December 2019
(Vea los comentarios para una traducción al español de google)
The creation of Bitcoin will change the world in big and small ways. In this article I explain my view of some of what has been happening to the dream of Bitcoin since it was discovered by those who love and hate it. Luckily for the people of the world, the IDEA of a currency that cannot be controlled or overprinted by governments (or corporations) will not be put back in the bottle. Dark forces opposed to financial freedom for the people of the world are scared of the future. I will explain how I believe they have succeeded in delaying the arrival of peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people using massive wealth and immoral strategies. Crime against humanity? or business as usual? I am thinking both.
I will be stating a lot of opinions and make assumptions I have not proven. Many would be very difficult to prove, but, I believe in them and expect to alter my beliefs if I learn different. I welcome honest feedback. There will be many who disagree with much of what I say. Many will disagree with things that are true. I assume that is their job or they have been fooled by people who's job it was to fool them. I think, in the future, history will record the true facts and many of my "seemingly controversial" assumptions will be proven correct (or pretty close). In this article I will also point out how the dark forces can make "controversial" and "seemingly controversial" very different things.
The Bitcoin Dream
The original mission of Bitcoin was to create a sufficiently decentralized peer-to-peer magic internet money for the world's people. The decentralization is necessary to protect Bitcoin and it's users from "censorship" (outside control). The dream was for it to be faster than banks and cheap or free to use. It was also hoped it could free the people of the world from the financial oppression resulting from corrupt and misused monetary-policy strategies that history has shown always end in failure (and financial disasters for the People).
Bitcoin was intended to provide the ability for anyone to send any amount to anyone, anywhere in the world. Being able to do it quickly and cheaply without the need for permission from anyone was crucial. Bitcoin wallets make everyone able to own their own Bitcoin "bank" for free. This keeps people and governments from being able to seize or freeze your funds (unless they capture your secret wallet key that you get to hide). Bitcoin can also be anonymous when used carefully. Sadly, it is best to assume it is the opposite of anonymous unless you become a Bitcoin privacy expert. It is transparent and very traceable (all transactions can be seen by anyone). Wallets are working to develop privacy features, but, time will tell if they can be helpful at protecting privacy while powerful forces are working to unmask transactions and owners.
Bitcoin fixes another primary problem with government controlled currencies (also known as "fiat" currencies). Intentional inflation of the supply reduces the fiat's value every year. Once a government has the ability to print money they can spend, they always do. The more they print, the less it is all worth. Bitcoin solves this inflation problem by providing coins on a set schedule that creates a limited Bitcoin supply, then the Bitcoin code stops creating more forever. When a government increases the money supply, they usually spend that new money. With Bitcoin, an increase in the money supply means everyone that owns any small piece of bitcoin has more money (more value) instead of less.
The code is law. Because of the decentralization, no laws can control Bitcoin. Governments may create or enforce laws upon their citizens use of Bitcoin, but, a real Bitcoin is free from government control. This creates a lawless "wild west" of international finance. Price manipulation, insider trading and many activities that would be illegal in some jurisdictions are not prohibited by Bitcoin.
Do be careful. The code is unforgiving. If you send to the wrong deposit address, lose your secret wallet key or someone tricks you out of your key, Bitcoin code will not give you your coins back. Only the person who controls your coins can send them back. Do backup your secret key(s) connected to even small amounts of Bitcoin. Many sad stories can be found about Bitcoins that are lost forever. Often they were worth ten thousand times less back when they were lost.
The Early Days
I am sure others will write the book on the really early days when science experts, nerds and geeks built, tested and ran the code. After some years, a modern "Dread Pirate Roberts" (see The Princess Bride story) saw the potential and developed a marketplace (Silk Road) on the "darknet" (a part of the internet where it is difficult to track the activities and true location of users) for unregulated sales and services provided by people who would be (or attempt to be) anonymous. All payments on the Silk Road were made in Bitcoin.
My understanding is that a Gawker magazine article did a story on the marketplace and a congressman got publicly enraged about it and those 2 things created enough public awareness that the darknet marketplace began to become a big deal. This spread awareness and encouraged other adoption. For a while, belief slowly grew among mostly techy people and darknet dwellers.
I assume it was about this time that people controlling massive fiat wealth begin to really worry about this wild financial experiment's potential to change the international monetary status quo. No such concerns would be admitted to by any power-players since that would lend legitimacy to the dream of Bitcoin. I assume this is also when the unknown "dark forces" began to delegitimize Bitcoin and develop other plans to stop this cryptocurrency from taking over the world. For the next few years financial leaders will decry Bitcoin as a ponzi or scam while secretly buying it and looking for ways their bank or investment firm can get in on this new technology.
Also about this time, super wealthy "gamblers" see the potential and begin testing massive market manipulations. The manipulation turns out to be easy, anonymous, unregulated and very very profitable. Big-time money-launderers that can afford to hire Bitcoin-privacy experts (and bankers and such) also jump in for various reasons including moving massive funds across boarders without any checkpoints or underground tunnels needed.
The gamblers pushing Bitcoin values up over 100 times it's previous value begins to grab the attention of a new class of speculative "believers". Each major market "pump" is followed by a crash, but, the crash's depths are each higher than the previous low. So, "buy the dip" becomes Bitcoin Gospel. The pumps grow higher and higher over the years. The relative importance of darknet adoption shrinks as the other use-cases grow.
It becomes difficult for the giant gamblers to dump enough fiat into their massive manipulations without interested observers seeing them do it. It is probably also difficult for the big money-launderers to trade the crypto back and forth for fiat. They try corrupt banks and the traceabilty of crypto leads to international law enforcement actions catching some banks. Since that is a big problem, they (or someone they trust) creates "Tether" (an electronic "stable-coin" worth one USD). Tether allows Billions in anonymous fiat deposits to enter (and leave?) the crypto space.
Many think the creators of Tether just create the Tethers without real fiat deposits (collateral). This idea is supported by Tether secrecy and unwillingness to buy Tethers back for a dollar. Many expect "Tether" to collapse and cause massive damage to crypto prices at any moment. Instead Tethers fund ever-bigger peaks for Bitcoin. Also, as many new tokens enter the crypto ecosystem, the gamblers can easily pump them all because they are so small, and often, even more profitable "pumps" than Bitcoin itself.
The Dark Forces' Infiltration of Bitcoin and Social media
At some point, some person or group is spooked by the possible success of the dream of Bitcoin. I don't know if it is the G7, VISA, old banker money, the owners of the "FED", Government agents defending the USD "reserve currency" of the world or some other massively wealthy dark force(s). They feared the potential of peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people. They probably consider their battle "Just" and will use dark and evil methods to try to stop this "danger" at great cost to their deep pockets and soul(s) (if they still have them).
The gamblers want to support Bitcoin and promote people buying and holding it. The scared dark money wants to stop the creation of a successful peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people. I do not know how the gamblers and dark money are connected, but, it seems they found a win-win solution to keep them both on the same side. They would both promote Bitcoin for speculation and break it's ability to be peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people at the same time. People will write books about the details of how they did this using massive resources. I will try to summarize.
They created a massive well-funded social-engineering army (I call the "BTC-troll army" even though most of the agents are not "trolls" in the usual sense). They secretly bought control of the primary crypto-related social media sites and installed their own operatives as moderators (who began systematic censorship and banning). They created or bought control of most crypto-related online publications. They filled social media with thousands of vocal accounts pretending to love Bitcoin. The army commented on most every Bitcoin-related video, article, livestream, podcast,... they could find. They agreed with each other in teams to make it seem like the real Bitcoin community believed in the things they were saying and reinforcing. Books were written to support the fake "Bitcoin belief system". It is a massive social engineering "machine" that is still in control of most related social media today. The "army" will probably call this "story" I am telling crazy, insane, deluded, etc... They may even show concern for me due to my "obvious mental problems" or whatever, lol.
While they were building the massive mind-control machine, they were also infiltrating the developers of Bitcoin code to stop the Bitcoin dream. They found or created Blockstream (and probably other businesses) and used them as "pawns" to "hire" (buy) crucial developers. They may have introduced trojan code to hamper the future of Bitcoin, but mainly, BTC development was captured by gaining control of the ability to make changes to the code. Who wrote the code is unimportant when a "gatekeeper" is in place controlling what code is allowed in. This power has allowed them to keep Bitcoin from having the ability to scale (become massively popular and get used by the people of the world). The control over BTC development also breaks BTC-Bitcoin's decentralization. Even if they fixed the code, the coin can no longer be trusted as it has been captured by the dark forces who can do anything they want to do to the code.
While dark forces were capturing and breaking Bitcoin's primary use-case, the social engineering machine was spreading many false beliefs including that Bitcoin was not captured and was getting better all the time. The machine introduced alternative beliefs such as the "store of value" (SOV) use-case to replace the P2P-cash dream. The massive army pretended to agree SOV was great and all they needed. Those who saw the damage being done or who questioned the 'core dogma' in any way were ridiculed and demonized viciously by a hoard of fake humans.
New SOV and HODL (never sell) primary "use-case" replacements sold by the social engineering machine seem to be very popular because their army of operatives say things and agree with each other until any real humans arriving at a discussion find the new beliefs well entrenched. This was happening well before most people realized the Bitcoin dream (peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people) was no longer a goal of the new "owners" of Bitcoin. Many real humans still don't realize what has happened and will think (and be told repeatedly) I am just a crazy Bitcoin-hater. The anti-crypto forces had captured the "Bitcoin project" and used dishonesty, bribery, censorship and the social engineering machine to fool people into thinking there was a large group of supporters who believed the corruption of Bitcoin was a good thing.
The real Bitcoin community knew something was wrong and created the r/BTC Reddit subreddit to allow uncensored open discussions. The troll army made any site their masters did not control difficult to use by filling it with pro-Bitcoin-corruption posts. Much of the real community did not fall for the story that the corruption was a good idea. Sadly, most of the community did fall for the LIE that their views were a minority opinion.
Smart Bitcoin community members had tried to warn everyone for more than a year about the crucial scaling issue that was coming up if Bitcoin tried to "go viral" (become very popular). Most of the community believed scaling was important, but, did not realize they had majority community support for standing up to the pro-corruption forces. A few hero's of Bitcoin did not care about whether they were a minority or not. They realized those controlling Bitcoin were unlikely to fulfill their many promises (lies) about allowing Bitcoin to scale "very soon". They took the drastic step of creating a new Bitcoin project "fork" specifically designed to allow the original dream of Bitcoin to scale for massive adoption.
Almost all of the real community (including the miners) wanted Bitcoin to scale. The community was supportive of the new "BCH" fork (Bitcoin Cash), but, many "people" SEEMED to be believing the lies about BTC-Bitcoin still intending to allow scaling. Using the uncertainty and confusion the troll army created, the massive machine (using it's usual widespread dishonesty and bribery) was able to fool the Bitcoin miners into letting the capture go forward (miners continued to mine BTC-Bitcoin at the BCH fork) even though it was against their own longer-term financial best interests. This allowed the corrupted Bitcoin (BTC) to retain the "Bitcoin" name and ADOPTION the real community had spent years building. Bitcoin Cash was the real thing, but, the massive social engineering effort was able to sideline the real community and real Bitcoin project. The Troll army attacks ramped up and have been attacking BCH all day, every day ever since.
Within months of this "fork" (in late 2017), the captured form of Bitcoin (BTC) tried to go viral and experienced the expected shortage of blockspace the real Bitcoin community had warned would happen. The intentional inability to scale made the viral growth grind to a halt. When BTC failed, the new owners of BTC popped champagne and celebrated the destruction of the Bitcoin dream they had achieved on BTC-Bitcoin.
Had the public and miners not been fooled by the dark forces, Bitcoin would be decentralized peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people today. It would have large blocks, massive use and be worth over $100K each. Instead Bitcoin Cash is small and vulnerable with a lot of potential. Potential that the anti-crypto forces (that control BTC) cannot put back in the bottle even though they keep trying every day.
Bitcoin Reborn as BCH revives and focuses on the primary use-case
Even though BCH has been under massive ongoing attacks since before it existed, it has the real original Bitcoin community (minus some turncoats that were corrupted or fooled) and developers with a mission to create the Bitcoin dream of peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people. We are the resistance. A rag-tag under-funded bunch that gets attacked personally and by intentional psychological mind games dreamed up by professional social engineers out to divide and conquer the Bitcoin (BCH) community and developers. An electronic currency needs to be tough and durable. The coin and community are being battle tested and prepared for the future.
BCH starts right out developing better code than BTC. The defeat of BTC-Bitcoin's ability to scale has caused an explosion of possible competitors for the lucrative P2P-cash use-case. BCH is the only Bitcoin still trying to be that, so, in some ways we have little competition. Still, some think we need some new bells and whistles to make us competitive in the more crowded field. We can't tell if these distractions from our primary mission are coming from corrupt influences or not. Who does not love bells and whistles? So, we add some.
The project development energy around BCH is getting to be much like it was before the BTC-capture stifled efforts towards innovative improvements on BTC. Software apps, adoption, meet-ups, developer progress, new wallets and wallet improvements, ... are really happening again. Prices on all the crypto's are very low and we are wondering when the next pump of prices will make it so crypto owners can sell some without it being the worst possible time (in the bottom of the dip). This is a terrible time to encourage adoption since prices are falling and no sane holder would sell at these prices if they could help it. Spend and replace (buy back) is a common BCH mantra. Even in these dark times for prices, adoption of BCH is growing. Heroes are arising around the world and spreading the word.
Major new Attack By BSV (supported by BTC)
Long story short, we get infiltrated (or a supporter gets corrupted?) by what appears to be a crazy serial liar who claims to have invented Bitcoin and now loves BCH since he knows a real Bitcoin project when he sees one. He says great things. Many want to believe in him. Many know he is bad news right off the bat. He tries to become a BCH "thought leader" but it does not go too well.
He proposes some software code ideas that do not get taken very seriously (probably because they are bad. They may even be intended to harm BCH). He demands to control BCH development immediately or he will create a fork of his own and use his new? friend's massive wealth and newly acquired mining hash power to take over BCH using an intentionally-harmful 51% attack. His wealthy forces do control over 51% of BCH hash power at this time. He also threatens people, exchanges and other businesses with harm if they do not follow his demands.
There is only a short time until his deadline, but, the massive BTC-troll army joins in supporting the attacker's claims about how great his new "Bitcoin - Satoshi's Vision" founder's dream ideas are. There is not really enough time for the troll army to convince the BCH fans because they have seen it before, social engineering deceptions take time to develop support and the crazy attacker is admitting to his evil intent along the way. At this point what I call a new mini troll-army dedicated to BSV maximalism (opposed to BTC and BCH) arrives on the scene to help the attack. They appear to be from the same BTC-troll source and using the same tactics with a different dishonest fake belief system.
The attack fails because the BCH-friendly miners mining BTC learned a valuable lesson when they were fooled into mining BTC last time: 'some short-term losses to mining profits now are better than losing the massive upside BCH still has for future mining profits'. After all, only BCH is still working on how to scale a Bitcoin for massive adoption. Anyway, some BTC miners switched to BCH to defend it from the attack and BCH developers added some defensive code that made it hard for BSV to use another attack vector they were probably implementing. BCH survived another attack. I now consider BCH "Battle tested". It also proves BCH is much more "hash-secure" than it's low daily hash-rate might suggest.
Sadly, the attack spooked the businesses the attacker threatened and there was uncertainty as the threats kept coming even after the BSV loss. BSV did not give up either. The attack coin still had massive financial support and was able to take a few community members I assume were bought out. The BSV- and BTC-troll armies continued to pretend BSV was more of a real Bitcoin than BCH. The whole mess hurt the BCH price badly. BSV still exists and has an obvious troll presence on social media (often more aggressive than the BTC-trolls) pushing the BSV false beliefs. BSV is a development-centralized pretender like BTC, but, they have deep pockets, social engineering, bigger lies and bigger blocks than BTC.
BCH Soldiers On...
The BSV 'deathstar attack' was painful and left us weakened, but, we know we are the real Bitcoin project with better code and a better community that mostly does not support evil methods and dishonesty. Some might say not evil enough to win? "Good folks with the much better product" is a dangerous strategy in this tough ecosystem, but, I still like our chances.
One problem is that BCH still cannot scale for massive worldwide adoption yet. We are way ahead of the adoption curve for now, but, it appears massive scale is not a quick easy fix for our dev team. The troll army swears it is impossible. Our team is complaining about a lack of funding and bad underlying code we inherited from the "core" developers. Going back to fix the underlying code is a massive distraction from the primary goal, but, may be needed. The funding may remain a problem in great part due to the low price of BCH. This is probably the dark times for BCH. Having faith in the future of BCH is still not all that difficult for most of the community since signs other than price are still all bright.
Eventually BCH will catch on and go viral on it's own (no manipulations needed). If we are ready the growth will be insanely intense and high like the old Bitcoin peaks, but, it will not stop going up for (years?). I am hoping we get the scaling ready before it goes too far, but, a little slow viral growth would be nice about now. Many things could catalyze the sudden growth. I am sure the dark forces are working all the time to block those things from happening. I am pretty sure they can't put this Genie back in the bottle forever though.
A manipulation pump would also be great about now for BCH. BTC-Bitcoin is now broken, but, because it has a massive social engineering machine supporting it, the market manipulation gamblers can still prop it's price up with ease if they want to. The problem is, it seems to me they can't really pump it up super fast to massive new highs like they used to do (before 2017). For one reason, it can't scale! If they could overcome that hurdle by doing their trading on exchanges (not on the blockchain itself), it would be hard for the regular public to join in and help with the pump and then buy the manipulators coins near the top before everyone finds out it is the top. Secondly, here at the end of 2019 when the next pump seems overdue, their Tether "pumping service" is under massive scrutiny from government regulators.
I think the gamblers want to do another massive pump. The easy way for them to get richer would be to sell their BTC-Bitcoin for Bitcoin Cash and pump it since it can scale much better than BTC. BCH is still not totally ready for super-massive viral growth, but, it could do one good pump which would provide funding for developers to make it scale even better in time for the next pump. I have seen no sign of this happening yet. I do not know if the gamblers are controlled by the dark forces? They might also oppose the dream of Bitcoin or fear the massive social engineering apparatus? Maybe they have a fragile compromise and cannot break their deal with powerful people who know who they are?
By the way, if I am right, the many on-line statistics- and chart-based price forecasters (that are not part of the BTC-Troll social engineering army) are just guessing over and over and hoping to get lucky unless they know the manipulators. Same thing for investors buying long and short (crypto-gambling) contracts unless they know someone planning to manipulate the price. Manipulating the price is not illegal on Bitcoin. Investing on regulated platforms with advance notice of intended manipulations may be?
The Future
Dark forces captured and corrupted BTC to stop it from becoming Magic Internet Money for the people of the world. BCH saved the dream of Bitcoin and will help free the world from the financial oppression of corrupt monetary policies. I do not think it will replace fiat, but, all fiats will have to start emulating the behavior of BCH (treat their users with more respect). Banks and smart-phones are already changing to be more like BCH.
I also do not expect BCH to be the only cryptocurrency. There will probably be at least a few. This multi-currency future will "scale" crypto even if no one currency solves the scaling puzzle on it's own. Very smart wallets will pay whatever currency a seller accepts with on-board exchanging seamlessly built in so people will be able to hold whatever currency they prefer. Electronic fiat will also be supported by these wallets unless people have to break free from fiat and government approved wallets to have control of their own funds. I hope oppressive governments do not try to take overt control of our devices (to keep a "protective" A-eye on us) and force us to break free.
I want to emphasize that sufficient decentralization is necessary to protect Bitcoin and it's users from "censorship" (outside control). The centralized development of BTC and BSV make both untrustworthy and censorable. I think that makes them unsuitable as freedom money. I believe BCH is currently sufficiently decentralized. It is an issue to keep considering as there are tendencies towards centralized mining and development to monitor. The difference with BCH is that it is the only Bitcoin that has not been captured yet and the teams working on it believe in decentralization as an important element of BCH.
While BCH is small and cheap enemies circle like vultures looking for weaknesses. The troll army wants to help the vultures and will tell many lies about their own token being the real "Bitcoin". The best way to solve the weaknesses of BCH is massive adoption and the rise in value that would create. I really think it is just a matter of time and could happen quickly any day now. It is somewhat surprising to me that it has not already begun in earnest.
New "competitors" rarely have the necessary decentralization feature even if they claim they do. Facebook's planned stablecoin, for instance, is expected to be under centralized control (and pegged to the value of an inflationary currency). The many cryptocurrencies of the future may be useful and they may have bells and whistles people like. Many of us are used to letting bankers hold our money for us. Just remember to consider who really can control your wealth. For important amounts, I think it should be only you unless you don't trust yourself to do it alone.
BTC is not likely to be popular for daily commerce due to the intentionally-poor and expensive user experience it provides. It may still hang on for history buffs and larger transactions where fees do not matter. It's hash rate will be less than 10% of BCH's, so, it may whither away over time? I think BTC-Bitcoin does appear to be destined to have significant non-cash uses even though it cannot scale anymore. Some pretend "lightning network" will make BTC scale like a real Bitcoin, but, that was always a lie used to fool the public into thinking the destruction of the primary use-case was not their intention. Even so, the broken Bitcoin should still have potential for significant KYC-rich centralized business uses. And, darknet dwellers may keep using it because they are too stoned to change? lol. Just kidding about the darknet dwellers.
Final thoughts
Bitcoin Cash is the only Bitcoin seriously working to scale for massive worldwide adoption. The dream of financial freedom for the people of the world lives in BCH. Magic Internet Money is the future of Bitcoin. Price does not really matter to achieving the dream of Bitcoin, but, the BCH potential-price up-side is massive. I think BCH is currently experiencing the "Dip" of a lifetime. It is still a gamble, of course.
BTC-Bitcoin has been intentionally code-corrupted to be sure it does not achieve the dream of Bitcoin. Even so, as long as it has the massive manipulating gamblers and the massive social engineering machine working to keep it's house-of-cards standing it should remain a good short-term speculative investment. Weakness in either pillar of support could lead to a massive crash. Be careful, trying to send BTC anywhere during a crash (or high peak) could be difficult or impossible due to the full blocks.
It may seem like it, but, this article is not intended as financial or investment advice. All of crypto is super dangerous gambling.
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Big Bubbler
I am a flower farmer and big-bubble entertainer (facebook) Big-Bubbler-197778163227 in Oregon, USA. I like to spend time as an "anti-troll" defending BCH against dishonesty on Reddit's real Bitcoin subreddit (r/BTC) reddit.com/user/Big_Bubbler/, . YouTube (BiggestBubbler) and occasionally elsewhere. I actually believe in the things I write. You can support my efforts to resist the dark forces by donating:
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Or, request your own deposit address for better privacy or to offer any other crypto you prefer.
All rights reserved 2019 except: Copying any part of this article is allowed if you provide attribution and a link back to this original article. Making a movie or writing a book about this would be great and I would love a chance to help make sure it is not based on the false assumptions that are so common on social media.
This is a major update of my "classic" (from March, 2019, lol): Troll Army's Massive Social Engineering Can't Stop "Magic Internet Money". (Older article: https://honest.cash/v2/Big_Bubbler/troll-armys-massive-social-engineering-cant-stop-magic-internet-money-3100)