Fatherless Protocol
Gray Motion

According my Mempool w BIP110 monitoring Block 985067 had 20 BIP-110 violations.
https://nostr.download/509448798b394aff90463a8a895464ffaf59a3b9e6fbf9f8d95d6dfd68a0f91d.webp
and July 15, 2025 block 905585 had 2746 violation
https://nostr.download/eda12253eea1f2108ee3480509280c6593f0e0fd5d1a54f604df4b63b87c33dc.webp
Are knots filters of the last year resulting in a drop in violation?

2026-07-14 15:01:58 UTC

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I'm a reading the data correctly?
Core enforcing RDTS = 11 nodes

2026-07-12 17:43:06 UTC

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They look right at home...and might I say...it's so green there unlike here where everything green has turned brown. Ready for winter and cant come soon enough.

2026-06-26 22:20:25 UTC

#nevent1q…kv5y

2026-06-26 17:03:33 UTC

Conjunction is where theses go to die?
# Bitcoin Block Space as a Premium Settlement Rail (~2035)
## Thesis, mechanism, and the strongest bear case
This document consolidates the question of whether Bitcoin base-layer block space becomes a premium, tier-one settlement rail for banks and nation states by roughly 2035, whether that status feeds back into the price of bitcoin, and how the competitive game theory plays out. It then stress-tests the whole construction with the strongest bear case I can assemble.
---
## Part 1 — The bull thesis, stated as cleanly as possible
The bull case is a chain of five claims, each of which has to hold for the conclusion to follow.
**1. Block space is a scarce, premium commodity.** Base-layer throughput is fixed by protocol (~7 tx/s effective, weight-capped blocks every ~10 minutes). Institutions settling large value don't need cheap or fast; they need final and trust-minimized. A few hundred dollars of fees against a billion-dollar settlement is rounding error.
**2. The base layer becomes a settlement layer, not a payment layer.** Retail payments and high-frequency activity migrate to Layer 2 (Lightning, rollups, sidechains) and reference Bitcoin for security. The base layer specializes in large, infrequent, batched settlement — functionally the role SWIFT plays today, but with cryptographic finality instead of institutional trust.
**3. Demand for that settlement reflexively bids up block space.** Institutional settlement demand → competition for scarce block space → rising fees → higher total miner revenue → stronger security → a more credible settlement layer → more institutional demand. A virtuous cycle.
**4. The cycle feeds the price of bitcoin.** A more valuable, more secure, more adopted settlement network strengthens the scarcity-and-store-of-value narrative, and institutional balance-sheet demand for the asset rises alongside demand for the rail. Block-space value and BTC price reinforce each other — the way gold became valuable as a recognized, scarce reserve asset.
**5. Neutrality wins the game-theoretic equilibrium.** Even though CBDCs and bank-consortium chains are faster, cheaper, and programmable, each is *controlled by someone*. In a multipolar world where the US, EU, China, and others each run their own controlled rail, no bloc will subordinate itself to a rival's system. Bitcoin's lack of control becomes a credible-commitment device — the neutral "external auditor" of global settlement, the escape hatch and settlement-of-last-resort for cross-bloc, cross-jurisdictional flows. That makes broad use of a neutral layer a Nash equilibrium: no single player improves by defecting.
Conclusion of the bull case: by ~2035, base-layer Bitcoin captures perhaps 15–30% of high-value, cross-bloc institutional settlement as a premium neutral rail, and the resulting fee demand plus reserve-asset demand drives BTC materially higher.
---
## Part 2 — The strongest bear case
The bull case is internally elegant, which is exactly why it's worth attacking hard. The strongest bear case is not "Bitcoin fails" — it's that **the specific causal chain above quietly conflates two different and partly contradictory theses, and that the link the argument cares about most (block-space value → BTC price) is the weakest link in it.**
### 1. Fees accrue to miners, not to holders — there is no mechanism connecting "valuable block space" to "valuable bitcoin"
This is the load-bearing flaw. The reflexive loop in claim 3 is real *as a description of miner economics*: more settlement demand does raise fees and miner revenue. But fees are paid **to miners and immediately sold** to cover energy and hardware. They are not a dividend, a buyback, or a claim on the asset. There is no cash-flow channel by which expensive block space transfers value to a bitcoin holder.
The bull case bridges this gap with the word "narrative" — high fees *signal* adoption, which *strengthens belief*, which lifts price. But that is a sentiment channel, not a mechanical one. It means the price leg of the thesis rests entirely on reflexive belief, and reflexive belief is precisely the part that is not durable. Compare equities: an expensive, heavily-used toll road raises the toll operator's earnings, which flow to *its* shareholders. Bitcoin has no equivalent of the toll operator's equity — the toll (fee) is consumed by the people maintaining the road (miners). "Block space is precious" and "the coin is precious" are linked only by story.
### 2. The gold analogy proves the *opposite* of the rail thesis
The bull case leans on gold: scarce, neutral, a reserve asset, valuable because no one controls it. But notice what gold actually *is* in the modern system — **a static reserve that sits in vaults and is almost never moved.** Nobody settles cross-border trade by shipping physical gold anymore; they net positions and move claims. Gold's monetary value comes from sitting still, not from being a high-throughput rail.
If Bitcoin becomes "digital gold," the implication is *low* on-chain activity: coins locked in institutional cold storage, rarely transacted, generating almost no fees. That is the reserve-asset thesis, and it's the more defensible one — but it directly **undercuts** the block-space-as-premium-rail thesis, which needs sustained, fee-generating settlement flow. You can have a pristine reserve asset that sits still, or a high-fee settlement rail with constant large flows, but the maximal version of each is in tension with the other. The bull case wants both at once and uses each to justify the other.
### 3. Successful Layer 2 *cannibalizes* base-layer fee demand
Claim 2 (settlement migrates to the base layer while activity migrates to L2) contains a hidden contradiction. The entire engineering purpose of Lightning, rollups, and sidechains is to **compress many economic events into very few on-chain footprints.** A rollup batches thousands of settlements into one base-layer commitment. A Lightning channel can route enormous lifetime volume while touching the chain only twice (open and close).
So the more successful the L2 ecosystem is at being the institutional rail, the *less* base-layer block space each unit of settlement consumes — which suppresses base-layer fees rather than raising them. The bull case implicitly assumes scaling drives demand *to* the base layer, when scaling is the technology of demanding *less* of it. A world where Bitcoin "won" as a settlement substrate could plausibly be a world of *cheap* block space, because L2 did its job.
### 4. The genuine demand for trustless, neutral, base-layer settlement is probably thin
How many truly neutral, cross-bloc, final settlements actually need the base layer per year? Premium settlement is by definition infrequent and batched. A few dozen mega-institutions and sovereigns netting and settling periodically could fit their entire annual footprint into a tiny fraction of block space. Scarcity only produces high fees if demand for the scarce thing is *broad and competitive*. A handful of whales batching quarterly does not create a sustained competitive fee market; it creates occasional large transactions in otherwise slack blocks. The thesis needs a thick order book for block space, and the use case it describes is structurally a thin one.
### 5. You can't denominate settlement in a volatile unit — so you settle stablecoins, and then you may not need Bitcoin's chain at all
Settlement rails settle in a unit of account. No treasurer will denominate a settlement obligation in BTC across a multi-day window and eat the FX risk of a 20% move. So institutional "settlement on Bitcoin" really means settling **tokenized fiat or stablecoins** that happen to live on a Bitcoin-linked chain. But once the settled object is a stablecoin, the choice of chain is up for grabs — and the chains optimized for stablecoin settlement (with programmability, yield, compliance hooks, and cheap finality) are *not* Bitcoin's base layer. The volatility argument doesn't just complicate the thesis; it routes the actual demand to whatever rail hosts the dollar, which is the competition's home turf.
### 6. Irreversibility and pseudonymity are *liabilities* for institutional settlement, not just features
The bull case treats cryptographic finality and censorship resistance as unambiguous selling points. For institutions they are double-edged. Irreversibility means **no recourse**: a mistaken, coerced, or fraudulent settlement cannot be clawed back, and institutions spend enormous effort on exactly that kind of error-correction and dispute resolution. Pseudonymity collides head-on with AML/KYC and travel-rule obligations that banks cannot opt out of. A settlement system with no reversibility, no legal counterparty, no recourse, and a compliance story that regulators distrust is a hard sell to a bank risk committee, regardless of how elegant the finality is. The features that make Bitcoin attractive to the censorship-resistance use case are frictions for the regulated-institution use case the thesis is targeting.
### 7. The Nash-equilibrium argument assumes the very neutrality it's trying to prove
The game theory in claim 5 is the most seductive part, and it smuggles in its conclusion. "Bitcoin wins because no one controls it" only holds if Bitcoin is *credibly* uncontrollable in 2035. But neutrality is an empirical property that is eroding at the margins, not an axiom:
- **Mining and ASIC concentration.** Hashpower is concentrated in a small number of pools, and ASIC manufacturing and a large share of energy capacity sit in identifiable jurisdictions. A neutral layer that a handful of states could coerce is not neutral against those states — which are precisely the actors in the cross-bloc settlement game.
- **Filtering and compliance creep.** Pool-level transaction filtering (OFAC-style) is already technically demonstrated. If regulated miners increasingly filter, the "censorship-resistant neutral rail" loses the property institutions were supposedly buying.
- **The defector's strongest move is to capture, not abandon.** The bull case assumes rivals defect *toward* Bitcoin. The more dangerous defection is a powerful bloc that gains influence *over* Bitcoin (via hashpower, regulation of miners and on-ramps, or capture of the development/funding ecosystem) and quietly converts the "neutral" rail into one that is neutral-except-against-them.
The equilibrium where everyone uses the neutral layer is only stable while neutrality is common knowledge. That's an assumption, not a result.
### 8. The security-budget cliff makes the reflexive loop dangerously symmetric
By ~2035 the block subsidy has fallen to roughly 0.78 BTC per block (post-2032 halving), heading to ~0.39 after the ~2036 halving. The network's security budget must increasingly come from **fees**, not issuance. This is where the bull and bear cases collide most sharply:
The bull thesis *needs* premium settlement fees to be large precisely so they can replace the vanishing subsidy and keep the chain secure. But if the premium-settlement demand fails to materialize at sufficient scale — and points 3, 4, and 5 above all suggest it might not — then the security budget shrinks in real terms, hashrate-cost-to-attack falls, and the finality/neutrality that was the *entire* pitch degrades. Worse, the same reflexivity that powers the virtuous cycle runs in reverse with equal force: weaker security → weaker settlement credibility → less institutional demand → lower fees → still weaker security. Reflexive systems don't have a virtuous mode and a separate safe mode; they have a virtuous mode and a vicious mode, and the cliff is the period when the system is most exposed to flipping from one to the other.
### 9. The competition is stronger than the bull case concedes, and it's not (mainly) CBDCs
The original framing pits Bitcoin against CBDCs, where Bitcoin's neutrality looks good. But the live competitive threat by 2035 is more likely **tokenized real-world assets and stablecoins on bank-consortium and general-purpose chains**: tokenized Treasuries that pay yield while settling, regulated stablecoins integrated into existing correspondent-banking rails, and consortium ledgers (the JPM-Coin lineage and successors) that offer programmability, legal recourse, atomic delivery-versus-payment, and compliance by construction. These capture the *actual* institutional settlement flow because they do everything Bitcoin can't — and they're being built by exactly the institutions the thesis assumes will adopt Bitcoin. Bitcoin's neutral-reserve niche may well survive, but as an *insurance policy* held in reserve, which loops back to point 2: insurance held in cold storage generates almost no block-space demand.
---
## Part 3 — Synthesis: what would actually have to be true
Lay the chain out as a conjunction and the problem becomes visible. For the full bull thesis (block space → premium rail → higher BTC price) to pay off, *all* of these must hold:
1. Genuine, broad, competitive demand for **base-layer** settlement exists (not just thin batched whale flow) — fighting point 4.
2. That demand is **not** absorbed by L2 compression — fighting point 3.
3. It settles in a way that requires **Bitcoin's** chain specifically, despite volatility routing value to stablecoins — fighting point 5.
4. Institutions accept irreversibility and pseudonymity despite recourse and compliance needs — fighting point 6.
5. Bitcoin remains **credibly neutral** against the very states doing the settling — fighting point 7.
6. Fees scale enough to cover the post-halving security budget — fighting point 8.
7. And there's still a **mechanical or durable-narrative** link from fee demand to coin price — fighting point 1.
These are not independent 90% bets. Several are conditional on each other, two of them (broad rail demand vs. reserve-asset stillness) are partly mutually exclusive, and the price link at the end is the softest of all. A conjunction of seven sub-certain, partly-conflicting conditions is a low-probability event even when each individual story sounds reasonable.
The honest read:
- **Bitcoin-as-neutral-reserve-asset** is the *defensible* thesis. It survives most of the bear case, because it doesn't depend on high on-chain throughput or a fee→price mechanism — it depends on scarcity and credible neutrality, and it's content with coins sitting still. This is the "digital gold / insurance against any single bloc winning" outcome from the game theory, and it's plausible.
- **Block-space-as-premium-high-fee-rail-that-drives-the-price** is the *weaker, more conjunction-dependent* thesis. It needs sustained competitive base-layer demand that L2 success actively suppresses, in a volatile unit institutions won't settle in, with a price linkage that is narrative-only — all while the security budget is most fragile.
The trap in the original five-step argument is that it uses the strong reserve-asset thesis to lend credibility to the weak rail-and-price thesis, and uses the rail thesis to give the reserve asset a "utility" story, when the two are partly in tension. The reflexive loop is genuinely present — but reflexive loops are symmetric, and the security-budget cliff is precisely the moment that symmetry matters most.
A reasonable base case for ~2035 is therefore *neither* the clean bull cascade *nor* outright failure: Bitcoin most likely persists as a credibly-neutral reserve and settlement-of-last-resort asset whose block space is occasionally, not chronically, in high demand — with the link to price running through reserve-asset adoption far more reliably than through fee revenue. The premium-rail-drives-price story can still happen, but it's the conjunction, and the conjunction is where theses go to die.

2026-04-17 20:30:37 UTC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JwKwHEdEwY

2026-04-09 23:30:17 UTC

On the road to One Sextillion hashes per second and beyond
https://fountain.fm/episode/zwmdkwdhy0jQT5dVkhah

2026-04-07 20:53:45 UTC

Start Tunnel acts like a router in the sky.
It forwards traffic to your home over VPN, lets some VPS provider know you’re a miner, gives you a static IP, and makes life much easier if your home connection does not have a static IP, which almost no one does.
It also means you do not have to rely on a home IP that might change and break the bid later.
https://youtu.be/KZ2_jwayAgg?si=zJ_bqsi42kmb60uQ
https://rentsomehash.com/guides/startos/
https://docs.start9.com/start-tunnel/1.0.x/index.html

2026-04-06 15:25:59 UTC

https://youtu.be/7ALxGh-QRl8?si=P_Re9-Nwfc4TUd4e

2026-04-03 23:13:31 UTC

https://youtu.be/IXPJczQvNaE

2026-04-01 17:41:55 UTC

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Another thing.....lightning channels confuse the heck out of a lot newb's. I've seen plenty of plebs complaining about OCEAN payouts and blaming OCEAN when the entire time it's their own setups the screw them.

2026-04-01 17:39:03 UTC

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Yes. I do receive payouts from him. Like I say...I don't think it's you.

2026-04-01 17:35:35 UTC

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I've been trying to get him there but he is apprehensive for some reason. Maybe scared of the tech or the full responsibility. Who knows...but I keep dropping bombs in his ear about it.

2026-04-01 17:04:48 UTC

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Or possibly their silly KYC policy? Regardless I agree with you no need to test as it seems to work ok between you and I. I have a solid setup on my Start9 with LND, Core Lightning and Alby. I can send/receive without glitches and OCEAN mining payouts are like clock work. I wonder...is Jerry sending via Strike to your speed wallet? Strike is also a problem child and their fees are ridiculous for Jerry to send sats to ALby addresses. Something like 50 sats per 10000. Ridiculous.

2026-04-01 15:04:08 UTC

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Oh...and I don't mind helping at all.

2026-04-01 15:02:35 UTC

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That should be plenty as far as routing channels go. I had problems with Speed also...it is not you it is them. Their routing channels suck and do not like Alby at all. Good luck.

2026-04-01 02:09:18 UTC

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What are your main routing channels? Are they balanced?

2026-03-31 15:59:11 UTC

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Confirmed. I sent them back to you. Hope you get it fleshed out. May I suggest getting someone from Jerry's channel to try as well...maybe Backpacker. Good luck

2026-03-30 15:33:38 UTC

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I'm not calling you stupid nor do I think you are. I was simply pointing out that longs and shorts don't care about Bitcoin. It's all about FIAT for them. Look what they did to Gamestop. In their minds there is only winners and losers.
Lesson to take away from trading in that environment though is don't use leverage. U will get REKT'd.
Have a great day sir 👊🏻

2026-03-30 14:27:11 UTC

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You do realize that is the game they play...over and over and over. It's not about trading. It's about the REKT game. Pride and I told you so. They don't care if they get liquidated. They have 100 of millions to play with. That is their game. They do it all day long. And it's not "whales" ...it's speculators.
U wanna watch the game go here... https://www.coinglass.com/liquidations

2026-03-27 23:37:21 UTC

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Sent it back...u should see it

2026-03-27 23:36:57 UTC

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Yep. Works on your outgoing to me

2026-03-27 21:19:07 UTC

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BTW - are you self hosted or are you using Alby proper? I see you mentioned LND node so that indicates (to me) self hosted

2026-03-27 21:15:13 UTC

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Ok. Understood.

2026-03-27 20:26:04 UTC

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Sent a tip to...but cant attach messages to the Zap. Might be a noStrudel

2026-03-27 20:22:38 UTC

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Configured correctly?

2026-03-27 20:11:14 UTC

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5% discount for paying in BTC

2026-03-25 15:51:23 UTC

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Whats the rock for? Looks like a granite thrown out of Yellowstone.

2026-03-20 17:02:05 UTC

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Exactly!

2026-03-19 00:27:05 UTC

Current (3.18.26) node status from Luke Dashjr. https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/services.html https://image.nostr.build/6632948a69b7210bd42fa109776ef09a4be3088bad478f765f7dc1be66ae7328.jpg

2026-03-19 00:21:04 UTC

On March 1, block 938903 set BIP-110's signaling bit (Barefoot Mining ) https://image.nostr.build/d6e47ee704c545501c33878d90c7ef0c944c48146b85b3e4e570e3c3fecf9c1b.jpg

2026-03-18 22:58:50 UTC

For reference: 14 days of renting hash (1 Ph/s per day) from Braiins Hashpower and pointing to OCEAN mining pool. https://image.nostr.build/7cd20c7889f0125a81e74fea5cfe88d2f78e7491adac7c940f03057502f95939.jpg
Around 25% increase. So far have not fallen into red

2026-03-18 22:40:30 UTC

Why BIP-110 may mater. Looks messy don't it? https://image.nostr.build/7b532f8474ad044e15e8768258aaf3aa2c070c98aef4e15769de4cd1defc3a95.jpg