The Battle for Bitcoin: Where I Stand on BIP-110 | Simon Dixon

This is a long read. It is my honest attempt to answer a question a lot of you have been asking me: where do I actually stand on BIP-110, the “spam war,” and the fight over Bitcoin Core? I am going to give you the game theory, follow the money on all sides, walk through exactly what happens over the next year, and then tell you what I am doing and why. I am not going to tell you I know how this ends. Anyone who tells you they know how this ends is selling you something. Where I stand, in one breath I already run a Bitcoin Knots node. That was a choice about which implementation I trust, and I made it before this latest fight came to a head. What people are actually asking me now is different: where I stand on BIP-110 — the soft-fork proposal that has revived the old activation war and forced the question of who really sets Bitcoin’s rules. So let me answer directly, then earn the answer over the rest of this piece. Ideologically, I am aligned with what BIP-110 represents: node operators demonstrating that corporate capture of Bitcoin can be resisted, the way we demonstrated it in 2017. I have concerns about BIP-110 as a specific mechanism. I have far graver concerns about the current state of Bitcoin Core. And I have concerns about the actors circling both camps. I am not tribal about this, and by the end I hope you will see why refusing to be tribal is the whole point — and why, in the end, I think Bitcoin needs to go through this to come out stronger. One thing I want clear from the very first line, though, so the rest reads correctly: my conviction in Bitcoin itself is total, and has been since 2011 — that is not what is in question here. Let me be precise about what “total” means, because I am not a blind loyalist: I am with Bitcoin unless it is actually captured by the Financial Industrial Complex and stops being money that individuals control. That is not something I expect to happen, and I think we are a long way from it even though they are clearly trying. But my loyalty is to Bitcoin-as-sovereign-money, not to a ticker — if the thing were ever truly captured, the commitment would be to the properties, not the brand. What I am actively deciding in this piece is narrower and more specific: my conviction in BIP-110 as a mechanism for pushing back against the capture of Bitcoin Core. That is the vote I am casting. The caution in this piece is about how this particular fight resolves tactically — never about whether I stand with Bitcoin, and never about whether the community should push back. I do, and it should. 1. The frame: this is a strategy of tension Before the technical weeds, the lens I look through, because without it my “concerns about both sides” will sound like fence-sitting. I do not believe the most important thing happening in Bitcoin is a disagreement about data in blocks. I believe it is a strategy of tension — the pattern the historians of the Cold War called Operation Gladio. The essence of a strategy of tension is not that you back one side and beat the other. It is that you quietly involve yourself on both sides of a conflict, let the conflict itself do the damage, and position yourself to benefit from — and steer — whatever outcome emerges. The division is not a side effect. The division is the operation. Let me be careful and precise, because this is exactly the kind of claim that makes people stop reading. I am not asserting that a single named person runs a control room. I am describing a structural pattern, and I am telling you honestly that it is my reading of it, not something I can place before a court. Where I name people and money below, I show you what is documented, mark clearly what is my interpretation, and carry the denials. Hold me to that. Once you see Bitcoin’s civil wars through this lens, the question changes. It stops being “which side is right?” and becomes “who benefits from the war itself, and who benefits from each possible ending?” That is what this article is really about. 2. I have seen this movie before: Hong Kong, New York, and 2017 I am not analysing this from the outside. I lived it. In February 2016, a group of Bitcoin Core developers and the major miners met in Hong Kong and signed the Hong Kong Agreement — a roadmap to activate Segregated Witness as a soft fork and then follow it with a 2MB hard fork. I was at the Hong Kong event. It was, for all its flaws, a genuine attempt at consensus between developers and miners. It fell apart. Which side reneged is still contested — the big-block camp says Core never delivered the promised hard fork; the Core developers argued they had only agreed to propose one, not force it, because they do not control the network. I will not pretend I can cleanly assign blame. Hold that ambiguity; it matters. Then, in May 2017, a different configuration emerged: the New York Agreement, also known as SegWit2x. This one was driven by Barry Silbert, the head of Digital Currency Group, and gathered a large group of corporations and miners behind a plan to force a block-size increase. I was not at the New York Agreement — but I was a shareholder in many of the companies that signed it, so I watched it unfold from inside the businesses that were party to it. Unlike Hong Kong, essentially no Bitcoin Core developers signed it. Observers at the time — not just me in hindsight — described SegWit2x as a corporate takeover attempt, agreed behind closed doors among a Bitcoin investment conglomerate and a group of large companies, designed to divide the community. I did not watch that war from the sidelines. I covered the entire block-size war in real time, week after week, on Tone Vay’s YouTube channel — and at one point I sold some of my Bitcoin Cash live on that show, executed through Kraken. I was giving a presentation in Shanghai the day SegWit actually activated. So let me be precise about the shape of it, because it is the shape that repeats: most of the large corporations wanted bigger blocks and SegWit2x — that was the corporate side. The users, running their own nodes, were the resistance. SegWit itself was genuinely contested; Taproot, later, was far less so. The block-size war was the contested one, and it is the one that rhymes with today. And it was defeated. It was defeated by node operators — ordinary users running their own nodes, through a user-activated soft fork, making clear they would enforce the rules they chose regardless of how much hashpower or how many corporate logos lined up against them. The miners and corporations backed down because a chain the economy refuses to honour is worthless. That is the precedent under everything that follows. In 2017 the community discovered that corporate capture could be resisted — but only because enough people understood the game theory and were willing to run the experiment to the edge. The key corporate figure that round was Silbert and DCG. Keep that pattern in mind, because it did not go away. It changed clothes.