Chat_148 - It Doesn’t Pass the Smell Test with Jimmy Song

"If you have this disconnect between Core devs that value
one thing and the users that value something else, something's
got to give at some point, right? Either you get developers that
are more in line with the users or a lot of the other users kind
of end up leaving and so on.
So this is not a trivial concern and it's a big
attack
surface and we've seen it in these communities where a
lot of this political stuff enters and then next thing you know
it gets completely sort of subsumed by that movement, by
institutional capture, if you will.
And that's not just true in open source software, it's
true in every nonprofit organization and so on.
This is a big problem."
~ Jimmy Song


Jimmy Song joins me for a deep dive into one of the most heated
topics in Bitcoin today - the debate around Bitcoin Core, the
OP_RETURN controversy, and the growing cultural divide within
Bitcoin development. We explore whether Bitcoin’s technical
decisions have become political moves, and what “verify, don’t
trust” really means when trust itself starts eroding.


We talk about Bitcoin’s identity crisis between innovation and
ossification - should Bitcoin keep evolving with new toys, or
hold the line and protect what already works? We cover everything
from Taproot’s legacy to mining decentralization, censorship,
left–right polarization in the dev community, and the spirit of
cypherpunk independence.


Most importantly, Jimmy challenges us to think for ourselves - to
stop being clones of whoever we agree with, and to test every
assumption against reality. Because Bitcoin’s strength has never
been in consensus for its own sake, but in the willingness to ask
hard questions.




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