Reader,
Two women lived in one house and each bore a son, days apart.
In the night one child died beneath the weight of his own mother and she rose in the dark and took the living boy from the other woman’s side and laid the dead one in his place. By morning both stood before the King Solomon and each swore the living child was hers.
Solomon called for a sword. Divide the child, he said. Half to each.
The blade lowered.
The true mother cried out. Do not harm him. Give him to her and let him live.
The other woman watched the blade. Let it be neither mine nor yours, she said. Divide it.
She had already lost her own. Her grief had gone dark in her. If I cannot have a child then no one will.
Solomon stayed the sword and gave the boy to the woman who pled. The real mother would not trade the life of the child to win her claim.
This past weekend I watched the same trial.
There was no king.
On one side stood Bitcoiners who wanted the child as it is. Flaws and all. Blocks carrying data nobody asked for. Spam in the ledger. Imperfect. Alive.
On the other stood the supporters of BIP110. A rule to purge that data and keep Bitcoin pure. They are not idiots. They run nodes and read code and love this network in their own way. The spam is real. Their point deserved making and it was made.
Their proposal set its own bar. 55% of miners signaling support.
It got 2.53%.
The network had heard the argument and said no. And the moment asked them what they loved more. The child or the winning.
Neither mine nor yours. Divide it.
On August 8, at block 961,632, their nodes rejected a block that didn’t fly their flag and began building a chain of their own. The blade came down. For a few hours there were two Bitcoins.
Then the math spoke.
Their chain carried all of Bitcoin’s difficulty and almost none of its hashrate. The next adjustment sat a year away. They mined two blocks and stopped.
Two blocks. Then silence.
In the Book of Kings the sword never falls. That was the wisdom of it. Everyone in that room knew a child dies divided.
Bitcoin has no Solomon. The blade fell. And where there is no king the child decides. It crawls to whoever can keep it alive. The hashrate stayed. The nodes stayed. The market stayed. The price barely moved.
I have been keeping an eye on their camp. One argument keeps surfacing. The miners and the pools only chose money, they write. That is the sickness in Bitcoin. And in the same breath they warn their own. When the fork comes, choose carefully or you will lose money.
Money is corruption when it moves the other side. Prudence when it moves yours. There is a word for accusing others of the thing your own plan depends on. I say it with respect. Projection.
Economic incentive is not Bitcoin’s flaw.
It is the game theory.
It is why a network with no king and no army has never needed either.
And the stakes are no longer pleb stakes.
Nations hold this asset now. Pension funds. ETFs carrying someone’s savings, someone’s retirement, someone’s grandmother. Swing a sword at this child and you are not swinging at your rival’s ideology. You are swinging at other people’s lives.
Here is what I hold with open hands. The data they call spam may be tomorrow’s foundation. Room in a block is room for builders, the way changes nobody loved became the ground Lightning was built on. Or it may be graffiti. I don’t know. Neither do they. That is why you argue it out instead of reaching for the sword.
Since the split I have watched the egos sort themselves. Some doubled down. There is talk of changing the mining algorithm on the frozen chain, bricking the very machines that mined for them. Changing the locks after the child crawled to the other house.
Others went quiet. Stepped back. Looked at two dead blocks and asked what had been won. Watch that second group. That is what it looks like to love the child more than the claim.
Motherhood is not what you claim. It is what you keep alive.
The woman who said divide it was not a monster.
She was grieving what she had already lost.
I think some of that camp is grieving too.
A smaller, purer Bitcoin that stopped existing years ago, if it ever did.
The grief is human. But you do not resolve it with a sword.
Bitcoin, flaws and all, kept breathing.
There is no king.
There doesn’t need to be one.
Rare
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