Imagine Wiping Almost A Trillion Dollars

Imagine wiping nearly a Trillion Dollars off an investment?

You’d probably go into hiding or at least - or hang your head low.

Meet - Gloria Zhao.

Gloria pulled the trigger that caused an $800 Billion dollar market cap evaporation.

Gloria was the one who merged in the attack Vector into Bitcoin.

When it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck - it’s a duck.

It would appear that the Bitcoin Core team (the people that have the most sway in Bitcoin maintenance) are either compromised or malicious.

I don’t suppose them to be dumb.

In early September I wrote about the forthcoming attack on Bitcoin - See article below. The attack vector they introduced was the ability to store state secrets and illegal/immoral images on the network.

Well - Gloria went through with it. Severely crippling confidence in Bitcoin.

The probable reason is that people are spooked as to why the team entrusted in maintaining Bitcoin has effectively gone rogue.

From a humanity point of view - it is quite upsetting that humans have managed to create the best store and exchange of value ever invented. Then deliberately undermine it.

What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger

Bitcoin has been around for coming up on 17 years. Crazy when you think about it.

It’s weathered math, intelligent adversaries, hackers, governments, technology issues during all of that time.

Let’s take the time quickly to visit some of the previous storms it has weathered:

• Mt. Gox collapse - 850,000 Bitcoins lost

• Bitfinex Hack - 120,000 Bitcoins stolen

• QuadrigaCX Collapse - Founder died of dysentery took the private keys of the company to his grave

• FTX Collapse

• China banning mining and trading

• Multiple ETF denials via SEC

• US/UK Banking restrictions

• “Bitcoin is banned” headlines - China, India, Nigeria, Russia, Eu MiCA debates

• Blocksize Wars

It faces future threats too.

• Quantum attacks

• Centralization of Miners

• State attacks as the realization of Fiat is a scam catches on

• “Green” attacks on the usage of energy and so on

Bitcoin must become stronger and this is/was clearly an attack point. Any centralization must be mistrusted.

The “Bitcoin Core” team name implies centralization - this needs to end.

Something must change to negate these compromised and nefarious actions.

Part of that is stepping away from Github as an authority for software management.

The ability to be arbitrarily banned from the repository for speaking your mind is dangerous.

Soft Fork

In the Software & Cryptocurrency world -

• A soft fork is considered a constricting of rules and constraints

• A hard fork is considered an opening of rules and constraints

Going forward, what I expect to happen is there to be a soft fork re-introducing the previous constraints that were taken out by Gloria.

This would mean that nodes running the Bitcoin network, if they started running this software, they would create risk for Miners if the miners were running the looser rules.

As their blocks may not be included in the blockchains - causing them to have wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars in electricity costs and hardware.

Now the issue is any state secrets or nefarious images that will have found themselves onto the blockchain in that time will be there forever.

I’m not sure how that will be solved retroactively.

The heavy handed approach would be to re-write the blockchain but this goes against the principles of having an immutable history.

Logically one could run a node with hashes starting after any “bad blocks” - however you are operating on “trust, don’t verify” which is inferior to “verify, don’t trust”.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And there are a lot of smart people out there with real skin in the game.

I’ll keenly keep watch on the situation as I feel it is one of the most pressing issues that I am aware of. Given the gravity of what Bitcoin means to humanity.

Bitcoin has gone through multiple HUGE declines in USD price in the past. I expect it to go through them in the future.