okay I read "Hijacking Bitcoin" I never paid much attention to Roger or BCH, he always seemed whiny to me. and he is kinda whiny, there's a fair amount of rehashing of Twitter and bitcointalk drama in the book, but not without good reason. I'm ultimately sympathetic to his case. essentially he provides an early 2010s viewpoint and rationale for the development of the problems on Bitcoin that I complain about anyway. Bitcoin was designed for L1 financial transactions. reserving L1 for "settlement" and moving actual user's financial transactions to higher layers is a change in spec. It isn't necessary to be anal about Satoshi's original intent, but there's *no reason* to not pursue it. nobody's needs to run a full node on an RPI and ultimately, it isn't necessary for EVERY user to run their own node at all. it's ridiculous people are now arguing we CAN have trusted banks for scaling with custodial ecash, but we CAN'T have SPV nodes for light wallets and good UX for self-custody L1 transactions. IOW, Roger is right. Bitcoin was always intended to have a block size increase to do *some* scaling on L1, but was captured by small blockers pushing a fringe view that actually doesn't make sense in the light of day. a block size limit that was meant to be temporary became enshrined as gospel. the proponents of SOV have zero vision for Bitcoin beyond ossification and the fiat enrichment of early adopters. refusing to do ANY scaling on L1 combined with the domination of the SOV and gold 2.0 narrative is a guarantee of regulatory capture of the Bitcoin network. pointing this out is simply hand waved away with " Bitcoin is inevitable " "the hardest money always wins" cope. theyve succeeded in making this view seem normal and sane. it isn't. they've just been loud enough to make it seem normal. Roger makes a decent case for thinking that this capture was coordinated. it's curious that he is talking about possible links to intelligence agencies who want to subvert Bitcoin (remember Peter Todds leaked emails and John Dillon?) and here we are today with another link between Bitcoin and Epstein as a proxy for the legacy financial system. It seems undeniable theres wan agenda to keep blocks small and to prevent zero-conf transactions from happening with RBF. so if you're looking into connections between Epstein and Bitcoin, you would be looking for ways that his money supported this "small blocks forever" argument that enables regulatory capture. I'm a bad conspiracy theorist because I remain agnostic when there isn't good data. but whether it's a coordinated conspiracy among three letter agencies, or just a social media push by a minority group of zealous small blockers, the result has been the same. Bitcoin has been captured by the SOV/Gold 2.0 people and there is no open governance so any change is ultimately decided upon by a small group behind closed doors. if you think Bitcoin doesn't have governance, you're wrong. I don't necessarily agree with how Roger thinks it has gone, but anybody who has experience with open systems knows that governence happens anyway. basically there is either 1)a dictatorship or theres 2)a federation or there are 3)endless meetings for people to air their "concerns" and then the people with actual power make the decisions themselves. no, your home node does not matter. and since Bitcoin has the third style of governance the only recourse is a hard fork. I don't think BCH is going anywhere, as he obviously seems to be hoping. It seems clear to me that Monero has become the preferred silver to bitcoin's gold. I do think we will have a multicoin future, but it's hard for me to see what chains like BCH and LTC have to offer. although I also exist in my own echo chamber. so to sum up, Roger does a pretty good job of putting all this information together in one place. its presented through the lens of somebody who is sentimental about bitcoins " original purpose", so there's that. it should be required reading for Bitcoin maxis. it's also a natural compliment to "The Blocksize War" and good for anyone like me, who didn't get involved in the *social aspect* of Bitcoin until 2016. #RogerWasRight #bitcoin