they drew a line in the straight and put a toll on it. Now stay with me here. In October 2025, with the release of Bitcoin Core version 30, that cap was effectively removed, raised from roughly 83 bytes to about 100,000. A guardrail that stood for years, gone in a release. The predictable result? More arbitrary data on the chain. Images, tokens, files, cruise points to some of the material inscribed this way. And some of it is genuinely vile.
No one's going to show that. But understand the consequence. Once it's on the chain, it's on every full node on earth permanently. I'm sure the free market will handle it. That's the reassurance. And on its own, it's reasonable.
But every bite of unrelated data bolted to the base layer raises the cost of running a node at home and pushes Bitcoin a little further from being usable money for an ordinary person. That isn't a side effect of the change. Some would say it's the point. And here's what the major outlets largely declined to dwell on. The network pushed back. There's an alternative, Bitcoin NOTs, that keeps the guardrail. Through 2025, its share doubled in a matter of weeks, and by November, sat above 20% of nodes. Currently above 17%, and the second most used client is NOTs, thousands of operators replacing the default software in protest. That is not apathy. That's the beginning of a revolt. Which raises the obvious question, who removed the guardrail in the first place? A project with no CEO and no boss made one of the most contested decisions in its history. Who exactly made it? The answer begins at a dinner. Everything in this section comes from a four-part investigation by the Bitcoin legend who defeated fake Toshi Hodlnot over at Citadel 21 The same work Dr. Cruz himself has shared and praised. Start with the money.