Visionary. Blue sky thinker. Cult member.
Scotland
Joined December 2016
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Phil Fast retweeted
Bitcoin was meant to be electronic cash.
Not digital gold. Not a speculative shrine. Not an expensive settlement toy for institutions moving millions while ordinary users are politely shown the door.
The economic design was simple: miners would process enormous numbers of transactions, each paying a very small fee. No individual payment needed to be expensive because the system earned revenue through volume. A fraction of a penny multiplied across millions or billions of transactions becomes a substantial security budget.
That is how functioning payment networks scale. They do not make each customer pay more because capacity has been deliberately restricted. They lower the marginal cost, expand throughput and earn more by serving more people.
The block subsidy was never meant to finance mining forever. It declines. Transaction fees were supposed to replace it, not through a tiny number of extortionately priced transactions, but through vast numbers of inexpensive ones.
That distinction is everything.
A network processing seven transactions per second must eventually charge a great deal per transaction if fees are expected to support its miners. A network processing millions or billions can charge almost nothing per transaction and still generate enormous aggregate revenue.
Bitcoin was meant to make small, casual payments practical without a trusted intermediary. It was meant to compete with payment systems by being cheaper, faster and more open—not by becoming a digital vault whose entrance fee exceeds the value of what many people wish to send.
The original vision was low-cost cash for everyone.
BTC replaced that with artificial scarcity, high fees and the curious doctrine that a payment system becomes more successful as fewer people can afford to use it.
That is not scaling.
It is exclusion wearing a monetary costume.
Phil Fast retweeted
Intrinsic value is not bestowed by rhetoric; it is earned in use.
Even fiat, miserable creature that it is, can pay taxes, settle bills, and buy coffee. BTC cannot. Lightning does not scale. BTC does not scale.
A system that cannot be deployed, exchanged, or used at scale is not money. It is a glass ornament in a burning bank.
Phil Fast retweeted
Imagine the severe inability to think required to call BTC “the most decentralized system ever” while missing the obvious point.
Decentralization is about control and governance.
And BTC governance is not decentralized.
Three people control the GitHub keys. That is not a grand political philosophy. That is not a revolution. That is three gatekeepers with commit access and a mob pretending not to notice.
If you cannot work that one out, I am genuinely sorry for your lack of intelligence.
Phil Fast retweeted
BTC is not TCP/IP. The comparison has the elegance of a silk waistcoat placed upon a scarecrow.
TCP/IP endured because it became the working grammar of networks. It scaled because it was designed as an internetworking architecture. Its layers are actual protocol layers: IP, TCP, UDP, routing, transport, application interfaces, all functioning inside a coherent communications stack. TCP did not survive because speculators admired it. It survived because machines used it.
BTC has not achieved anything analogous. It is not widely used as a cash system. It does not scale on-chain. It survives through market lock-in, not technical supremacy. That makes it less like TCP/IP and rather more like DECnet: once impressive, once installed, once defended by incumbents, and then increasingly a monument to yesterday’s architecture.
Nor does TCP/IP suffer from BTC’s governance theatre. TCP is stable in the meaningful sense: the core protocol does not require committees of priestly maintainers to reinterpret its purpose every few years while pretending the altar has never moved. Its stability is functional. BTC’s alleged stability is political. One is engineering; the other is etiquette among custodians of constraint.
And “layers” in BTC are not layers in the network sense. They are external systems built around an incapacity. IP layers are part of the communications architecture. BTC “layers” are workarounds, side arrangements, liquidity contraptions, trusted intermediations, and accounting systems that exist because the base system cannot do the work it was meant to do.
A better system does not “replace the internet” because the internet is not a speculative asset. It is a protocol substrate. BTC is not such a substrate. It is a restricted settlement token with a branding department and a congregation.
The internet won because it connected the world. BTC has spent years explaining why it need not.
Phil Fast retweeted
The modern cult of the “node” is rather charming. Like watching a child put on a policeman’s hat and declare himself the state.
No. It is miners.
The only nodes that matter are the miners because they are the only systems propagating transactions and blocks across the network. Everything reaches them first. The rest sit downstream like old women peering through curtains pretending they run the city because they own binoculars.
Call them pools if it makes the marketing department feel warm and democratic. There are still only around a dozen actual coordinating entities in BTC producing and propagating blocks. Those are the nodes. Those are the machines enforcing consensus in practice.
The so-called “validators” do not propagate. They do not create blocks. They do not relay competing histories to the network. They merely inspect what miners already produced and mutter approval into the void like a theatre critic reviewing a play after the audience has gone home.
A validator that nobody listens to is not governing anything. It is a diary with electricity.
The fantasy that millions of passive observers somehow secure a network is one of the great comic operas of modern technology. Security comes from economically accountable block producers competing under proof-of-work, not from hobbyists running glorified packet sniffers beside their gaming PCs while congratulating themselves for “decentralising” civilisation.
The BTC crowd transformed miners into a dirty word because reality offended their theology.
Phil Fast retweeted
Satoshi gave us one explicit benchmark in 2009:
Outperform Visa.
We just did it 96x, in distributed consensus, zero loss.
Sound money infrastructure is finally here.
The only question is whether you build on it now, or wait for the suits to bless it.
Phil Fast retweeted
The Bitcoin white paper is eight pages long. Its objective is stated in the abstract: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system allowing payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution (Nakamoto, 2008). The word “directly” is doing the work. The system was designed to eliminate intermediaries from electronic value transfer. Not to reduce them.
Not to replace them with different intermediaries wearing different labels.
To eliminate them.
Phil Fast retweeted
For years they say he isn't Satoshi, most believe them.
Then Craig lost in court. Even more believe them.
Yet somehow they keep on making content about this "clear fake", when they've convinced 99% of the crypto space a long time ago.
Sure is curious. Almost as if... 🤫
Phil Fast retweeted
Chronicle activates April 7th.
I want to take a moment to explain why this upgrade matters - not just technically, but personally.
First, huge thanks to everyone involved. The developers who did the actual work, and the community members who contributed to ensuring the scope was as airtight as possible while promoting stability. Maintaining stability while restoring the original protocol was a delicate balance, and the final release reflects all the hard work that went into ensuring that.
Why restore the original protocol?
This isn't just about completion for its own sake. Over the years, a lot of restrictions were added to Bitcoin. And in the same way that central planning can destroy an economy, centrally planning and limiting developer creativity means we have no idea what possibilities the original protocol actually enabled. We know it allowed more flexibility. We imagine that as better Bitcoin scripting engineers emerge and people learn more about the underlying protocol, they'll take advantage of use cases we can't even predict yet. Chronicle removes those artificial constraints. This is the core of the BSV Association's mandate. There should be no central person or group of people that tell you how you can build on top of the protocol.
Original Transaction Digest Algorithm (OTDA)
One of the most significant changes is the restoration of the Original Transaction Digest Algorithm. BSV will now support both the OTDA and the current BIP143 digest algorithm. Developers can opt into OTDA by setting the new CHRONICLE sighash flag (0x20). If you do nothing, existing behavior is preserved - BIP143 continues to work exactly as before. This gives developers the flexibility to choose which digest algorithm fits their use case, whether that's maintaining compatibility with existing systems or leveraging the original protocol's behavior.
Transaction malleability
Transaction malleability has been treated as this big scary problem throughout Bitcoin's history. There were a lot of patches added to Bitcoin over the years specifically to prevent it. But in doing so, they limited developer flexibility significantly.
Here's the thing: transaction malleability itself isn't actually a problem. It was only perceived as one because of how people were doing payments in Bitcoin - which was always wrong. Payments in Bitcoin were always meant to be peer-to-peer, then broadcast directly to the mining network. This is outlined in the Simplified Payment Verification section of the white paper. The work that has been done on all of the development tooling and the BRC-100 standard has enabled users and developers to utilize SPV.
Transaction malleability was a concern based on a misunderstanding of the payment flow, and a misunderstanding of nodes themselves. Because they misunderstood how payments should work and are convinced that miners will behave irrationally, they put in a bunch of restrictions on developers.
And here's the clever part: this is opt-in. Transactions using version 1 keep all existing restrictions. Only transactions with version > 1 get the relaxed rules. Existing applications remain completely unaffected. So if you are reading this and think "no way Connor is right about this" - then you can continue to ensure payments made with your wallet or application are not susceptible to malleability.
Restored opcodes
Chronicle re-instates several opcodes that were disabled years ago. Of note:
• OP_VER, OP_VERIF, OP_VERNOTIF — access the transaction version directly in script
• OP_LSHIFTNUM, OP_RSHIFTNUM — numerical bit shifting (restored to mimic the original behavior of OP_LSHIFT and OP_RSHIFT)
Business continuity
In line with BSV's commitment to stability: if you do nothing, nothing breaks. Existing applications using BIP143 without the CHRONICLE flag remain completely unaffected. The changes are all opt-in. This was deliberate - we needed to restore the original protocol while respecting that real businesses depend on the current state.
Personal note
I've been in BSV since day one. The uniting goal, shared with other community members, was always restoring the Bitcoin protocol and locking it. Set in stone. I'm proud to have played my part in that, and to have been involved in the actual work being done by the developers to enable it.
The work of the Association in doing this restoration is finally done. The protocol Satoshi designed is back.
This is cause for celebration. Let's build.
Phil Fast retweeted
Still wondering what Adam “Andy” Back did on Epstein Island that led Jeffrey to say he “liked him.”
Phil Fast retweeted
Hey @elonmusk, @nikitabier, @engineering, did you know the only reason @bitcoinsv exists is because a group of us resisted the hijacking of bitcoin by a bunch of people funded by Jeffrey Epstein?
The DOJ files prove it, and we would like to stop being suppressed.
Thank you.
Grok says chances of getting @bitcoinsv unsuspended are very low, even though it never violated twitter rules.
need to rally the troops and tag @elonmusk and @engineering and @nikitabier for any chance of this happening
This was a targeted attack by @jack back in the day.
