Last Notes
That’s cute and all, but I think the previous century and a half have provided evidence aplenty of the folly that this mindset leads to. Governments are affinity scams.
Presented at the UW Bitcoin Research Initiative yesterday. The full picture is now available as a decision boundary, all findings, and the interactive fork dynamics explorer.
Starting with the three questions that matter most during a contested fork.
1. Is economic adoption above ~60%?
If not, the upgrading fork struggles regardless of mining support.
Monitor: exchange proof-of-reserves, institutional custody migration, ETF flow data.
2. Has a pool controlling >20% of global hashrate committed to the upgrading chain?
This determines whether that pool is economically trapped on the upgrading chain or ideologically committed, a distinction that can reverse outcomes at moderate economic adoption levels.
3. Is economic adoption above ~75%?
If so, pool ideology and commitment structure become irrelevant to outcome. Mining dynamics still determine how disruptive resolution is, but not which side wins.
https://image.nostr.build/2891c818c2f7910cac25e3334fcc2db70b33920aece2ca646349c97cd31261c8.png
These thresholds come from 1,385 fork scenarios on real bitcoind nodes. Three statistical methods converge on the same boundary.
Caveat: numbers are calibrated to current pool distribution and modeling assumptions, mechanisms are general, specific values are not universal.
Full decision boundary, presentation, and data: https://github.com/pfoytik/Bitcoin-Fork-Governance-Study
Interactive fork explorer (adjust sliders, see predicted outcome): https://pfoytik.github.io/fork-explorer/index.html
I agree with this, which is not exactly the position you took in your previous note.
https://blossom.primal.net/814e09716a38527bbd1ec15c4467f26477d796f501355edb041e68e2980c3634.gif
So you’re here in support of the government?
Got in a wreck this morning taking my kid to work. Hydroplaned into a guardrail. We’re ok but the car is not. I’m 100% responsible for this but I can’t help feeling a little shafted by the universe.
Bch price didn't just start, it took a little time for exchanges to find the price based on market offers and orders. For that to happen they had to specify a token on the exchanges that everyone agreed on. Futures markets help to understand prices before that point. Liquidity is just the amount people are willing to sell and buy at a particular price. Getting rich is not so simple i n the moment.
At a chainsplit, the capital and market value for the two tokens likely would be equal to the prior tokens value before the chain split. If the market is split on both coins meaning half the market thinks the new token is bitcoin and the other half think the old token is bitcoin then one could sell the other token for a meaningful amount but you risk selling the token that will become the Bitcoin that the market decides is the correct fork in the end. If the market is not split 50/50 then one token will have value and the other token will not. The weaker token would have very few buyers and to sell it you would have to sell it to those few buyers at a very low price.
If a chainsplit happens and persists the price of the original token would likely split between the two takens, not by any protocol rule but because of the free market. The capital is splitting between the two. So in a sense you aren't getting a free air drop, the total value of both chain will probably equal the total value of the original. There is still a lot we don't know about how the market reacts so for now a lot of this is just hypothetical.
Maybe the move is to get bidets and be up front about charging for a first-class experience
I have a sign. It only seems to work on people that don’t want to use the bathroom
https://blossom.primal.net/22171ecd2bd0cdaf6a9cdd293a37c8391d92267a5cc9d583f03587872ae96acc.jpg
Air drop, equal amount on both chains if you hold your own keys. Obviously this only happens if a chain split persists for a long period of time.
Did the backup work in restoring all your chats?
We need a Nostr app that replaces YouTube
Problem is the people I wanna watch are not on Nostr yet ….
I'll be briefing the local meetup on some of the soft simulation results!
#nevent1q…h9v4
There's a live debate right now about whether user node signaling is sufficient to carry a soft fork, whether the current picture resembles past successful activations.
It's the right question. Here's what the simulation found about what actually determines fork outcomes.
First, a clarification on scope: this research isn't about BIP110 specifically. It's about the general conditions that determine whether a contested soft fork succeeds, fails, or splits the chain. BIP110 is a timely reason to share it.
The clearest result from 2,694 scenarios: there's a threshold in economic adoption below which no mining support can carry a fork and above which miners can't stop it.
https://blossom.primal.net/5e0631b0d049e697f6c581168c35f8e76835df8c4f58cb6dcc09a064d35440d1.png
Result holds across the range of pool profitability assumptions tested. The contested zone is narrow.
Below that lower threshold, a fork fails regardless of mining support. Above the upper threshold, it succeeds regardless of mining resistance.
What sits between is where mining dynamics actually matter and where most current governance debates are happening.
As for whether user node signaling translates into the kind of economic adoption that moves that threshold, that's a separate question the simulation addresses directly.
Full answer at the UW Bitcoin Research Institute workshop, July 13–17.
#Bitcoin #UWBRI #softfork
Lol, the hand signal at the end is the best! Looks like you are getting yourself a production crew and camera person ;)
Meet up with us next Saturday July 11th 2pm at our regular location Mile Zero Marine in Downtown Portsmouth Virginia: @npub1zzs…4lj8 where we will discuss and answer questions about the sovereign stack for freedom oriented self hosted tech and simulations of contentious soft forks. All are welcome, swing by and find out what the local Bitcoin community is up to!
https://757btc.org/meetups/2026/07/04/20260701-Meetup.html
#Virginia #Meetups #Bitcoin #757btc #757 #HamptonRoads
One thing the simulation makes viscerally clear: a contested fork doesn't resolve gradually. It stalls... then it doesn't.
Here's what the timeline actually looks like across 2,694 scenarios.
https://image.nostr.build/3f9eb1b310fb58f2ac4dc829f0d62a03caa6a2aa06755d0ae1acc6f414121360.png
After the split, two chains run in parallel and when it breaks, it breaks fast. In the cascade scenarios, the decisive hashrate shift often happens within the first 500 blocks.. Profit-seeking pools drift toward whichever fork the price signal favors. Ideologically-committed pools hold their ground. For a stretch, it looks like a standoff, both chains viable, neither winning cleanly.
What the chart doesn't show is what breaks the standoff. One chain accumulates 2016 blocks first. Its difficulty adjusts sharply down, its blocks become far cheaper to mine. The profitability math flips for every pool still on the other side. Resolution happens fast.
The race that matters in a contested soft fork isn't block-by-block. It's who reaches the difficulty adjustment first. That single event is a cascade trigger and it's why most observable action happens in a compressed window once that threshold is crossed.
Three outcome shapes visible in the data: a clean win for one side, a cascade win for the other, and a contested equilibrium where neither chain breaks through.
General findings and useful frame for any contested fork. Full picture at UW BRI, July 13–17.
#Bitcoin #softfork #UWBRI
Happy 4th of July! https://nostr.download/d6ab1727dd2fae304c57230f0be6a1e307aa597f30ebbd76870f319b55d856e0.jpg https://nostr.download/208883359a2794569148174ec9820a5ab95524f3c9ab86f624d836eab1abc4cd.jpg
I don't know this sounds pretty USA patriotic to me, is this the false flag?
A few people asked how the fork simulation actually works. The modeling choices matter, and I'd rather they be on the table before I start sharing results. Here's the short version...
A contested soft fork (one where a chain split occurs because there isn't agreement in the network) is a decision problem for the entities who run Bitcoin's infrastructure. So the model represents them as three classes of actor, using the stakeholder taxonomy from the Blockchain Consensus Analysis Protocol (BCAP) as a starting point.
https://github.com/bitcoin-cap/bcap
Economic nodes: exchanges, institutional custodians, payment processors, merchants: weighted by the BTC they hold or the volume they transact. Mining pools: weighted by hashrate, each with its own ideology and tolerance for losses. User nodes: retail operators running their own full nodes with some amount of custodied Bitcoin and option to have hashrate representing solo miners.
Each actor re-evaluates the same way: first the rational choice (which fork is worth more / which do I hold), then ideology (am I committed enough to eat a loss), then inertia (is the gap big enough to justify moving). One pipeline, applied independently by every actor.
Then we vary what we can't know in advance, how adoption splits, how committed the pools are, how much conviction each actor has across thousands of scenarios on real Bitcoind nodes using warnet and watch what the network does.
https://github.com/bitcoin-dev-project/warnet
Results coming this week. Full picture at UW BRI, July 13–17.
#softfork #Bitcoin #UWBRI
Watching the BIP110 debate, I keep seeing the same honest admission from people who know Bitcoin deeply: past forks only tell us so much about this one. It's different. We'll have to wait and see.
They're right that it's different. But "wait and see" isn't the only option.
It's not that the past teaches us nothing, we learn plenty from earlier forks. It's that the outcome doesn't transfer directly. We map 2017 onto today, and the mapping breaks: Different hashrate concentration, different custody landscape, different players.
@nprofile…vvhl and @nprofile…dzev made sharp points: technical people tend to treat user behavior as more predictable. I think that's right. So the goal here isn't to predict how users will act... it's to respond systematically to the fact that we don't know.
To be clear, this isn't guessing, it's testing. You take structured assumptions about how users might influence the system, run each one, and ask whether any of them actually moves the outcome. The assumptions are explicit and on the table, not baked in and hidden.
That's the gap simulation fills. Not a crystal ball, you can't predict what a new rule set gets used for. But whether a contested fork resolves cleanly or splits the chain is something you can study under today's conditions, while staying honest about what you don't know.
#nevent1q…d22z
GM to all the new felons in Virginia. 🫡
Yes! I will be leaking out the findings as we get closer to the workshop :)
757btc researcher!
#nevent1q…w32g
@nprofile…dzev recently made a careful argument about BIP110: Bitcoin is a dynamic system, and you can't know a soft fork's consequences in advance. "I don't know the consequences," he wrote, "and neither do you."
He's right about the uncertainty and the limits of prediction. But there's a third option worth considering.
The choice isn't only between *knowing* an outcome (hubris) and *not knowing* it (watch and learn). For one specific question, will a contested fork succeed, fail, or split the chain? deep uncertainty doesn't mean zero information.
You can't predict a dynamic system's full trajectory. But you can bound it. You can map which conditions push a contested fork toward a clean win, which push it toward a sustained split, and where the boundary between them sits. https://blossom.primal.net/813b90bd5824dbe0f9c376cfccf9ec01576e7f2d23105ba2d3840b1dea4e758d.png
That's what simulation is for. We ran 2,694 contested-fork scenarios on real bitcoind nodes using Warnet with mining pools, exchanges, and users modeled as the actors BCAP (https://github.com/bitcoin-cap/bcap) defines, each making independent economic decisions to map exactly that boundary.
We don't claim to know whether BIP110 should activate. We claim something narrower: the success-or-failure of a contested fork isn't pure fog. It has structure, and that structure is measurable in advance.
Full methodology and findings at the University of Wyoming Bitcoin Research Institute workshop @nprofile…z73t , July 13–17. Thread to follow. https://github.com/pfoytik/Bitcoin-Fork-Governance-Study
Epistemic humility and quantitative analysis aren't opposites. You can hold both.
#nevent1q…gmzk
Pitcher of Beer!? Now we are talking!
"GoMining announced it mined a Bitcoin block with DMND mining pool using Stratum V2’s Job Declaration, allowing the miner, rather than the pool, to build the block template and prioritize GoBTC Pay transactions. The company said the demonstration highlights miner-controlled block construction and Stratum V2 adoption."
Apparently first mined stratum v2 block, more decentralized mining in the future! https://mempool.757btc.org/block/955318?showDetails=true&view=actual#details
Think of the children
https://image.nostr.build/a2b67ae3f6fd060ed60bdef7322907bb253c1e7f1ad7415da445a7bb23875273.png
You can still set your datacarriersize in Core v30.2 and fetch block templates from it with your Datum instance. Of course it works w/ CLN, which you need for instant payouts. No need for Knots
GM! Just had a good call with a good pleb.
We're building the circular economy sat by sat. Exciting times.
Now, back to work. 🫡
I haven't been to water country in a while, always a good time, how was the crowd?
Maybe the problem with your blue strap is that what you chose to wear is actually not a watch at all?
Crocs were chosen by Mike Judge to be the footwear of the future for the 2006 movie Idoicracy. They were an unknown startup at the time and Judge had little budget for wardrobe. When he found them he thought they were perfect for his dystopian future because they were so cheap and horrible that they could never possibly take off. He told the story years ago on Rogan
Prompt agent to spec out new feature for software product.
Agent estimates effort at two weeks. Instruct agent to begin work.
Agent completes implementation of new feature in 14min; 1 week, 6 days, 23 hours and 46 minutes ahead of schedule.
Interesting that agents have zero concept of agent time vs human time
Even if you try to be helpful you get punished in these permissioned systems....
#nevent1q…an48
My gf got purple pilled harder than orange
And it shows
It seems like something like this to automatically target and blind cameras would be effective. I would never advocate disabling someone else's property though. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334694331_DroneGraffiti_autonomous_multi-UAV_spray_painting
Not I, but the gentleman fighting for privacy has a go fund me that he is actively updating his status with: https://www.gofundme.com/f/jeff-sovern-legal-fund
Great one! I love the Travis Bean shows!
Going fishing 🎣 this weekend
3 day weekend so starting tomorrow…
https://media.tenor.com/2OA0LBeZ8KUAAAAC/idiocracy-gun.gif
Yeah what actually happened here? This note isn’t doing anything more than describing bitcoin working normally
Low IQ thinking focuses on the denominator. There will be countless trillionaires when a loaf of bread is 200 billion 𝖬̶𝖺̶𝗋̶𝗄̶𝗌̶ Dollars
Nope. Posted a hint for you. How do you like wisp?
Not Denver
https://image.nostr.build/c1d370fae3f975df4076d4566cc958ea121ccc5f609b5a4386818bc21165984e.jpg
