This is a breakdown of the Capture series of articles. I invite any of the free thinker conspiracy theorists to stop and think for a second what the articles actually say, what they invite you to accept without evidence, and what evidence you must demand if you're going to cosplay as a skeptical "I'm against fiat control!" who buys into the narrative. I'm the kind of person who doesn't care what you say or think, I care about what you can prove. Part 0: The idea of capture is deliberately as vague as the asserted shadowy cabal executing it, and just as unfalsifiable. Capture is a catch-all which started with Core removing OP_RETURN limits, and which is eventually cited as conclusive proof that Strategy and Blackrock dictate what happens in the network with no pushback from the original author. Hodlonaut didn't write Capture as a fork prospectus, but he now sends people to those articles while ranking Bitcoin as the compromised chain and Blake2b as the one that still matches the idea. “I’m not telling you to sell” does not undo that ranking. The articles still do not get you from Optech dinners to that conclusion. Part 1: The entire series rests on a guy called John Newbery. The article invites you to treat Newbery’s funding graph as the seed of a long project whose payoff, in the current telling, is Wall Street running Bitcoin. Quotes from Newbery's podcast appearances are cited not as a guy lightheartedly and excitedly explaining a fledgling FOSS project finally gaining traction and him recruiting people he knew (as opposed to people he didn't know) as evidence he was hand picking a machinery that would eventually carry out his vision of a destroyed Bitcoin network. If I were putting in my time and money into a FOSS project, I'd also like to know the people I asked onboard. Part 1 jumps from Newbery's departure from Brink in 2021 straight to uncapping OP_RETURN in 2025. You're invited to accept that the conspiracy's endgame took 4 years to materialize. Hodlonaut does his "just ask questions" about Newbery's stepping down at Brink. This is presented, without evidence, as a contentious firing or other disagreement with the board. In his article, under "Departure Framing," we get an explanation from Mike Schmidt: "I see these questions are about specific individual's situations/decisions or internet-rumoured situations/decisions and can fall into what I outlined in my last email that I try to avoid commenting on per: “Unfortunately, if I respond to all of your specific questions about individuals, I may necessarily drift into this territory and I'm not comfortable with that, therefore I hope you understand where I decline to comment.” Even #2 and #5, answered below, are already into this uncomfortable territory talking about details of salaries and individual applicant or a grantee's board or grant committee proceedings, since we want to protect applicant/engineer privacy and ensure a fair, independent review process." Not wanting to fuel what he could see was a deliberate, bad faith conspiratorial framing regardless of the answer, Schmidt declined from participating. This was the responsible thing to do. Here, I would ask Hodlonaut if there were any answer Schmidt could have given where he would have concluded all of it was ordinary corporate stuff and forgone his conclusion of an evil conspiracy and left the series there. Ultimately, Hodlonaut documents the influence of Newbery in the form of people he publicly spoke about, funded and mentored. His quotes come from podcast appearances and public online discourse, which is arguably the worst possible way to build and organize a shadowy cabal of bad actors with a shared evil vision. Should Newbery have influence over who gets funded? If it's his job at Brink, then yes. If he doesn't like someone's ideas, he's not obligated to fund them. These ideas should be discussed, of course, and they were. Nothing was rejected out of hand as evidenced by the fact that Hodlonaut himself documents people arguing about all kinds of things. Those arguments developed from disagreements, disagreements develop from discussions. What should you demand as evidence, then? What wouldn't be vague innuendo? Easy: Find us a document that says: "If you don't merge X, I'll pull your funding." Show us proof that a change occurred as a direct result of transparent funding of individual developers that otherwise would never have happened. Why hasn't the investigative journalist found these? Why can't he present them? Why "just ask questions" when that will do just fine? Perhaps these discussions happened at the Newbery dinners? Maybe. Although we already know from the Blocksize wars that when miners and corporate elements collude, they actually get together and form a publicly stated partnership to fork off. If you're going to form a conspiracy to capture Bitcoin, you do what they did in the Blocksize wars. You don't do this: "Jonas's email to Zhao noted that she had applied the previous year and had been "pretty close," and offered to arrange a coffee chat at the upcoming Stanford Blockchain Conference with "some Chaincode Bitcoiners." Zhao's initial response, in her own words, was: "nah,nah, I'm good. I'm done."" Zhao is an interesting pawn in this saga. She was widely criticized for her being clueless and docile, yet according to Hodlonaut, she was instrumental in bringing down Core after Newbery's departure from the entire scene. This person who was attacked for being disinterested possessed the agency to attack the Bitcoin network on a daily basis with her cohort of funded developers. The road from Newbery's rise and fall and orchestrated machinery reads like fanfiction. An 8 year long machinery where Newbery foresaw his own departure in 2021, building contingencies upon contingencies. It culminates in Zhao merging evil pull requests to finally bring down the very network Newbery spent his spare time building up in 2018. Even if you grant every dinner, every fellowship, and the 2025 merge, you still have not shown Strategy or BlackRock giving an order. You have shown a small implementation culture shipping a setting. That's not Wall Street taking the network, but it's the claim the articles are made to carry without being able to do so. Core is a small team of developers who can ship client settings without the leave of conspiratorial noderunners. Knots evidenced the ability of anyone to clone the repo, change its default settings and ship it. The market can either take it or leave it. Parts 2 and 3 to follow later.

You can't say the US is a global military and economic superpower and justify its submission to Russia by comparing it to 1940's Finland, a low-industry, agrarian European backwater. This is devastating to your argument.

Trump devotion syndrome means turning your IQ negative and believing the United States is so starved for fuel, you have to suck Kim Jong-Un's and Putin's dick to secure 15 hours' worth of diesel, just because Trump said so. Beyond braindead. Zero self-respect.

I'm old enough to remember MAGA making fun of Europe for being dependent on Russian energy.

TheraWork. Get your blood tested in a co-working space. @SoftBank let's do this!

Normally I'd consider this wasted taxpayer money, but MAGA chose this as the standard of political discourse, so it's worth every penny to see them triggered. Epic memes and all that.

Russia funds Iran, by the way. Every casualty in Iran is struck by a weapon bought by Russia with this money.

Remember when "biolabs" were an issue for MAGA? All that bovine feed research in Ukraine costing a few million bucks was an existential threat to the world. Now the plague is out in Russia because of operator incompetence. *crickets*

FAFO. I encourage every "Putin is the savior of the West" to pack up and go to Russia.

Bitcoin is about the protocol. It's not about waiting for instructions from some dipshit on Discord.

When people "just ask questions," they're lying.

Remember, he's not telling you which coin to buy or sell. He only says one is compromised and fraudulent and he supports the one that's moral and righteous and all the good things.

If billionaires are in the administration or run the government, all of your problems are because someone else is a billionaire. If trade unions were in the administration or ran the government, all of your problems would be because of that.

The world if I were in charge looks only slightly below average.

If you're simping for an authoritarian old KGB goon who wants to reconstitute the Soviet Union, you're a communist.

What's really amazing is that there are actual people out there who fall for targeted, organized bot operations. Those people will tell you they're independent thinkers who do their own research, yet they're the first ones to believe all bots.

If this is the case and Ukraine is just an EU or whatever proxy, go to Russia and enlist in Putin's army. Really. Goes for anyone claiming this. Don't bitch and moan online, go to Russia, enlist and fight the good fight.