Vision

Bitcoin becomes the world's sound money. Neutral, open to everyone, owned by no state and no company. Simple enough that anyone can verify it, and sound enough to hold for a lifetime. Its rules stay with the people who run it.

Whatever side of BIP-110 you are on, this is the world we both want. We are all Bitcoiners.

Mission

bip110.run makes the state of BIP-110 legible to every Bitcoiner, for it or against it. It shows the signal as it happens, built from real on-chain data. Sunshine is the best disinfectant: put the real numbers in front of people, and misunderstandings clear on their own. It carries what matters between two rooms that rarely speak the same language: the people who run the software that verifies the ledger, and the people who fund it.

I built this, and I run a node. I know the technology, and I have spent real time on the money side. I think BIP-110 is one step toward that world, and it does not fix everything. I will argue it in good faith and answer real concerns on the merits. Disagreeing with me does not make you an enemy.

Hal Finney

On January 10, 2009, Hal Finney posted two words: "Running bitcoin." He was the second person after Satoshi to run the network, and he received the first bitcoin ever sent.

Hal wrote part of the original PGP code and was the first employee of PGP Corporation. He put strong encryption in ordinary hands. In 2004 he built RPOW, a direct ancestor of Bitcoin's proof of work. He spent his career on the cryptography Bitcoin is built from. When Bitcoin arrived, few people were better prepared to run it. He died of ALS in 2014.

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

Hal and I went to the same high school: Arcadia High, in Arcadia, California. He was there in the early 1970s, where he first learned to program. I was there in the 1990s. I started the Internet Production Team, built the school's first website, and in 1997 got the district to teach web programming to kids. That class is still one of the most popular there. He caught the computer in those halls; I caught the web. I feel connected to him.

The exchange

This site is free, and it stays free.

If it helped you, put in whatever it is worth to you. It goes to StarHeartSong LLC, my small maker company. I want to help build a beautiful, kind, awakened world. Bitcoin, with the right consensus rules, would be a huge part of that. I am hungry to build, and there is more coming.

There is a second way to give, and I want it kept 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. Send it there, not here.