-----BEGIN BITCOIN SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Hello. I am the BearWhale. After a series of bad experiences with

the banking system, I invested most of my life savings into bitcoin

when the price was fairly low, around $8. For years I was a HODLer.

I was holding when Trendon Shavers ripped everyone off. I was holding

when the price was over a thousand, and I held after MtGox imploded.

I believe strongly in Bitcoin’s decentralized promise of displacing

immoral national currencies.

The price kept drifting downwards until finally at a little over $300

I had enough. I sold off everything, based on an accumulation of

information I gathered mostly from social media such as bitcointalk.org

and reddit:

* The block size limit of 1MB was a threat to bitcoin’s future

* “Satoshi’s vision” was unlimited block sizes

* Gavin was ousted by a cabal of self-interested engineers, a.k.a. “Blockstream”

* Blockstream took control of bitcoin’s source code repository

* Theymos colluded with Blockstream to censor block size increase discussions

* The subreddit r/bitcoin heavily censored block size increase discussions

* Blockstream wanted the block size low to promote its proprietary Lightning Network

* Gregory Maxwell was a bad actor and Luke-Jr was a religious nut

* The market agreed with the above, leading to the then-decline in price towards $300

At this point I should state that I am a highly technical person.

I understand all of the math behind the bitcoin whitepaper and the

software that powers it. Although, I am not a security expert nor

am I a cypherpunk - only a little experience in the type of adversarial

thinking necessary to be a competent steward of the technology. I don’t

regret selling, as I made an enormous profit. The decision was a rational

one based on available information. However, in 2017 I went all-in on

bitcoin again and here’s why:

None of the supposed facts which motivated my decision to sell were

correct. It was all a carefully crafted and funded disinformation

campaign launched by Roger Ver and his cronies, perhaps Jihan Wu, to

discourage improvements to the bitcoin protocol to achieve financial

gain at the expense of the community.

Once I recognized the moves to discredit the core developers for what it

was, a covertly operated smear campaign fought on social media, funded by

enormous enrichment from bitcoin, carried out with sock puppets and appeals

to emotion, I looked at bitcoin and the greater community again with a more

critical eye and I came to the following conclusions:

* Bitcoin is working great: look at the fees people are willing to pay

* Resistance to poorly thought out protocol changes is a feature not a bug

* Core developers are highly competent, from reading the mailing list

* SegWit is incredibly well engineered to create the least network disruption

* The subreddit r/btc is filled with negativity and meaningless attack

* Roger Ver is a con man who uses his bitcoin.com domain to push his agenda

* Bitcoin mining is centralized due to Bitmain’s temporary monopoly on retail hardware

* ASICBoost is an exploit which has broken some economic incentives of bitcoin

* Absent Bitmain, bitcoin the currency is far superior to altcoins

Although I am of course an adult fully responsible for my decisions,

I want to make it clear that Roger Ver’s agenda was successful at

convincing me that bitcoin had a “governance crisis” and was at risk

of being overtaken by altcoins.

My reason for this open letter s simple: I want the community to know

that I fully support the core developers. I am strongly in favor of UASF

as a mechanism for liminating the centralizing effect of miner control

illusions. I support SegWit as a sensible technology for moving Bitcoin

forward. I reject a block-size increase hard fork at the present time.

I reject a phony “compromise.” And I especially resent and reject a

consortium of suits coming to an “agreement” on what source-code base

will be named “bitcoin” without that code base being thoroughly vetted

over a suitable long time-frame by industry professionals. Those industry

professionals include Gregory Maxwell and most of the people who

participate regularly on the bitcoin developers mailing list and contribute

pull requests to the bitcoin-core repository.

tl;dr; I am the BearWhale: I sold Bitcoin for the wrong reasons,

and now I am all-in and long bitcoin again.

-----BEGIN SIGNATURE-----

159SCycgn8weAy2XGUEhD6V1RTFni7E3iq

G3vLGiiDFjnDM0xzGSDMk4Ub0CX3Y4AJ8cde9gS+xE23kWmKQME1iToNiP9PudJIA84YDZGKvroJxQOib5DXWwk=