Satoshi Never Intended Bitcoin Users To Run Full Nodes

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Written by

Pantera

Bitcoin Is Cash

1 year ago

Topics: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Bitcoin Cash, BCH, Cryptocurrency, ...

How Bitcoin Stopped Aiming For Global Adoption.

We’ve been hearing from Core developers and the Bitcoin (BTC) community about the importance of individuals “running their own nodes” for years.

To translate, Core suggests running its Bitcoin full node implementation (which is the prevalent one by 99%!).

A non-mining node that takes weeks to download the entire blockchain and synch to the rest of the network, but does not generate new Bitcoins.

According to the beliefs of those currently describing themselves as BTC maximalists, non-mining nodes are crucial for network security and represent the only truly decentralized approach.

However, running a node with no financial incentive is not the approach Satoshi envisioned, and the Bitcoin Whitepaper explains exactly how Bitcoin works with the Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) option for simple users and node operation for businesses.

The whitepaper approach seems reasonable as it could pave the way for global adoption.

However, was global adoption what Core wanted, or were there higher forces and plans that demanded stagnating the network and limiting its potential?

It appears that each step, each argument, and each decision Core enforced was antithetical to Bitcoin achieving global adoption.

Satoshi Never Intended Nodes for Simple Users

Satoshi never intended all of the users of the network to run a full node.

That would be illogical as it limits the network to a few tech-savvy individuals instead of aiming for mass adoption.

Full nodes were planned for a) miners and b) businesses such as exchanges, marketplaces, websites, payment providers, etc.

(A previous quote I posted on X.com)

Simplified Payment Verification (SPV)

As Satoshi mentions in the whitepaper, the intention is not to enforce mandatory participation by downloading the entire blockchain and synching to update with the latest block details.

The intention of Satoshi Nakamoto and the early Bitcoin community was the mass adoption of P2P Electronic Cash.

For this reason, Satoshi allocates an entire chapter of the whitepaper to analyze Simplified Payment Verification (SPV).

Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) is the most viable way to enable mass adoption and establish Bitcoin as a globally accepted form of digital money.

Bitcoin Fees Exclude The Overwhelming Majority

We claim that Bitcoin empowers the individual, but is the BTC version of Bitcoin serving and empowering all individuals, or has it diminished to a tool of financial freedom available only to a small elite?

The original vision of Bitcoin was for it to be accessible to everyone, but due to bottlenecks (1MB block size limit, RBF) and internal sabotage, it has become problematic for the general public to use it effectively.

This is Bitcoin since 2017 and supported by the reigning team of devs (Core, a.k.a Blockstream):

The current BTC community supports this type of financial exclusion.

Ex-Blockstream executive Samson Mow directly says that Bitcoin excludes billions of people in the BTC version:

High fees ($20 to $50) have been the intent of Core since 2015 (after the end of the scaling debate), and we should expect such fees to prevail in the coming years:

Permanent $50 Bitcoin Fees Will Be The New Norm

A network struggling to process more than 3 to 7 transactions per second but also one with high fees, transactions stuck in process for weeks, and sometimes not executing at all (dropping from the mempool).

That’s not a reliable payment system, and certainly not even resembling what digital money should be.

Satoshi Directions On The Block Size Limit

As the number of transactions increased, Satoshi Nakamoto emphasized in 2010, how the 1MB block size limit should change to enable Bitcoin to reach a global scale.

Still, the blocksize never increased, Bitcoin never scaled, and the Segwit “hack” didn’t even temporarily address the issue.

Core developers never hid their enthusiasm for high fees:

Gregory Maxwell Celebrates High Fees and 300,000 Stuck Transactions

“Personally, I’m pulling out the champaign that market behaviour is indeed producing activity levels that can pay for security without inflation, and also producing fee paying backlogs needed to stabilize consensus progress as the subsidy declines.”

Gregory Maxwell (2017)

The Blockchain Trilemma that Never Existed

Bitcoin Cash is the finest example of how to scale the blockchain and decentralize all procedures in the process.

In several parts, Bitcoin Cash is more decentralized than BTC (with several node implementations, decentralized crowdfunding platform Flipstarter, CHIPs process, and several more decentralized procedures), while all that remains for BTC is a higher number of non-mining nodes.

SPV wallets and nodes support mass adoption, with Satoshi in the whitepaper explaining their exact process.

It seems deliberate that Core devs and maximalists contradict the whitepaper by claiming all users should be running a node.

This is not only irrational but also provocational and uncovers some of the true intentions of the team in control of Bitcoin (since 2015).

After the end of the (one-sided) scaling debate, Core got to keep the massive effect of the Bitcoin brand, so it had an easy task to market it to mainstream media and behave as if it was successful, hiding the fact that the price would have been multiple times higher if Bitcoin didn’t exclude 99% of the population.

Conclusion

It appears that each step, each argument, and each decision Core enforced was antithetical to Bitcoin’s target of achieving global adoption as P2P Electronic Cash.

Nowadays, we encounter “Bitcoin maximalists” promoting centralized wallets, custodian re-lending schemes with several red flags, and centralized stablecoins with dubious reserves while begging BlackRock for an ETF.

If Bitcoin is begging banks for a bailout, then it failed in its purpose.

Blockstream stagnated Bitcoin’s scalability after assuming control of developments in 2015–2016. This for-profit company, funded by AXA, Mastercard and other financial institutions, ostracized the early developers (Andresen, Garzik, Hearn), censored the community that demanded a higher block size limit, and blatantly lied about their intentions.

We find all those individuals having accumulated vast resources but only using them for marketing to support the bullish cycle after the fourth halving, with a narrative aligned to the legacy finance directions.

It will be fun to watch the last halving that will matter for speculators unfold since it will also be the final moments of all these falsehoods sustained by the price and the “number go up (NGU)” argument.