Overnight, BTC (Bitcoin) rebounded slightly to around the 5-day moving average of 67.7k. In the internal reference “US Core Inflation Slows, Favorable for Loose Monetary Policy” [link] on May 31, Liu Jiaolian mentioned that Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, has recently published a long article reflecting on the Bitcoin block war.
The topic he talked about is naturally well-known, the community battle over Bitcoin scalability that erupted in 2017-2018. That intense conflict led to the division of the community, with a small group of people supporting the so-called “big blocks” causing a split and forking out BCH (Bitcoin Cash). Confidence was shaken, and the bull market peaked. Later, in the second half of 2018, the infamous impostor “Faketoshi” on BCH created another hard fork called BSV (Bitcoin Satoshi Vision). The market collapsed, entering the “valley of death” at the end of 2018.
Countless cryptocurrency investors were swept away by this historical torrent, deceived by the “grand narrative” of BCH and even BSV, selling off their BTC holdings and going all-in on these forked coins, paying the price for their own understanding and “ideals”. Now, six years have passed, and I wonder if the graves of many “betrayed” positions are overgrown with two meters of grass?
Wu Jihan, who championed the BCH split, has lost his position at Bitmain. Craig Wright, who used BSV to deceive and defraud, has been legally recognized as a fraudster and has been fined globally.
Vitalik, who intended to expand BTC’s programming capabilities but was rejected and left to work on Ethereum (ETH), is still talking about the “failure” of Bitcoin.
Only the bag holders who heavily invested in them and lagged behind BTC are left in confusion. Some of these confused bag holders have developed Stockholm syndrome and now speak highly of these coins, deluding themselves and others.
Character determines destiny, and cognition determines wealth. The character of the elite has changed the fate of millions of living beings, and the cognition of the elite has influenced the wealth of thousands of people.
Vitalik’s arrogance and prejudice will inevitably make the people around the world who believe in him pay the price.
The ones who have to support him are the “pre-miners” from the initial coin offering, the “foundation” that constantly sells at high prices, the “big capital” that gains interest through staking in PoS, and more.
ETH has never had a stable token economic model, let alone a “century-long plan” with a strict, concise, and elegant issuance formula like BTC.
[Image]
Because Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation have de facto monopolized the most important “weapon” in the Ethereum ecosystem – hard forks.
In the view of Liu Jiaolian, the hard fork that dominates Ethereum is the most important power that Vitalik wants to defend with this post, under the guise of objective neutrality and a slight bias towards supporting big blocks.
For this reason, he does not hesitate to strongly oppose the cautious principles of Bitcoin core developers in the past, and even oppose the technical values of “soft forks are better than hard forks”.
By monopolizing the power of hard forks in Ethereum, Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation control and arbitrarily change the issuance rules of ETH – you guessed it right, perhaps this is also the real reason why Vitalik and the foundation have never formally clarified the issuance model of ETH and do not seem to intend to adopt a fixed and unchangeable model like BTC.
“Just let me control the currency issuance of a country, and I don’t care who makes the laws.” – Mayer Amschel Rothschild
In his article, Vitalik talks extensively about the prisoner’s dilemma model in game theory, but he conveniently ignores the clear statement in the textbook “Game Theory” that a more deterministic monetary policy has better economic efficiency.
Bitcoin’s entire technology is designed to defend its unchanging monetary model for thousands of years. Ethereum has implemented so many cool technologies, but is it just to defend the monopoly and dictatorship over hard forks and currency issuance?
In order to emphasize the noble reason of “technological improvement”, Vitalik even directly wrote a section in his article called “Less Conflict, More Technology” to criticize Bitcoin for not being innovative.
He writes, “The ultimate diffuser of political tension is not compromise, but rather new technology.”
He questions Bitcoin, “One key question for Bitcoin going forward is, will Bitcoin be able to become a tech-forward ecosystem?”
He uses technological supremacism to dismiss his so-called “Saylorism” (presumably created to mock Michael Saylor, the founder of MicroStrategy and a Bitcoin maximalist). He claims that the approval of an ETF for ETH in the United States would lead to the death of Saylorism and make people realize that Bitcoin needs to improve its technology.
Liu Jiaolian couldn’t help but laugh. A group of people who pretended to advocate decentralization and resistance to censorship actually used the approval of the US regulatory agency SEC to endorse their own legitimacy and rationality, as well as to attack the Bitcoin community. It is truly ridiculous.
Although Liu Jiaolian is also a technical professional, he never believes in so-called technocracy.
“This is the so-called ‘weaponism’, the mechanical view of war issues, the subjective and one-sided opinion. Our opinion is the opposite of this. We not only see weapons, but also see manpower. Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor. The decisive factor is people, not things.” – Mao Zedong, “On Protracted War”, May 1938
After six years, Vitalik wants to reverse the case for big blocks. He criticizes the SegWit technology, which made it possible for soft forks to scale and quickly redirected the debate to support the SegWit scaling solution and abandon the hard fork scaling solution. But in his article, Vitalik wants to believe that hard fork scaling with larger block sizes is simpler and better.
He even quotes the forum post by Bitcoin’s founder Satoshi Nakamoto to support his argument for hard fork scaling. It’s amusing for someone who opposes Bitcoin to use the words of Bitcoin’s founder to endorse their own views. This is similar to Craig Wright claiming to be the true embodiment of Satoshi’s ideas and accusing Bitcoin core developers of being revisionists.
But in his article, he “pretends” not to see the current adoption rate of SegWit, which has exceeded 95%.
[Image]
Vitalik also sighs and laments that the big block camp was “incompetent” in terms of technical development. He indirectly admits a historical fact that those who advocated for split and hard forked big blocks back then were not technically competent and repeatedly failed, losing the trust of the people.
But he wants to misinterpret this fact and engage in a wrong historical reflection. He sees not the objective infeasibility of unlimited big blocks, but attributes the failure to the technical incompetence of those who advocated for big blocks. This is a grand idealism, not historical materialism.
Vitalik even goes so far as to use his traditional skill of “inventing intimidating jargon” and reverses the incompetence of the betrayers, creating a cool phrase called the “one-sided competence trap”.
Wow, General MacArthur would exclaim “Wow!” when he sees this! It turns out that the incompetence of the big block camp, who advocated for split and hard fork, is all because the so-called Bitcoin core developers who support small blocks are too technically competent and too capable of Bitcoin development work! So it becomes “one-sided competence” instead of both sides being competent. Vitalik has determined that this is very bad, it is a “trap”! “Trap” ah, students!
He said that because of this one-sided competence difference, Bitcoin has fallen into “authoritarianism”. Criticizing Bitcoin for falling into authoritarianism, is it to whitewash the dictatorship of Ethereum?
Isn’t it because talented individuals with strong technical abilities are more rational and objective, making the correct “alignment” and historical “choices”? Does Vitalik know what the people’s hearts and minds want? If it wasn’t for the incompetence and blatant speculation of the big block camp, why couldn’t they attract more outstanding talents than the original Bitcoin maintainers?
Because it is not popular and cannot attract talents, it cannot be competent. It must be claimed that it cannot be competent because it cannot produce good things, so it loses people’s trust. Isn’t this a reversal of cause and effect, a distortion of right and wrong?
In a deeper sense, those who believe in the people creating history are more likely to accept the former narrative logic (people’s history). Those who believe in the elite creating history will attribute everything to the latter narrative logic (elite history). What Vitalik skillfully argues is precisely the narrative logic of the latter elitism.
The narrative of the elite is the narrative of the capitalist ruling class. The people are just a mass, and they must be used and supported by the elite. Without capitalists, who will pay workers’ wages? Is it the workers who work overtime and earn excess profits to support the capitalists, or is it the capitalists who pay workers’ wages and support them?
Therefore, we can see very clearly that Vitalik is deeply immersed in the mainstream ideology of the present era, while Satoshi Nakamoto is beyond the present era.
The Ethereum and Bitcoin created by their completely different ideologies are not products of the same era and the same level at all.
For Vitalik, who is trying to revive hard fork scaling, he only fervently denies and opposes an objective fact when it comes to whether “miners” should dominate hard forks: that is, consensus among miners is sufficient to implement a hard fork.
Why? Because Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation have used various means, including the difficulty bomb and the promotion of so-called “orthodoxy,” to politically and ideologically manipulate the miner community, firmly grasping the power of hard forks in the hands of the foundation.
On the one hand, they promote the idea that hard forks are good, and on the other hand, they constantly guard against other forces usurping power. This is the distorted mentality of feudal “imperial power”. In order to monopolize the power to dominate hard forks and control currency issuance, they are willing to go to great lengths, just like feudal emperors who hold the power of life and death and cannot sleep peacefully.
Vitalik may be a pure-minded comrade without ambitions. However, when Ethereum started with pre-mining tokens and coin financing, and when Ethereum implemented PoS for staking and earning interest, he and the leaders of Ethereum had already introduced the ghost of capitalism into Ethereum. Once this ghost enters, it will parasitize in everyone’s mind, blood, and marrow, and cannot be removed.
And all of Vitalik’s speeches, on the surface, are what he wants to say, but in reality, they are just endorsements for this ghost. On the surface, he talks about technology, but he is actually defending the fundamental interests of this ghost, which is the monopoly and control over hard forks and currency issuance. On the surface, he is shouting for justice for the big block camp that splits from Bitcoin, but in reality, he is just clarifying, defending, and whitewashing the ultimate ruling power of the Ethereum ghost, which monopolizes currency control through leading hard forks.
However, we should still believe that the eyes of the people are sharp. History will eventually give its fair judgment.
[1]
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/05/31/blocksize.html
(Public account: Liu Jiaolian. Knowledge planet: Reply “planet” to the public account)
(Disclaimer: The content of this article does not constitute any investment advice. Cryptocurrencies are highly risky assets and carry the risk of going to zero at any time. Please participate cautiously and take responsibility for yourself.)
Tags:
Vitalik Buterin
Ethereum
Liu Jiaolian
Investment Insights
Bitcoin
Random Thoughts
Source link:
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/jDJC6YC_qUUZPmg-7qcgvw
Note: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute investment advice