@ Bitcoin Curmudgeon

There was a time when mining meant something. Not just the noise of fans and the stink of ozone, but a political act. An act of rebellion, like smuggling pamphlets under the nose of the king. You mined in the basement. You mined with pride. You mined because you could. Not because Fidelity wrote a whitepaper on it. Not because a hosting provider in Iceland offered you a bulk discount. But because you believed.

That miner is dead.

He didn’t die in a blaze of glory. He didn’t go down swinging. He was euthanized. Slowly, over years, by spreadsheets, subsidies, and a thousand tiny concessions. Killed off by a culture that said, “Why do it yourself when you can outsource the soul of Bitcoin to a pool in Singapore?”

Welcome to the age of industrial Bitcoin: a world where miners don’t mine, pools don’t just process. They rule. And the only thing sovereign anymore is the dividend.

The Sovereign Miner is Dead, And No One Mourned

The sovereign miner, the madman with a dusty rack, a full node, and a middle finger pointed squarely at the Eccles Building, is extinct. He’s gone the way of the dodo, the blacksmith, the outlaw. And in his place? A fleet of khaki-wearing ASIC clerks uploading hashrate reports to their VC lords like dutiful little interns. These are not revolutionaries. They are box operators. Corporate larvae wiggling around in server farms financed by pension funds.

Once upon a time, mining was an act of insubordination. You ran a rig to say "no" to Janet Yellen. You ran a node because you meant it. You didn’t need permission. You didn’t ask for subsidies. You didn’t file paperwork. You fought for consensus by living it. Every block was a punch thrown in a quiet, bloodless rebellion. Now? Now you’ve got KPMG-certified mining outfits measuring ESG impact and tweeting about carbon offsets like they’re trying to win a grant from the UN.

The eulogies for that old miner are full of oily euphemisms. They drone on about "efficiency," as if selling your vote for a cheaper power bill is some kind of virtue. "Economies of scale," they whisper, as though scale were some holy sacrament instead of the Trojan horse that delivered centralization to our doorstep. What they call progress, I call a back-alley mugging of Bitcoin’s soul.

The modern miner isn’t mining. He’s leasing his dignity to a pool that doesn’t know his name. He’s plugging in Bitmain boxes like a hotel maintenance worker changing light bulbs. The only heat he generates is for the benefit of someone else's node. Someone else's mempool. Someone else's idea of consensus. He doesn’t build the block. He just pays the electric bill.

And the worst part? He likes it. He thinks it’s normal. He thinks it’s “smart business.” He’s internalized the defeat so completely he brags about it on social media. He’ll tweet about uptime, about efficiency ratios, about hashprice curves—as if he were describing a well-run gulag. He’s the obedient prisoner who polishes the chains and calls it freedom.

The sovereign miner didn’t die in a blaze of glory. He died quietly, smothered under a fleece blanket of comfort and yield optimization. And no one mourned. No one wept. Because everyone was too busy benchmarking their ROI and counting fiat. The revolution didn’t end in a shootout. It ended in quarterly earnings calls.

Power Reversed: Pools Run Nodes, Miners Run Cable

Let’s be crystal clear: The pools run the nodes. The miners do not. This is not a subtle shift. It is a total inversion of power. A coup d'état wrapped in JSON-RPC and relayed with a smile. The pool clerks have become the governors of consensus, and the miners? They’re errand boys. They might control the heat, but they don’t control the protocol. They’re like engine pistons in a car they’ll never be allowed to drive.

Pointing hash at a pool and calling yourself sovereign is like renting a tux and declaring yourself royalty. It’s cosplay. At best. Pools decide what transactions are valid. Pools enforce the rules. Pools interpret consensus, not the miners, not the miners, and certainly not the plebs stacking sats on Raspberry Pis, who, through their economic activity and validation, still enforce the rules but are powerless to stop this creeping centralization in the mining layer. In a world obsessed with decentralization theater, pools are the centralized prop masters pulling the strings.

And when the curtain pulled back in 2021, it wasn’t some secret backroom scandal. No. Marathon Digital bragged about OFAC-compliant mining. They filtered transactions with state-sanctioned precision. They announced it like a new feature rollout. “Censorship-as-a-Service, now in beta!” The mining pool became an extension of the U.S. Treasury—while still waving the Bitcoin banner.

That wasn’t a red flag. That was a blood-soaked banner waved from the parapets of captured consensus. And the response? Nothing. No mass exit. No fork. No slash-and-burn rebellion. Just soft mewling from miners who’d already convinced themselves this was “pragmatic.”

Miners didn’t revolt. They shrugged. They shrugged because they didn’t feel it in their bones anymore. They’d been domesticated. Fattened on subsidies and mining-as-a-service. Pacified by dashboards and yield spreadsheets. When the pools took the steering wheel, the miners reached for the air conditioning controls.

This is the hard truth: sovereignty cannot be delegated. You don’t get to outsource rebellion. You don’t get to file a ticket and request autonomy. If someone else runs the node, someone else owns the power. And if you’re pointing hash at their rules, you’re not free. You’re furniture. Industrial-grade silicon furniture humming in tune with someone else’s politics.

ASICs Are Treadmills, Not Weapons

Here’s a bitter pill: plugging in an ASIC doesn’t make you a participant in Bitcoin. It makes you a battery. Yes, economic nodes still set the rules through their validation and transaction activity. But what happens when the mining layer, the muscle that enforces those rules on-chain, goes rogue? What happens when the mempool you built gets ignored because your hashpower is pointed at someone else's filter?

A node might define validity, but without aligned mining, it’s a lion without teeth. If economic consensus is the blueprint, mining is the builder. And right now, most builders are following someone else's floor plan. The node might say, "this is how we build," but the pool, with its centralized relay and selective enforcement, says, "this is what we’re willing to build."

Without a node, without building your own block, without choosing your own mempool, you’re a hamster in a high-voltage wheel. All that heat and noise? It’s not rebellion. It’s treadmill sweat.

Without a node, without building your own block, without choosing your own mempool, you’re a hamster in a high-voltage wheel. All that heat and noise? It’s not rebellion. It’s treadmill sweat.

You are not a general. You are a grunt. A CPU on contract to someone else’s war.

Fiat Habits: The Culture of Convenience

Bitcoin was supposed to be the great divorce from fiat thinking, a severance from the debt-ridden clown world where every moral principle is for sale if the yield’s high enough. But lo and behold, the fiat habits came slithering in through the miner’s back door. It started small. “Just a hosting service,” they said. “Just outsourcing the firmware,” they claimed. “Just using a pool for efficiency.” And before you knew it, the average miner was indistinguishable from a middle manager at an Enron reunion. Optimizing, spreadsheeting, begging for subsidies like a lobbyist on his third bourbon.

The culture is poison. It rewards cowardice, convenience, and cost-shifting. Small miners moan about volatility like day traders with arthritis. Big miners wine and dine regulators, sniffing after tax incentives and ESG badges like some filthy dog begging at the World Economic Forum’s dinner table. We’re no longer talking about building a sovereign financial system—we’re talking about quarterly earnings, power purchase agreements, and whether your server farm meets carbon neutrality guidelines. What the hell happened?

Take a look back at the New York Agreement in 2017. That wasn’t a negotiation. It was a ransom note. The largest mining outfits, including BTC.Top and ViaBTC, held SegWit hostage because it didn’t butter their bread. The principles didn’t matter. The technical merit didn’t matter. All that mattered was leverage, yield, and preserving their own stranglehold. They tried to shove a hard fork down Bitcoin’s throat like a goose being force-fed for foie gras. And if not for the sheer stubbornness of the user base, real economic nodes who still gave a damn, Bitcoin would’ve gone full Frankenstein.

But did those miners learn? No. They just shifted tactics. Today they ask for different forms of convenience: not block size increases, but subsidies, regulations tailored to their rigs, public-private partnerships. The song remains the same. It’s the fiat mindset dressed up in ASIC drag. Instead of defending neutrality, they demand special treatment. Instead of embracing the responsibility of consensus participation, they’d rather hand it off to a pool that promises good customer service and a Discord server with emojis.

What we’re seeing is the spiritual sequel to fiat monetary policy—moral hazard in overclocked silicon. Miners begging for insulation from the market, protection from volatility, and someone else to carry the political weight of consensus. That’s not sovereignty. That’s serfdom with a spreadsheet. These aren't rebels. They’re corporate supplicants doing yield gymnastics while the heart of Bitcoin withers under the fluorescent lights of their co-location facility.

Bitcoin doesn’t need more efficient parasites. It needs fewer of them. The culture must shift from comfort to combat. From optimization to obligation. A miner who outsources consensus is no better than a fiat printer optimizing bond auctions. The minute you make convenience your god, you become indistinguishable from the system Bitcoin was meant to destroy.

The Culture of Convenience

Bitcoin was born as a rejection of fiat habits. So naturally, miners dragged every last fiat habit into the server farm like rats carrying plague. Outsource the firmware. Outsource the hosting. Outsource the power contract. Outsource the node. Outsource the sovereignty. What’s left?

Mining today looks like Goldman Sachs cosplay. ESG reports. Carbon credits. Webinars on regulatory compliance. Bitcoin isn't being mined anymore. It's being monetized. It's being lobotomized by yield-chasers and spreadsheet cultists.

The New York Agreement was the test. The miners failed. They held the protocol hostage for a slightly thicker block and a fat slice of yield. They were willing to hard fork Bitcoin into a Frankenstein fiat-friendly platform if it meant a better power purchase agreement.

They haven't changed. They’ve just gotten better at disguising their cowardice as competence.

Software Will Not Save You (But Cowards Sure Will Sell You the Illusion)

Let me tell you a ghost story. A tale of silicon treachery dressed up as innovation. It was 2017. The air stank of backroom deals and nervous sweat. Bitmain, the ASIC kingpin of the age, had quietly embedded a little something into its hardware. A cheat code. A hidden rake. A parasitic exploit called ASICBoost, but not the honest kind. No, this was the covert variant, slinking beneath the protocol’s floorboards, exploiting transaction ordering for a tidy little edge. It wasn’t disclosed. It wasn’t debated. It was used. Quietly. Gleefully. While the rest of the ecosystem was busy arguing about scaling like philosophers in a house fire.

Bitmain wasn't interested in consensus. It was interested in arbitrage. They saw Bitcoin not as a commons, but as a slot machine they had rigged. And when SegWit appeared, when it offered scaling and immunity to covert ASICBoost in one surgical tweak, Bitmain panicked. Because SegWit would end the grift. Not softly. Not eventually. Immediately.

So they did what every entrenched parasite does when exposed. They lied. They stalled. They "compromised." They ginned up support for SegWit2x, not to scale Bitcoin, but to preserve their exploit. A hard fork with extension blocks would keep the legacy block structure alive and well, tucked into a cozy parallel track where covert ASICBoost could still thrive. It was a bait-and-switch. A con. A trojan upgrade smuggled in under the banner of progress.

But this time, the hosts fought back.

Node runners saw the ploy. They didn’t need fancy tooling. They needed guts. They didn’t negotiate. They didn’t flinch. They ran SegWit. They activated UASF. They drew a line—not in sand, but in bedrock. Bitcoin would not be held hostage by ASIC cartels. It would not bend for Bitmain. It would not become an extension block casino for rent-seekers in Shenzhen.

So no, software didn’t save Bitcoin. Men did.

Ordinary plebs with full nodes and no backdoor. They used the tool, yes, but what mattered is that they refused. Refused the scam. Refused the deal. Refused to bend the knee to an ASIC cartel dressed in business-casual and lies.

SegWit didn’t win because it was elegant. It won because enough people had the guts to jam it through in spite of sabotage. The protocol gave them a knife, and they had the moral clarity to use it. That’s the lesson. Not that we need better code, but that we need sharper men.

Because in the end, every exploit is possible when the culture is weak. And every fix is worthless if the people implementing it don’t care. The problem was never ASICBoost. The problem was what miners were willing to do to keep it.

The Pool Cartel is the New Central Bank

Middlemen were supposed to die in 2009. That’s the entire reason Bitcoin exists. To gut them. To render them obsolete. To salt the earth behind them so nothing like them could ever grow again. But here they are, reborn, not as banks, but as pools. Not in suits, but in server racks. They wear the garb of "infrastructure providers," but they function as gatekeepers, choke points wrapped in API documentation.

Pools don’t just process, they decide. They decide what gets into the chain. They decide whose transactions are valid. They decide what software matters, and what consensus looks like. They’ve become the central banks of the hashrate economy: unaccountable, invisible, and too boring to fear until it’s too late.

They don’t win power. They absorb it. They don’t need legislation or signatures. They just need you to keep pointing your hash in their direction. That’s the magic trick of middlemen: their power lies in being taken for granted. And in that, they’re the perfect parasite, one that feeds on your energy and then tells you they’re helping you digest it.

Every time you optimize for pool payout efficiency, every time you default to the biggest provider, every time you accept their mempool instead of building your own, you’re kneeling. You’re pledging allegiance to a cartel of block-builders whose loyalty isn’t to Bitcoin, it’s to operational ease and regulatory appeasement.

These aren’t neutral actors. They’re political animals. They hold the levers of consensus without bearing any of its weight. They’re the mortgage-backed securities of Bitcoin: abstracted, opaque, and one market panic away from becoming a systemic risk. We have, once again, created a class of intermediaries who profit by extracting value from a system they didn’t build and no longer understand.

Bitcoin didn’t kill the middlemen. It fed them. It made them smarter. It made them less visible. But their hunger hasn’t changed. And until we name them for what they are—cartels in priestly robes—we will keep mistaking the cage for the cathedral.

Stratum v2: A Rifle, Not a Revolution

Stratum v2 is the closest thing to a loaded weapon Bitcoin miners have been handed in a decade. It is, quite literally, the mechanism by which miners can wrench their dignity back from the clenched fists of the pool cartel. And what have they done with it? Mostly shrugged. A few pilot programs, some halfhearted integrations, and a handful of blog posts filled with the kind of cautious optimism you’d expect from a risk-averse actuary.

This isn’t a critique of the protocol. Stratum v2 is beautifully ugly. It’s messy, technical, and dense enough to scare away the very consultants who want to repackage Bitcoin into polite compliance middleware. But none of that matters if no one has the guts to use it. You don’t win wars by stockpiling weapons you refuse to fire.

Stratum v2 gives miners the power to construct their own blocks. Not just vote with hash, but wield it. Choose transactions. Set mempool policy. Actually participate in consensus instead of spectating like a retiree watching a soap opera. It is the rifle hanging over the mantelpiece. The one Chekhov warned us about. And right now it’s gathering dust.

The tragedy here isn’t technical. It’s cultural. Because this tool, this literal key to sovereignty, is being treated like a library dependency. Something for someone else to test, to vet, to implement. Meanwhile, miners continue to act like it’s 2015 and their biggest concern is firmware compatibility and finding a better power rate in Kazakhstan.

Ignore Stratum v2, and it becomes protocol theater. A museum piece. A tragic artifact of what could have been. But use it, and it becomes a wedge. A crowbar in the gears of centralized mining. A bright, shining middle finger to the entire architecture of compliance-friendly consensus.

But don’t fool yourself. Stratum v2 won’t make you sovereign any more than buying a gun makes you a revolutionary. It won’t beam liberty into your soul via Tor, won’t whisper “freedom” into your hashboard, won’t bathe your rack in the holy light of decentralization. It’s not salvation. It’s a tool. And tools don’t care who uses them—they serve the hand that holds them.

Stratum v2 is a rifle, yes—but even a rifle requires guts, aim, and the clarity to know what you're shooting at. In the hands of a coward, it’s a paperweight. In the hands of a rent-seeker, it’s a bargaining chip. But in the hands of a miner with fire in his gut and sovereignty in his blood? It’s a revolution.

This isn’t about technology. It’s about spine. About picking up the one weapon you’ve been given and refusing to keep it locked in the safe while tyrants build your blocks. Stratum v2 offers freedom, but it demands ferocity. You have to load it with your own mempool. You have to chamber every transaction. And then you have to fire.

No protocol, no BIP, no whitepaper will ever substitute for moral will. And if you’re too polite to use the weapon, too busy maximizing uptime to get your hands dirty with real consensus, then you deserve whatever filtered, censored, OFAC-compliant future you inherit.

Stratum v2 is not your savior. You are. And until miners act like it, until they treat this protocol like a weapon and not a toy, the pools will rule, and the timechain will continue to serve the highest bidder.

It’s just a rifle. But rifles have rewritten history when wielded by men who knew they weren’t free.

Ossification Without Decentralization Is Death

Everyone loves ossification, until they realize they missed their chance to do it when it mattered. We had a window. A golden, fleeting window to freeze Bitcoin in a state of clarity, minimalism, and neutrality. Instead, we blinked. We let upgrades seep in. Complexity crept through the back door, and with it came unintended consequences. Among the earliest and most corrosive: the rise of centralized mining pools. A structural outcome embedded in Satoshi’s original design, born from the brutal variance of solo mining. But if that centralization was unforeseen, imagine how many more we’ve introduced since, through every soft fork, every upgrade, every decision to keep tinkering instead of locking the vault when we had the chance.

Ossification isn’t just about code. It’s about culture. It’s a posture. A refusal. And we failed to assume it when it counted. We chose tinkering over tenacity. We chose cleverness over caution. And now the fruits of our hubris hang heavy on the vine: a mining layer riddled with capture points, a mempool hijacked by middlemen, and a user base quietly wondering why their transactions feel like applications.

Yes, economic nodes enforce the rules through validation and usage. But that power has a prerequisite: inclusion. If the only blocks being built are by pools with selective relay policies and a fondness for government compliance, then your economic activity is a shout into a soundproof room. The validation rules may be perfect, but if your transaction never hits the chain, it’s as good as invalid.

The trap we set for ourselves was gilded with good intentions. Soft forks meant to improve scalability. Relay policies meant to minimize bloat. Fee markets meant to incentivize good behavior. And now? Now we find ourselves staring at a timechain that functions—but no longer feels inviolable. The foundation wasn’t corrupted in a day. It was eroded, line by line, by developers trying to be helpful.

Freeze Bitcoin now, and we don’t immortalize virtue—we immortalize vulnerability. We lock in the flaws. We preserve a snapshot where the power has already been ceded to those least equipped to wield it justly. It’s like slamming the vault door shut just as the thieves finish loading the bags.

That’s not ossification. That’s embalming. That’s turning the timechain into a museum exhibit of the ideals we almost lived up to, before we traded principle for pragmatism and thought we could always fix it later.

Ossification is not neutral. It’s not some universal good. It is power, fixed in time. And if that power belongs to the wrong class of actors, the OFAC miners, the hosting conglomerates, the Silicon Valley startups that mine with ESG consultants on speed dial, then ossification doesn’t lock in liberty. It locks in them. It fossilizes a regime that already serves someone else’s interests.

We speak of ossification like it’s an event. One final commit. One last hardening. But in truth, it’s asymptotic. You don’t slam the door shut in one dramatic gesture. You inch toward it. You tighten the bolts over time until change becomes culturally, politically, and economically impossible. And that means we’re ossifying right now.

Picture it: a frozen Bitcoin where the rules can’t change, but the blockspace is filtered, the miners are compliant, and the pools relay transactions based on a government-approved blacklist. That’s not sound money. That’s a digital leash. A ledger of obedience masquerading as freedom.

If Bitcoin ossifies after it has been captured, it does not become incorruptible. It becomes irredeemable. Like sealing a vault before checking what’s inside, you don’t get resilience, you get entombment. You get permanence without virtue. You get consensus without sovereignty.

That’s not ossification. That’s embalming. That’s turning the timechain into Lenin’s corpse: glassy-eyed, sterile, and meticulously preserved in service of a state it was meant to outlive.

We may only have one chance to rescue bitcoin from the clutches of the fiat maximalists, before it is impossible to do so.

Core's Quiet Capitulation

Bitcoin Core was once the temple guard. Militant minimalism. Ruthless conservatism. The last line of defense against creeping bloat and protocol erosion. You didn’t have to agree with them, but by God, you respected the trench they were willing to die in.

Now? They’re white-gloving the stretcher for a dying protocol. Hospice caretakers tending to consensus rot with polite documentation and GitHub tickets labeled "enhancement." The keepers of the flame have become interior decorators for a collapsing cathedral.

They removed filters, the thin defensive crust that kept bad-faith actors at bay. They weakened defaults, the backbone settings that preserved network sanity. They bend policies not to protect consensus, but to please mining cartels and PR-sensitive operators. Every decision smells like appeasement baked in a think tank.

This isn’t some grand betrayal of principle for power or riches. It’s worse. It’s resignation. Exhaustion wrapped in technocratic humility. They didn’t sell out to the highest bidder, they just ran out of fire.

Where once they chanted ossification, now they mumble "flexibility." Where once they enforced sanity with zero tolerance for grift, now they entertain proposals that would’ve been laughed out of the room a decade ago. They say yes out of fatigue. They say no with asterisks. They commit code like bureaucrats signing off on a slow-motion demolition.

Core didn’t just get captured. It got comfortable. And comfort, in protocol stewardship, is fatal. The war for Bitcoin's soul isn’t being lost in some smoky backroom. It’s being forfeited in polite silence by maintainers who forgot the protocol doesn’t just need to run. It needs to refuse.

The Call: Rewild the Hash

This is the fork in the road. This is the final flare fired into the sky before the trench goes quiet forever. You either take back the hash, or you become a dependent serf in a digital fiefdom run by pool lords and relay priests. No more excuses. No more polite appeals. No more PRs begging middlemen to do the right thing.

Run your own node. Build your own block, even if it takes a lifetime. Not tomorrow. Not after the next bull run. Not when it’s convenient. Now. Because if you don’t, someone else will do it for you, and they will not share your values.

Stop waiting for permission. Stop tweeting at pool operators like they’re public servants. Stop optimizing for latency like it’s a sacrament. You are not here to impress compliance officers. You are here to enforce your damn sovereignty.

Don’t beg the cartel to behave. Starve it. Cut it off. Build the mempool you want to see in the world and let their VC primed and bloated relay network choke on their own paperwork. Let their blocks fill with NFT spam and chain analysis reports. You are not required to participate in their theater.

Use Stratum v2. Not because it’s clever, not because it’s next-gen, but because it puts the steering wheel back in your hands. It lets you carve your transactions from granite instead of begging for a line on someone else's spreadsheet. It is not optional. It is not academic. It is your rifle, and the target is consensus capture.

Rewilding the hash isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about survival. It’s about tearing up the artificial turf of corporate convenience and letting the hard, messy, glorious chaos of sovereign mining grow back. Every node a fortress. Every block a declaration. Every miner a free man with dirt under his fingernails and fire in his chest.

This is the line. Pick up your weapon. Run your own node. Build your own block. Or die watching someone else sell your freedom by the byte.

Murder the pools. Rewild the hash. And mine like it means something... because it does.