waxwing on Nostr: I saw a message on twitter from a BIP110 proponent arguing that the fact that ...

I saw a message on twitter from a BIP110 proponent arguing that the fact that Karpeles' pull request to redirect the MtGox coins to creditors was immediately closed is evidence of the problems with Bitcoin Core. It wasn't a joke.

I think this a good, and stark, example of how far some substantial portion of the modern Bitcoin community has drifted away from the original cypherpunk--> bitcoin vision. The whole cypherpunk thesis was something like: the new online/digital version of the world (speaking from c. 1990 when the internet was very nascent) will have a natural tendency to vast government overreach (think: instead of letters that can't be intercepted by law, you have emails that are default open to all government agents to read), and the way to protect against it is to build systems using public key cryptography which render government's asymmetric force impotent. Their whole motivation for digital cash came from that same vision, but also, in analogy to the mail vs messaging problem, they focused on the secrecy side, which in retrospect may have been an error (see my recent post about the 1999 mailing list message); the great achievement of bitcoin was not to make it impossible for a government to see a transaction occurring, but that it couldn't stop it through decentralization; and it worked incredibly well, but only because transactions are controlled by cryptography, not people. Satoshi heavily nodded towards this with references to bittorrent in particular (doubtless bitcoin's name is related to this, though "bit-*" was being used a fair bit back then). So at the very center of this vision is the idea that no one can stop you from doing transactions, only public key cryptography controls ownership, nothing else. Ethereum violated this principle about 1 year after it launched - it added a consensus change to simply redirect funds, i.e. the funds transfers explicitly was not a function of cryptographic authorization. It's easy to miss this detail in all the noise; but crossing that line is anathema, it completely removes the entire point of the system. Any proposal along these lines, from CZ, from Karpeles, from anyone, is idiotic. And if you support it you are at the very least, a million miles from being a bitcoiner. When we say "no rulers" we specifically mean that: nobody gets to move funds except by having the spending key; the end, no exceptions.

Bitcoin's value has this principle as its backbone. That's why proposals to freeze coins are fundamentally wrong, imo. You can't protect a house from flooding by setting it on fire.