Why this house is open.

Why this exists

We want the same thing. Whatever side of BIP-110 you are on, you and I both want Bitcoin to win, and to stay sound money. We are all Bitcoiners. We are all better off because it exists.

Step back and look at what is at stake. For the first time in history the world has a money that answers to no state and no company, that anyone anywhere can verify for themselves, that plays by the same rules for everyone. More of humanity leans on it every year. What it becomes is being decided now, in the rules we choose. This does not happen twice. We should get it right.

Here is the quiet miracle. Bitcoin can settle an argument this large with no one in charge. No CEO. No committee. No miner. The people who run the nodes each choose which rules to enforce, and the network converges on what they hold in common. This fight is Bitcoin doing exactly what it was built to do.

I only get to control how I show up. So I will argue this the honest way. Real concerns get real answers, on the merits, and no one is treated as an enemy for disagreeing. That is the only kind of debate worth having about something that matters this much.

What pulled me in is simple: I love how simple Bitcoin is. A shared ledger. Peer-to-peer cash anyone can verify. That is the whole thing. The appeal was never features or complexity. It was purity, small and clear and powerful and understandable, like early Unix. I do not want that buried. BIP-110 does not fix everything. I think it is the first step in restoring Bitcoin to what it was meant to be, and that is worth showing up for.

I run my own node. Umbrel, port 8333 open. I am one of the people who hold the network up.

Here is the problem I keep running into, and it is why this page exists. There are two rooms, and they do not speak the same language. In one, the engineers, who know in their bones that Bitcoin is its nodes. In the other, the money, the people who feel how much of the world now rests on Bitcoin but never had to learn the machine underneath it. There is a legal room and an economic room too. Each holds a real piece of the truth. Almost no one walks between them.

I am not the smartest person in any of those rooms. Luke Dashjr, GrassFedBitcoin, Matthew Kratter and others have carried this longer and better than I have. I am here to help.

But I can do one useful thing. I have spent enough time in every room to speak all of their languages, and I can carry the signal between them. That is what this observatory is for. It makes the node runner's role legible to everyone with a stake in Bitcoin, not just the people who read the code.

Why Hal

On January 10, 2009, Hal Finney typed two words into the void: "Running bitcoin." He was the second human being, after Satoshi, to run the network. He caught the first bitcoin ever sent.

Understand who was on the other end of that transaction. Hal wrote some of the original PGP code and was the first employee of PGP Corporation. He helped hand strong encryption to ordinary people. In 2004 he built RPOW, a working ancestor of Bitcoin's proof of work. He spent his life on the exact cryptography Bitcoin is made of. When it finally arrived, no one on Earth was more ready to run it. That first node was a life's work meeting its moment. ALS took him in 2014.

Those two words hold the whole argument. Bitcoin's rules are kept by the people who run nodes. Each node keeps its own copy of the law and throws out any block that breaks it. Miners propose; nodes decide what counts. Hal ran the first node after Satoshi. BIP-110 is a fight over that exact power. It is a user-activated soft fork, which means the nodes enforce it.

Then I found something that stopped me cold. Hal went to high school in Arcadia, California, in the early 1970s, the place he first touched a computer and learned to program. I went to the same school, twenty-odd years later. I found him in the yearbook. At Arcadia I started the Internet Production Team, built the school's first website, and in 1997 talked the district into teaching web programming to kids, a class that is now one of the most popular there. He caught the computer in those halls. A generation later, in the same halls, I caught the web, and I stayed to teach the next ones to build. Same frontier, one turn of the wheel apart. I feel very connected to him.

The exchange

This observatory is free, and it stays free.

If it helped you and you want to back the work, put in whatever it is worth to you. It goes to StarHeartSong LLC, a small maker company, a real business, the workshop I build from. The dashboard is one thing I am making. The larger aim is a kinder, more awake world, with sound money as one of its foundations. I am hungry, and there is more coming. Call it an honest trade for something you found useful.

There is a second way to give, and I want it kept clearly separate. Hal's wife, Fran, runs the Running Bitcoin Challenge for ALS research, the disease that took him. Give there, at runningbitcoin.us, in bitcoin, over Lightning, or in fiat. That one honors Hal himself. Send it there, not here.

• Fran Finney’s Running Bitcoin Challenge (ALS) — Give there (bitcoin, Lightning, or fiat). That one honors Hal himself. Send it there, not here.
• Support this observatory — optional, pay-what-you-want — StarHeartSong LLC. Use the ₿ Support control in the header.

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