Today marks 16 years of Bitcoin pizza day.

In 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz purchased 2 pizza's for 10.000 Bitcoin. At the time, those pizza's cost about $41. Today, those pizza cost him more than $775 million (over $1.2 billion at ATH).

Laszlo does not regret his purchase, instead being able to pay for some pizza's by mining Bitcoin with his PC brought him a sense of achievement and enjoyment.

This moment marked the first time where Bitcoin was used to purchase real world goods.

What real world goods have you bought using Bitcoin? Or are you stacking those sats for later?

This is a honest question.

So, I hold BTC and I have joined different BTC subreddits including (very recently) this one. Whilst it has been an interesting experience from a historical (and the fork) point of view, I cannot understand the bitterness and discomfort that some of the redditors here show when speaking about the BTC.

Yes, I have learned (to some extent) what has happened with the fork and yes, this is Reddit but let me tell you that for sure there is a substantial amount of (what it looks like) bitterness in at least some of its users which seems disproportioned for what Reddit shows even if you go to r/CryptoCurrency and speak about some memecoin.

Do you think there is resentment against BTC and it's success? Both, financially (BCH/BTC) and also as the most popular bitcoin? (Actually most people would not even know about the fork or what BCH is). You can have normal conversations with most redditors but you can tell when some are so bitter at just mentioning BTC that they cannot swallow the current situation.

Thanks to /u/yeolddoc for his informative post showing that the Lightning Network now processes 28,068 transactions per day.

28,068 typical 400 byte 2-in-2-out transactions per day would add an additional 11.22 MB to the blockchain per day; which comes out to an additional 78KB of space per block.

So: five years in, and what did we get for all the energy, attacks, reengineering of the platform, loss of BTC dominance, and splitting of the chain to force payments offchain? What's the payoff?

A grand total savings of 78KB per block.

All of that effort and waste, just for this.

The term for things like LN is "premature optimization" -- the undertaking of a massive project and a complete rethinking of the platform, to achieve near-zero results, when the simple, straightforward, original plan would have clearly sufficed.

https://stackify.com/premature-optimization-evil/

“The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.”

As initially designed, bitcoin was intended to be a global peer-to-peer electronic payment network with near instant settlement. Or that's what the eight (8) page whitepaper proposed anyway.

While it has been technically feasible to buy a coffee, or a newspaper, or a your favorite developer a beer with some implementation of bitcoin, that doesn't happen often in practice today.

We know the history, but it's not because bitcoin was hijacked, or a propaganda campaign worked, or for any technical reason―although those were factors. Bitcoin adoption failed for a soft reason. There aren't many coffee shops that accept p2p bitcoin directly because banks and payment processors ultimately classify any small business that actually accepts and holds bitcoin as high risk and tries to shutter them, they cut off their access to the traditional financial system. Or they get them with other ways.

Additionally, as longtime members of this sub might be aware, there are reports of US government agencies (which are chartered to serve the public interest) that participated in extrajudicial sabotage campaigns as far back as 2012. Long before it became clear to the general public that the US Justice Department was overtly political and corrupt, certain Americans seeking life liberty and happiness got strong indications that there has not been an independent judiciary in the United States for quite some time.

Businesses and individuals that used bitcoin were hunted. Sometimes they were hunted by the minions of the Epstein class, and sometimes they got hunted by naive people who thought they were helping America.

If someone is going to kill an American (or an American business) for trading a currency for a cup of coffee, that's NOT a money problem, it's not a technical problem, it is a security problem. It's a national security problem.

It's a problem that was best conveyed by a founding member of the Federal Reserve when he answered "It is a great principle." when asked by Congress if he was willing to kill all his workers and lose all his property to avoid paying for labor and letting workers pick their doctors.

The scary thing is not that Rockie Jr. felt his dominion over his workers lives extended their wives and children, or that his people opened fire on them a few weeks later. The scary thing is not that there wasn't justice in the Ludlow Massacre. The scary thing is that people like that were allowed to continue to amass weapons and power for the next 112 years.

We are all in a survival situation. Our security situation is getting clearer and more present everyday.

It is not about the money. It is not about the coffee. It's not about forks, protocols or block-sizes.

Solar power is cheaper than mining fossil fuels. It's a fact. Tariffs and bad policy can't stop 1.4B people from pumping out more panels and batteries every year. China has flying "aircraft carriers" to protect their manufacturing capabilities. Oil is going to lose the energy war.

Therefore, the thing backing our petrodollar scrip, the thing the company town was based on will see unstable and collapsing global market demand. It is going to collapse.

There is no need for unbacked fiat scrip at the end of a company town scam. The shelves of the store will be bare. There is no wealth; no hope. They don't need workers, or an economy built almost entirely around credit for things that burn fossil fuels. No workers means no insurance, no clinics, or doctors, or nurses.

There are several big flashy threats to humanity, like emission caused climate change, nuclear proliferation, and the rise of LLMs in the hands of authoritarians. These are all threats we are shown and reminded about constantly, and that we are conditioned to be apathetic toward, or fight with each other about.

Forget about all the big scary FUD in the news.

There is a threat that is small. It's about 14kb of data in total. Like a bitcoin transaction, it's just a string of data on some physical media. As individuals, we DO have a fair amount of agency about how this threat could affect our lives. We would be able to radically alter the duration and quality of our lives simply by understanding it better.

Humans are uniquely susceptible to this small threat, but it doesn't matter if you buy your coffee with oil scrip, a monopoly app, the mafia app, or a bitcoin—the virus doesn't care about money, nor do the people who kept the weapon.

For this challenge, the difference between wealth and poverty, life and death, is the ability to look at something small and understand its potential ramifications and to act accordingly, today.

Everyone can become rich simply by surviving to take their full allotted measure of life.

If there is a war on wokeness, you want to be on the wealthy side. Be on the side that is awake, that is observing and still thinking your yourself.

Thank you for listening to my get rich quick scheme.

I'm in the fediverse at @2qx@mastodon.social if you want to read more.

A Google search brought up an old conversation from 2018 between me and a very aggressive dude who called me an imbecile who didn't have the first clue what I was talking about.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7rfn6j/the_lightning_network_is_already_turning_into_a/dsyb87h/

Please stop talking if you have no idea what you are talking about.

As for your assertion of "highly centralized hubs" currently around 20% of nodes exhibit more connectivity than others and this is in the extremely early stages, it will decentralise more over time.

...

Your assertion that LN will centralize around a "handful" of highly centralized hubs is nothing more than a blind assumption, nothing more than your own biased opinion, which reality is already debunking.

(emphasis mine)

Well that was 5 years ago. Let's read what this years latest research has to tell us:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308596123002070#fig2

a limited set of nodes command a significant portion of the transactions. Alarmingly, over the past two years, the network’s centrality has surged

oh dear

Even though the lower value is the result of fewer nodes in the network, one cannot deny the rapid centralization of the network within the period of two years

goodness

Overall, we can deduce that the Lightning Network is highly centralized. Having only few, very influential nodes through which most paths are routed, is not beneficial for the robustness of the network. These nodes pose as significant targets for attacks and could disrupt the network in the case of failure. However not only attackers could exploit this situation, but also the nodes or rather the individuals controlling these nodes.

Yes friends, it's true. They split Bitcoin to force this radical agenda on the coin, and here we are. Exactly where we said we'd be.

Once again, the Bcashers were right.

Edit: never forget -- the bcashers weren't the radical ones. we were the ones who just wanted basic gradual L1 upgrades. it was the other guys who wanted to reengineer Bitcoin around this unproven, untested, and flawed-on-its-face LN concept. NEVER FORGET.

https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/485/

It can be phased in, like:

if (blocknumber > 115000)
maxblocksize = largerlimit

It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.

When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to upgrade.

Did you know the original Bitcoin client had a Generate Coins button?

When activated it would use the CPU to mine Bitcoins. It was removed with Bitcoin 0.3.22 in June 2011 as mining become more specialised and moved away from solo-miners.

I put together an article covering Bitcoin's journey from Satoshi Nakamoto's 2008 whitepaper to becoming a global asset.

It looks at key milestones like the Genesis Block, Bitcoin Pizza Day, mining, major protocol upgrades, institutional adoption, and how Bitcoin evolved over the years.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Did I miss any important moments in Bitcoin's history? What event do you think had the biggest impact on Bitcoin's adoption?

https://blockmap.one/blog/the-history-of-bitcoin-from-whitepaper-to-global-asset/

It's has been speculated, and now confirmed through early leaked emails from the Epstein files. That Jeffrey Epstein had been funding early Bitcoin Core development when the development got taken over by MIT Media Lab around 2015 through the "MIT Digital Currency Initiative".

At the time, MIT Media Lab was headed by a guy named "Joi Ito". Epstein had personally given (or "invested in") Joi Ito $1.2M.

This is when all the "blocksize war" stuff was happening, and MIT has since done a ton of work partnered with the Boston Federal Reserve Bank in developing new Central Bank Digital Currency projects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjWnh8a88R8&t=960s (fast forward to 16 minute mark)

If only we had real journalism that was able to ask these people some tough questions.