Show notes
Yan Pritzker, Swan's cofounder and CTO, walks his new essay on Bitcoin fork history, from the 2015 block size debates through the hard fork scheduled for September 1. Published on the Swan blog and posted to X during the show.
His own entry point was Ethereum, not Bitcoin. The 2016 DAO rollback split the chain and created Ethereum Classic, and watching that taught him what a fork actually is before he lived through one in Bitcoin.
Soft fork versus hard fork, explained without jargon. A soft fork produces blocks old nodes still accept. A hard fork produces blocks every existing node rejects, which means everyone must upgrade or the new chain is invisible to them.
The asymmetry that decides every hard fork. Doing nothing rejects it by default. The forker has to convince every exchange, business, and holder to change software, including people asleep, on vacation, or gone. Brady's summary: they said if you're not with us you're against us, but the truth is if you're not with us, you ignored us.
The block size wars were about governance, not block size. The big blockers had 58 companies, 22 countries, 83% of hash power. They still lost, because Bitcoin is not decided by a vote but by whether the blocks you produce get accepted.
A 2010 forum post Yan found while researching. Jeff Garzik proposed a few lines of code to match PayPal's throughput, and 13 minutes later theymos and then Satoshi told him it would fork him off the network. The idea and the answer are both sixteen years old.
The SegWit2x futures market as free-market polling. Exchanges let people trade the forked coin before the fork existed, it priced below Bitcoin, and miners used that signal. Brady: you are risking capital to vote, not answering a question on the telephone.
Why every fork coin bleeds out. Holders receive it at a cost basis of zero, so selling at any price above zero is profit. Brady recounts selling his Bitcoin Cash near the intraday top around 0.4 to 0.45 BTC on Thanksgiving week 2017, watching a Telegram group call the biggest red candle in Bitcoin's history.
Suze sat through six days of Craig Wright's cross-examination and describes supporters leaving court convinced he was winning. Yan's read: each splinter selects for the most willing to believe, producing what Brady calls mini cults.
⭐ The practical warning, and the reason to listen: do nothing. Replay attacks mean a transaction signed to move fork coins can be rebroadcast on Bitcoin and move your real Bitcoin. Never type a seed phrase into fork software, and treat any urgent instruction as a scam.
On tail emissions: Yan grants that if Bitcoin had launched with 0.1% inflation nobody would object, because the point of the monetary policy is that it is fixed and predictable. Introducing it now is different, and he points at Ethereum changing its policy as the demonstration.
His closing thought turns the whole story around. Every failed fork has proved Bitcoin cannot be changed, and the price rose after each one. He suggests this fork may mark the bear market bottom.