The year is 2018, and the “ all your base are belong to us ” meme couldn’t be older.

I had to dust it off as I took it off the retro-memes shelf.

But like how a knight brings out his sharpest, strongest sword for that final battle, I had to bring back to life one of the most important ownage memes of all time.

Because all your coins are belong to us

The year is 2018, and not so long ago we had celebrated the 9th birthday of the Bitcoin whitepaper: one of humanity’s most important feats in the past few decades.

Electricity, cryptography, and the internet were the backbones on which this innovation was built; but like how we don’t think of a car in terms of its tires and its high-capacity batteries, we can’t think of Bitcoin in terms of its components.

Bitcoin is a complete, universe-changing entity.

And to be clear, by Bitcoin, I don’t necessarily mean BTC, but I mean the experiment carefully designed by Satoshi Nakamoto and outlined in Bitcoin's famous white paper .

I believe that the hard-fork which took place on August 1st, creating what is known as BCH, or Bitcoin Cash, is the legitimate continuation of Satoshi Nakamoto’s experiment. Bitcoin Cash continues Satoshi's original on-chain scaling plan and restores some maliciously-disabled native Bitcoin features such as instant-transactions and smart-contracts.

Blockstream, the company which took over the development and community management of Bitcoin starting around 2014, has drastically deviated from the original experiment. They practically hijacked the community and silenced any dissent as they sabotaged Bitcoin using their Bitcoin Core's client.

They introduced what is known as SegWit; a ton of hacky technical-debt working around a problem that doesn’t actually exist. They removed -weakened- trust features that were once native to Bitcoin such as 0-confirmation transactions, also known as instant-transactions. They claimed fixing "malleability", while in reality they were breaking the Bitcoin incentive model.

Segwit is a malicious step in the wrong direction; it is paving the path to off-chain centralization through clogged settlement-layers and hub-and-spoke second-layer models (lightning and liquid networks). Second-layer models allow for rent-seeking behavior and introduce non-mining incentives.

This is an intentional misalignment of incentives for the Bitcoin network participants, skewing Bitcoin’s carefully aligned Nash-Equilibrium. This is the recreation of banks and rent-seeking, something Satoshi's Bitcoin (BCH) is set to eliminate.

Essentially, this rendered BTC a non-Bitcoin-compliant version of Bitcoin.

In terms of scaling Bitcoin, BCH will grow to many, many times visa-scale when governments and big corporations finally move in.

The 1 Megabyte limit originally set on the block-size was to protect the early network from transactional-DDoS attacks; Satoshi’s plan for scaling Bitcoin was to increase the block-size as the network gained adoption. Satoshi is on record stating that raising of the block-size limit and having specialized mining-nodes are the path forward.

Satoshi poked fun at the absurdity of the idea that every Bitcoin user should be a full-node miner: "The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms".

This means that Satoshi knew that the long-term on-chain scaling plan includes developing dedicated and specialized infrastructure as to support Bitcoin's growth. The future was thin clients (SPV wallets) seamlessly plugging in and out of Bitcoin, the world's most resilient network.

A single amusement park costs anywhere between $600 million to $800 million to develop. A similar monetary investment in the network infrastructure of Bitcoin Cash (vanilla Bitcoin) will be sufficient to on-board the whole planet, sans third-parties, sans rent-seeking and sans agents.

Satoshi Nakamoto, be it a guy, a girl, a collective or a time-travelling robot from the future, has created what is proving to be, time after time, one of the most resilient and carefully aligned systems to have ever been designed.

Developing a system that exploits human greed and transforms it to be a prominent security feature is nothing short of a brilliant feat.

Bitcoin is built on greed, and greed is a first class citizen in human nature.

Bitcoin resides on the seamless edge between biology and math; biology is represented through its small-world network, and math renders it a brain-conceived natural resource.

Bitcoin is set to replace everything we know about finance, banking, trade, taxation, human labor, capitalism, communism, socialism, welfare, gambling, retirement, healthcare, warfare, religious exploitation, mafias, to list a few.

Soon, even gold might not hold its value as humanity evolves its into mining meteors and 3D printing sub-atomic structures.

Bitcoin though, marches on.

Bitcoin is the real honey badger.

Don’t hodl, spedn.





Your ICOs are nothing but gift cards

Few days ago, between two large isles in the local supermarket, I came across this huge stand of pre-paid Visa and Master and Gift cards. Tens of them, stacked next to each other, with each being designated to a specific merchant; Starbucks, Shoppers Drug Mart, Nando’s, TimHorton’s, Boston Pizza, Apple iTunes, Google Play, PetSmart, Forever21.

You name it, it was there.

When you purchase one of these cards, you’re buying the merchant’s promise to honor and accept whatever funds you deposit in these cards. Had merchants themselves not issued the card, someone else must issue the card and then go convince merchants to accept it.

When you buy into an ICO or a currency, you’re more or less buying into a non-merchant issued gift card. You are buying Monero’s, Dash's, Litecoin’s or any of the 100s other tokens and ICOs’ promise that a merchant, or a network of merchants, will eventually accept your tokens.

From Cannabis to Network Storage, these ICOs promise that they will go out and work on merchant adoption. They reserve percentages of their tokens, often pre-mined, for the platform development -most of which will never come to fruition-, and they also claim to have reserved some tokens for incentivizing merchant adoption. Basically, they promise you that their gift card will work with all these merchants.

You are buying their promise of a network effect.

The irony is, the network effect is the single hardest variable to build in almost any business; it’s why Facebook is now worth billions while Myspace is defunct. It’s why the US Dollar has a lot more value compared to the Zimbabwean Dollar; the mere network effect.

And how many networks do you think merchants care for?

Even when Visa and Master Card became prominent, it has always been one network, usually the central bank issued fiat per country. Visa and Master Card and American Express and others came to offer faster services, but on the same network.

The fiats network.

They could only dream of creating a separate currency which then merchants must accept, as that would be impossible; building a network effect is one of the hardest and most expensive feats to accomplish.

It took bankers and governments worldwide tens of years, two world-wars and lots of gold confiscation before they finally created fiat money, the world’s most inclusive -and the world’s least inclusive- network.

This is where the magic of Bitcoin lies; it is a grass-root movement which created a very powerful -technically, unstoppable- network effect.

A complete ecosystem of buyers, sellers and operators who willingly started accepting this other form of currency, with no incentive other than the currency's own technical merits and features.

All yours coins are belong to Satoshi’s Bitcoin; Bitcoin Cash.

Bitcoin’s primary use case is not a store of a value, rather, being a store of value is a derived feature from it being the best currency and financial network to have ever been created.

Bitcoin is about the technology, and the technology drove the network effect and its adoption. Its adoption drove the "store of value" and deflationary nature.

You take away any of these elements, be it the technology, the network incentives or its adoption ecosystem, and Bitcoin will be just another Airmiles, a Starbucks gift card, or any of the hundred other fiats.

When you buy into any other ICO or currency, you are forgoing all these network features of Bitcoin and accepting a promise that these pre-mined currencies will go and convince merchants worldwide to accept their token, or onboard users on their newly developed network or service as to render the token usable.

A feat that, if not impossible, is very expensive and few will ever succeed.

And those who succeed will be very, very greedy.





Bitcoin is built on greed, and that’s a good thing

One of the biggest attacks on Bitcoin is taking place right now.

Satoshi Nakamoto designed Bitcoin with great attention to not only the technical specifications, but also to the carefully aligned economic incentives. Guaranteeing that game theory mixed with our infallible human greed will always lead to a singular result; a beautifully orchestrated Nash Equilibrium where all and every attack on Bitcoin will fail.

Every better move possible on the network would have already been played by other participants. No one participant will gain by playing any further move and thus they all choose to maintain their position, protecting and optimizing the network. Miners are the knights of the round table of greed in the midst of all of this; their greed is a feature not a bug.

The one attack which Satoshi Nakamoto didn’t account for, is the subtle sabotage and taking over of Bitcoin through carefully engineered social and censorship attacks.

The attacks began with the birth of Bitcoin. Some of the very early actors which Satoshi himself trusted are now assumed to be either under direct gag orders or to have been corrupted and bought out.

Blockstream, one of the late entrants in the Fintech scene, is now the central entity controlling both the technical development roadmap of BTC and the narrative surrounding it. Blockstream spreads propaganda claiming Bitcoin Cash (vanilla Bitcoin) is a scam, using slurs such as bcash and attacking known cyberpunks and Bitcoin Cash supporters. These are orchestrated efforts meant at undermining the original scaling plan Satoshi designed for Bitcoin. Blockstream accomplishes this using their direct control over most of the information venues related to BTC and Bitcoin, such as the Bitcoin Talk Forums, Bitcoin.org, the r/Bitcoin subreddit among others.

There is a lot of speculation into why AXA, MasterCard and other financial institutions, naturally threatened by the very idea of Bitcoin, invested in the one company managing the Bitcoin source-code, Blockstream.

Without having to speculate, actions speak louder than words; I consider BTC to already be a sabotaged, broken version of Bitcoin. As of today, Bitcoin Cash is the only cryptocurrency which continues the exact original Bitcoin chain, token distribution and scaling-plan which Satoshi outlined in the Bitcoin whitepaper and then launched.

No other fork of Bitcoin, whether BTC or less known ones can claim that. This also includes LTC and other re-branded instances of Bitcoin which are also well into their way to centralized off-chain scaling.

In the Bitcoin Genesis Block, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks “.

This is the genesis block, the very first block that was ever minted on what is, in my opinion, the world’s most important technical breakthrough in modern history. It is by no coincidence that such a block contained such a very specific message.

Bitcoin was not created as a digital curiosity; it is one of the world’s most important experiments with a very clear intention: To pull the rugs from under the feet of those who exploited humanity this far.

Banking as we know it today is a mere illusion; a couple of layers of fancy services on top of a very broken and highly-abused system.

In crypto-currency talk, certain assets stand out as direct scams, meant to capitalize on the gullibility of new entrants who think that “Ripple might swell to X amount of dollars too!”. Ripple, being a pre-mined non-currency with a small number of groups holding the majority of the coins, directly exemplifies the problem with fiats today.

The mere idea of pricing Bitcoin in fiats, be it the US dollar or else, is a temporary phase of human history and will soon be gone.

Once humanity realizes that Bitcoin itself is a natural resource, everything will change, and adoption will take-on a logarithmic scale.

Your Bitcoin, if well kept, cannot be stolen nor confiscated, your bank account can be a sequence of 24 words memorized in your head as you travel the planet.

It cannot be devalued, because it is scarce by its nature.

It has a first mover supremacy and the fairest distribution model of all crypto-currencies.

And in a long tail distribution, Bitcoin Cash (vanilla Bitcoin) will claim most of the p2p cash activity.





On Vanilla Ice Cream

I’m a die-hard videogames fan who is stuck in the good old days of gaming.

The era of Red Alert, Sim City, and Diablo.

The modding scene in video-games beats the modding scene in any other space out there, including paintball, street racing and taco-selfies. Games, having slightly lax source-codes, allowed users to mod-the-hell out of them, and the mods were often absolutely awesome.

No matter what happens though, and as a hardcore gamer, you always play the vanilla version first.

Vanilla, i.e., as-produced. Unmodified. The experience the creator wanted you to have. The original parameters. You always play that first, especially if the game is good. You get to know the game intimately, and you befriend it. You then proceed to play the modded version as to experience the beautiful artistic takes or alternative narratives.

Here’s a video of a realistic Skyrim mod.

This is absolutely great in video games.

In the world of crypto-economics, however, being vanilla is not an artistic detail anymore.

Being vanilla is of utmost importance in staying true to the original parameters of the crypto-economic experiment.

Vanilla is as-designed, by its original creator.

I believe that in the Bitcoin experiment, the vanilla version continues in the network known as Bitcoin Cash.

Bitcoin Cash is scaling bitcoin on-chain, as designed and as per the original scaling path Satoshi discussed.

The Lightning network, Blockstream's plan for scaling Bitcoin Core (BTC), is off-chain scaling through centralized spoke-hub networks. This is essentially recreating 3rd party, rent-seeking, banking-like trustees on Bitcoin.

This is not what Satoshi Nakamoto designed.

This is not what the genesis block hinted at.

This is not an appeal to authority, no matter what the troll claims. It is an appeal to remain vigilant and to pay attention to those who try to break Bitcoin or change the original parameters outlined in Satoshi’s whitepaper.

I take my Bitcoin like I take my ice-cream, vanilla, BCH.

Finally, all your coins are belong to Satoshi, especially you, BTC .