When I removed myself from public view towards the end of 2010 and 2011, it was as I was rather disillusioned. Bitcoin was designed as a system that allowed for sound private money and would make criminal uses less viable. Between Wikileaks, Anonymous, and a number of dark websites including but not limited to Silk Road, I saw Bitcoin being used in a number of ways that disheartened me.

I had said that I had believed that Bitcoin would be attractive to those with a libertarian point of view, but many who jumped on to Bitcoin are far from libertarian. I’ve detailed the difference between anarchy and libertarian thought many times, and it is Marxist communism that seeks to expunge the state. Bitcoin was never designed to be anti bank or anti government. It is about a sound system that produces an evidence trail and incentivises good behaviour.

In The Sociology of Money (N. Dodd, Cambridge, 1994, xxii-xxviii), the author demonstrates how when the marketability of a good is directly observable by its potential recipients, the more likely it is to evolve as a medium of exchange. It requires a pseudonymous system — not an anonymous one. The people involved need to gain trust in the system through the ability to validate a chain of their own money. That does not mean, as many say, they need to run a node, but rather that they can validate the source of their funds and ensure that it has been paid in a manner that meets expectations.

I utterly failed to comprehend how many so-called anarchists and socialists would run around calling themselves libertarian or capitalist. Much of what I hear being described is not related to the concept of money in the Austrian economic school at all. Most of it comes from authors such as Simmel and his concept of perfect money (see Simmel, G. (2004) The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge.). Such socialist-inspired and sociological-based flawed concepts of money seem to have propagated throughout what is the SegWit or CoreCoin (BTC) community.

It seems that few in the more anarchist aspects of the community care for or want to understand the law of property in money. The principles of value inform the rules governing tracing, and set the foundation for the law of property of money. The exercise of tracing is a process where the value inherent in one asset is associated with the value in a second asset that is being exchanged for the consideration (see Foskett v McKeown [2001] 1 AC 102, 127 per Lord Millet).

The law of tracing is important to Bitcoin. Many of the issues associated with eCash derived directly from the inability to trace blinded eCash. In Law of Tracing (L.D. Smith, Oxford, 1997), the requirements for money to be traced under law are thoroughly investigated.

We live in a society with law and government. In fact, without law and government, we would not live in society not have society. All of the systems that allow people to run Bitcoin are created because a contractual and legal framework exists that allows for the creation of complex computer systems, global networks, and widespread exchange. In removing law, we remove the systems needed to create complex entities that can allow corporations such as Cisco, Intel, and even Microsoft to exist. Without it, the necessary frameworks allowing Bitcoin to operate are non-existent.

The utopian fallacies of money and society have been propagated for millennia; in The Laws (5.743 d), Plato wrote:

Our society, we pronounce, must have neither gold nor silver, nor yet much making of profits from mechanical crafts, or usury, or raising of sordid beasts, but only such as husbandry yields or permits, and of it only so much as will not force a man in his profit gathering to forget the ends for which possessions exist, that is to say, soul and body. (1961, p 1,328)

The described fallacy is propagated and exponentially expounded through the errors in the understanding of economics promoted by a community I sadly used to be a part of. Abolishing money or making Bitcoin universal will not become the end of all fraud, thefts, crimes of passion, fear, tension, anxiety, and long working hours.

Aquinas promoted the principle of “just pricing,” Ruskin as an advocate of a form of labour money, and the fixed wage, argued in Unto This Last that “the price of everything is to be calculated finally in labour” (1862, p 215). Ruskin unfortunately and extremely adversely affected Gandhi with his Fabian socialist utopian lies leading to the millions of deaths that resulted from the policies of a Utopia that could never exist.

Such then is the myth that seems to propagate in “crypto.” The idea that money alone will abolish the state and create freedom. Not vigilance, not evident work, but rather a utopian ideal as we see with neo-Fabian authors such as Simmel (2004, P 346):

The complete heartlessness of money is reflected in our social culture, which is itself determined by money. Perhaps the power of the socialist ideal is partly a reaction to this. For by declaring war upon this monetary system, socialism seeks to abolish the individual’s isolation in relation to the group as embodied in the form of the purposive association, and at the same time it appeals to all the innermost and enthusiastic sympathies for the group that may lie dormant in the individual.

Such thinking has led to the failure to understand Bitcoin, and the drive to alter it to something it can’t be. Bitcoin is not anonymous, nor should it be. It does not need to be more private outside of the dreams of criminals and anarchists. And it scales, as I originally envisioned, through corporate competition. The system is an ultra small-world graph, and it requires large network connections and the desire of companies seeking profit.

Orphans are a part of the protocol

As nice as Hal Finney was and as much as he was needed at the start of the project, he was absolutely terrible for me. I stopped working at the end of December 2008, and dedicated most of my time to doing research and Bitcoin. In effect, I put about everything I had into it. Heart and soul and, more importantly, money. I’d taken a golden handshake when I left BDO, and I had a massive set of loans taken out on the three properties I owned at the time. One of them was my farm. At the time, my property, which was a combination of a farm, cattle ranch, and orchard, was my sanity and the thing that enabled me to have some downtime.

It was over a decade of my life where I had invested in the orchard and many improvements, and it even planted a small timber crop.

To continue paying the bills in the early days of Bitcoin, I had to end up selling it. By the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to maintain it — the loan repayments and to keep going without getting another job. There wasn’t an option for venture capital back then. On top of it, I ended up paying over $1 million fighting a tax audit that I would end up winning. After going to the tribunal, I ended up getting more than I had originally claimed, and the tax office tried claiming that I had recklessly underclaimed.

Funny enough, if I’d moved the intellectual property into Australia at the time, I would have been paying much more tax now. So I do have to thank the government for saving me from my own mistakes. I spent my weekends listening to audiobooks and studying as I walked about my farm back then.

Getting to the point where I knew that I had to sell the property in itself was a blow.

What was worse was listening to Hal when he explained over and over how Bitcoin wouldn’t work. He was a far better coder than I was, and had been involved in the industry much longer. I believed in my idea, but always thought that he was focused on a different goal.

Hal was similar to people such as Wei who sought a completely different system. They looked at building systems without government and without corporations. When I talk about libertarian values, I had never once thought of the anarchist side of it. In fact, it is a socialist means of attacking capitalism, and I never considered that people who call themselves libertarians would be so deluded.

Then I should have, I was involved with all of such people in the 90s.

I always saw how things would end up in data centres. It is part of the design. Bitcoin is about competitive corporations securing the network. It is not decentralisation for the sake of it, nor is it the creation of a system that removes all government and corporations. Such a utopian perspective, as I have discussed earlier in this article, is rather delusional.

I still miss my farm.

It may be that I could buy it back now or even have another one here in England, but I know it might not be the case for many many years. To complete what I started, it is going to require many hundreds of plus-hour weeks.

Hal kept talking about second-layer systems. I never really equated the push that we still see now to try and make a democratised system of nodes distributed throughout the globe as I knew it was about a small-world network. I didn’t realise that Hal was seeking more nodes and not more edges.

I should have explained it far better, but then I also think that if I’d done so at the beginning, people such as Hal would not have been there. I don’t think Bitcoin is what he wanted.

A part of the problem was that there was no value in bitcoin back then. The security model of Bitcoin is economic, and the cost of running a node was something that I understood and that I think many people did. Nodes are miners, and such is how they make money. There is no such thing as a validating node. Validation is done through the creation of blocks.

I saw the network fragmenting and people starting to create sidechains and alternatives that took power away from Bitcoin. The problem here is that the security model of Bitcoin is an all-or-nothing zero-sum game.

What people fail to understand is that Bitcoin is designed as a commercial system.

True, when it first came out, it was an Alpha product, and the code standard was limited. I am not the coding God that people make me out to be, and there was a lot of work in getting it where it had to be just to launch. More, it didn’t even work at first. Bear and Hal acted freely, and gave a lot of advice, and basically fixed a lot of the shit that I had left. I act on a high level these days — Steve and the team wouldn’t let me near live code again, and I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. It’s the curse of being a generalist rather than a specialist.

Nodes need orphans. There is nothing to solve here.

Orphans are an economic signalling technique in Bitcoin. One of the reasons the block cap was put in place is that I did not have a clue on how we could have a floating limit work at the time. The problem was that the solutions all required monetary value.

Even orphaning blocks (as a signalling method) requires value to be of use. If you’re merely losing a reward of 50 bitcoin when bitcoin is not even worth a fraction of a cent, the incentives do not exist to think about the network, the connectivity of your node, or any of the other aspects of Bitcoin that people seem to ignore. This is the point; Bitcoin mining is not about finding a block, it is about ensuring that all other mining nodes know that you have found a block and that it is valid.

Once the network is large, there is an incentive for nodes to watch the validation times and propagation rates of blocks across the network. Once this occurs, they can start monitoring the time of discovery versus the time of propagation for blocks and then set limits on what they will produce versus what they will build on.

A block limit should be an economic function. More importantly, it is more about the inclusion of any transaction that you can take with any amount of fees. Where a miner starts to see orphans occur, they know that in losing the blocks they are losing rewards.

Bitcoin was designed with a two-week limit on difficulty for this reason.

Every 2016 blocks, Bitcoin was designed to reset its difficulty such that the system maintained itself in a fluctuating zero-sum game. It is a multi-leader Stackelberg game. But more importantly, the block reward is a zero-sum game meaning that orphans are not included in the two-week total. For the total supply, the two-week average creation rate will stay at 2016 block subsidies. If there are 1 million orphans, there will still be 2016 blocks discovered. Yes, I am exaggerating there a little, but the point is that extra blocks skew the reward towards better connected networks. Not home systems, but large well connected data farms that act to ensure that they are incredibly well connected.

The way it works is that if you have three nodes (yes, I know that such is not the case, nor shall it be) for our toy model of Bitcoin and each has equal hash power, then the better connected node wins more blocks. Imagine two of the three nodes have 10 times the bandwidth of the other. What will occur is that more transactions will be able to be taken and processed by the two miners than by the third on the more limited network. A part of the problem here stems from the block subsidy. People using it as the value of bitcoin and not as an incentive to build the network as it was intended.

We will assume that a 1GB block can be propagated from the first two nodes without too much problem and that it takes a large amount of time which effectively reduces the comparative hash rate of the third node. If we take block propagation of the 1GB block to take one minute on average (which is excessive but designed to make my point) for the two faster nodes, then each will lose 10% the hash rate equally. That is, some will gain a benefit and some will lose but at equal rate. Conversely, our slow node will lose around 65–70% of its effective hash rate.

Instead of an expected daily return of 48 blocks, the slow node will now expect to earn from a mere reap of 16 blocks with the other faster nodes each getting paid from additional 16 blocks in total reward. This is a significant differential, and will lead to a scenario where the slow system either goes bankrupt or updates its network. If it was to update its network, the equivalent hash rate between the systems would again equalise. Conversely, if the system went bankrupt, we would expect other players to come into the market due to the large increased profit margins of the remaining players.

On the other hand, if the two nodes can only handle blocks up to 100MB, the node creating 1GB blocks will end up losing an effective 50% of its hash power. This means that it would expect to earn only 24 of the 48 blocks that it is finding each day. The fast node will benefit by slowing down a little, maybe to 300 MB. Doing so will still give it an advantage and yet stop the losses from having the main impact.

Most importantly, as the block subsidies start to disappear, more and more of the profit-earning capability of a node will need to be derived from transactions. To do so, a node will want to build more and more transactions into a block. The issue now becomes one of paid versus unpaid transactions and of a rate per transaction.

There is no need to create an artificial fee market.

The socialist fools of Core who are running SegWitCoin (BTC) don’t understand that markets don’t need their help. They seem to believe that they need to be the socialist planner saving the Utopia that they wish to create. It is the irony of them calling themselves libertarian.

Orphans are the signaling method that allows organizations to control the rate of discovery and the rate of loss in a manner that lets them know when they need to upgrade their network and also to control the fee level that they will take. There should always be a certain number of free transactions in every block. Fees should be driven to a point that is as low as possible, and through capitalist competition should be driven so low that inefficient nodes are bankrupted and removed.

Subsidising home users remove the security of Bitcoin, and allow it to be easily attacked. Bitcoin becomes secure because a large number of competing organisations fight for the right to take your transaction.

There is nothing to fix in orphans. They are a critical part of the design of Bitcoin.

On failure

Bitcoin didn’t fail, but other parts of my life did. I used to own horses. When I sold my property, I had to sell them too. A horse that I had had for a decade, a mean grumpy thing like me. I had to give him away. It broke my heart.

Say what you want, that it was only an animal, but I interacted with them more than I did with many people. Outside of Dave and my property, I had a very isolated life. At one point, I was doing four post-graduate degrees simultaneously, and I was working. The period includes my master’s degree in law and a master’s degree in statistics. I needed such information to complete Bitcoin, but at the same time, it left me isolated. I had work, my farm, and one really good friend — Dave.

Dave started getting sick in 2011, and I knew that I had to give up my farm.

I did isolated forensic jobs, and did work for a number of casinos and sports betting sites such as Centerbet to try and keep some money coming in, but the first thing I needed to do was actually prove that Bitcoin worked.

It was the nature of what I did with Panopticrypt between 2011 and 2013. Nothing that I could commercialise and make money out of, just rule research so I would know that I hadn’t wasted my life completely.

I spent millions testing alternatives. I needed to be certain I was correct. That the system worked as a commercial solution and also that something like a home-user version (as the BTC Core group, Hal, and many others want and wanted) was not valid. Or, at least that if it was, it would not end as a crime coin. I worked to create a mainstream system, and making an anonymous coin would have simply ended me.

I worked out how systems such as Monero, Zcash, and for that matter any anonymous blockchain could be infiltrated and stopped.

They needed to work with a large number of organizations and some quite unsavory characters to do so. I’m not talking about the honest licensed gaming companies and other types that used Liberty Reserve. This was a part of the problem. Dave had been storing all the money we used in accounts attached to Liberty Reserve. It’s not as much of a problem for me as it was for him because gambling laws in the US preclude sports betting in any form whereas it is legal in Australia.

Dave and I worked with law enforcement and others for a long time. Dave took opiates, because his condition left him in constant pain. But more importantly, contacts of his told him about the impending takedown of Liberty Reserve eight weeks before it occurred. He was left with the problem of knowing that if he moved his funds, it would be tracked. Effectively, to do so would have ended his career.

Rock, hard place.

Frying pan, fire.

If David had talked to me about his problems with money, I would have helped. When it comes to work, I’m rather excessive and focused. My wife will tell you so, I hyperfocus, and the world moves around me, and I do what needs to be done. It is how we have gotten to completing over a thousand white papers and how I had 20 academic papers accepted for publication in the last two months. I can’t say it’s good, it takes a toll in anyone’s life, but you could say I’m driven.

Towards the end of 2010, many people sought to start making alternative systems, sidechains, and more. What people will start to realise is that Bitcoin only works as a single solitary chain. It will never be more than it is now, and eventually people will give up, and it will collapse unless it is one. I looked at proposals from people looking to do alternative blockchains, and tried to come up with solutions that allowed alternative chains to exist without splitting CPU power.

Where we are with the Metanet now has come about following another decade of research. I did not have a clue about how to do it until last year. What you’ve seen is the equivalent of the Internet circa 1991. We have a lot more coming, it is just not public quite yet. What people are seeing as development in BSV is nothing compared to what is about be released.

I wanted to bring my inventions back into Australia, but I also needed to do so without shooting myself in the head. I wanted to remain as secret as I could and also repatriate funds to Australia. I was still doing a lot of contract work with government, and even acted as a prosecution expert, and conducted judge prosecutor training.

I had spoken at many conferences where even in 2010 I had started trying to teach people in government and law enforcement about the benefits of Bitcoin, how it mitigated the problems of most forms of money today and allowed them to actually trace money better than they had ever dreamed when it came to crime.

Then Wikileaks, then dark websites…

Everything I built Bitcoin to be seemed to be falling apart at that stage.

I wanted to have a means to be open with government, but could not find one. I spent a year studying distributed botnets, not just the common knowledge — I had gone about as deep as you could expect anyone anywhere to go, and then some. In many ways, botnet territories mirror mining nodes within Bitcoin. I had actually based some of the design on learnings following work I’d been involved with concerning fast flux networks and distributed command-and-control servers.

There is nothing to fix in orphans. They are a critical part of the design of Bitcoin.

I always believed that if Bitcoin would eventually scale enough for my ideas to have a chance to succeed, nothing could stop it. I was also afraid that it wouldn’t make it to the stage it needed to reach to continue to grow. If I had been able to at the time, I would have patented everything to do with Bitcoin. Unfortunately, there was no way possible that I could see that would have allowed me to do so. Satoshi, the issuer of a monetary system, can be close to anonymous, though even then I wasn’t, but you cannot file an intellectual-property claim using a pseudonym.

So it was a choice at the time.

More importantly, it was also of monetary reason. Filing patents globally is incredibly expensive. My guess is that each patent is costing us between $25K and $70K, and right now we are approaching a total of 700 that have been processed. You can do the maths.

Likely, nobody really understood what the hell we were trying to talk about. SPV is something I’ve been arguing about for years now and everyone’s ignored. Likely they have because I was trying to spark someone into understanding it, but they haven’t understood it, which means we’ve been able to file patents on how it is actually achieved. It’ll be out later in the year.

It is going to be painful for someone to discover how simple it really is, and more importantly, it is absolutely critical for the scaling of the network. Other people’s loss.

When I wrote that Bitcoin was set in stone, I was referring to a protocol that can do about everything and will result in massive damage to the network when split. More importantly, the concept of splitting a digital currency is really scammy. There are no splits, there is a demerger process when all nodes agree, and where they don’t, there is the original protocol.

The creation of a protocol change is the creation of a completely new cryptocurrency.

You can airdrop all you like, except it is covered under existing law. Bitcoin remains the original currency that was formed in 2009, and the new currency is created alongside it. There is no democratic voting within money.

Gold was valuable when it was used as a global form of exchange. It was not valuable because gold was different in different countries nor because different governments exchanged at different rates, it was valuable as it allowed a universal measurement of value. Even when individual governments debased the currency, gold was valuable as it allowed measurement of the debasement. And that’s important; looking across global trade and global exchange, we want a system of value that can report on debasements and allow us to see the value of our money in any location as it is spent in the location. To do so, we need a stable base currency.

Miners can choose to reject blocks such as of those that have more transactions than they’re willing to build upon. They can choose to risk being orphaned and to orphan others. It is a part of how Bitcoin works. What is not a part of the system is the addition of new opcodes and the radical changing and alteration of the signature system such as with the removal of signatures in SegWit.

All of the divisive and socialist bull about money is at the heart of the attack on miners, but then, with the push towards proof of stake (aka proof of illegal security), we see that most of such myths are nothing but an attempt to create a system that allows for illegal bucket shops, criminal activity, and more importantly, pyramid and Ponzi schemes designed to allow one to facilitate the creation of ICOs which are merely a new form of stealing money. Rather, I should say they are an old form of stealing money with a new label, for none of it is new, and USENET scams existed way way back.

There are no forks

To put it simply, there are no forks in Bitcoin. The radical alteration of the base protocol by BTC in 2017 was not an alteration to Bitcoin. It was the creation of a completely new system that simply copied the existing coin holders and ledger and modified the system.

Bitcoin is not a consensus system based on democratic voting.

Bitcoin does not democratize shareholding. Shares have been de-materialised for a long time. Electronic trading is nothing new. Being able to create shares outside of a registered body is an old fraud, and it has been going on since the 1960s.

There are absolutely no benefits to society in having many blockchains. First, there are no such things as special-purpose blockchains in the same way that there is no such thing as a special-purpose Internet. You have a general-purpose system that does everything, or you have nothing of value. More importantly, the system security is incredibly low unless it congeals into a single unit and stays that way.

Bitcoin can be used for tokens. It is nothing new.

When you have an equity or share that is created across multiple ledgers, you no longer have a ledger with any value. If you split and make a copy of a blockchain, then you have the original share held on the ledger, and you have a sham copy of the same on another one. As an example, if we have bitcoin with tokenised gold issued and someone creates a new copy of a blockchain using the original bitcoin ledger, then we do not gain any further gold. You also cannot now distribute the same gold between two sets of blockchains.

The entire creation of the concept of splits is simply a form of fooling those who have no idea about Bitcoin into believing that you can change the protocol and still have a monetary system that works.

They are attempting simply to take the network effect of Bitcoin and steal it into their experiment. Luckily, we have enough capital now to be able to patent my ideas. Bitcoin, every blockchain that could possibly ever compete with it, and every other distributed ledger technology compete, and only one will win. None of that phases me because I’m about two decades ahead of the market, I’m very happy to be here, and I don’t really care if you wish to ignore me because you don’t cost me money.

There is value in being able to withhold information. Information is a commodity. This is the core of the heart of Bitcoin. I have information of value and others wanted. Information is property, and I choose how I distribute my property.

One of the worst things within the cryptocurrency space is the community. The toxic rabble that you like to call crypto as a community scares off business and adoption. Do I want followers? No. Do I need followers? No.

I have more intellectual property patented than any bank, any large vendor, and in fact more than even China combined. Very simply, we hit the filing of just under 700 this month, and that alone is only the ones that you will see for now. Unlike most organisations, we hide the publication of our patents as long as possible. It still gives us the priority date, and ensures that no one catches on to what we are doing before it is too late — and we will have moved on to the next 20 projects.

With just under 1200 white papers that in time will lead to around 10,000 global patent filings, I really don’t give a shit whether you like what I’m doing. But you are going to have to pay attention whether you like it or not.

The mis-focused attempt to abolish banking and modern finance through Proudhon and turn it into crypto anarchism in the seeking of equality through the abolition of monetary systems with the concept that “Money hides itself — we must dispense with it;” “Let all merchandise become current money, and abolish the royalty of gold” (Proudhon, 1927: 46) is a canker on the ass of society. What is even worse is the neo-utopian revitalisation of the flawed ideas of More (1516) with the mislaid attempt to radically transform money in a false belief that a redesign of the price system will somehow by itself improve economic conditions and global equality.

It is not technically feasible to accomplish what is conceptually correct, namely to transform the money function into a pure token money, and to detach it completely from every substantial value that limits the quantity of money, even though the actual money suggests that this will be the final outcome. (Simmel, 2004, p165)

Bitcoin doesn’t create equality, no blockchain does. The existence of a sound commodity money based on principles of supply and demand does not mean you become richer, and it does not mean that local currencies alter in form. It does mean that they compete, and it requires far more than simply having Bitcoin as a HODL platform, in other words a pyramid scheme or Ponzi.

Bitcoin is a system of work. In proof of work, it is fairly much a Protestant work ethic digitised and exchanged online.

What Bitcoin adds is efficiency. It does not democratize shareholding, and nor should it. Like it or not, people can issue shares in companies, and governments can control them however they want. Regulations are designed to protect investors. The interesting thing is that investors seek capital that is better protected. There is a premium placed on investing on the New York Stock Exchange over the Delaware exchange. The reason is simple: investor’s confidence.

With global corporations, a company in California can seek to raise money through the issue of shares on a stock market in Panama today. With de-materialisation, the electronic trading and payment are quick and simple. For the consumer, existing broker systems are actually more attractive than any digital token right now. It is not the consumer that is seeking the technology.

One party to the problem is the capital raiser seeking to gain a benefit without going through the necessary consumer protections. Right now, there are many ways of raising money from sophisticated investors. Such is the real issue with ICOs and the fraud propagated in selling them as democratising finance. They are democratising nothing; they are doing the same scams that we saw with pink sheets and USENET tokens over the previous decades ending in the last century.

All of them are seeking to raise money based on the token itself. They are not selling the benefits of the company, rather they are seeking to create a pyramid scheme where they sell the concept of a token that will naturally increase in price because everyone wants it. A monetised and marketed greater fool scheme. The worst of them are scams such as Ripple and XRP that offer nothing new to the market, but sell a false promise of a blockchain implementation without a blockchain.

The promise of Bitcoin and blockchain is linked to the immutable ledger. It comes when there is one set of books. If an organisation can have multiple sets of books, they can easily commit fraud. If they have multiple blockchains, they can easily commit fraud. As soon as you can start moving between Bitcoin and some sidechain or alternate chain, you have the ability to construct elaborate schemes such as those run by Bernie Madoff and Enron. With Bitcoin, vigilance is still necessary, but it is possible to construct a fully auditable system that allows for a single immutable record stream making fraud more difficult. Not impossible, but more difficult.

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