It's been a pretty jam-packed week in the Bitcoin world in terms of news. We've seen everything from Janet Yellen expressing her opinion that cryptocurrencies need to be better regulated to prevent money laundering to "double spend attack" FUD to Bitcoin energy FUD to a lawsuit that incited the blog post below from long-time Bitcoin Core maintainer and contributor, Wladimir van der Laan. For those freaks who missed the events that unfolded yesterday, a con artist claiming to be Satoshi threatened the maintainers of bitcoin.org and bitcoincore.org with a lawsuit if they did not remove copies of the Bitcoin white paper from their sites.

It's been a pretty jam packed week in the Bitcoin world in terms of news. We've seen everything from Janet Yellen expressing her opinion that cryptocurrencies need to be better regulated to prevent money laundering to "double spend attack" FUD to Bitcoin energy FUD to a lawsuit that incited the blog post above from long time Bitcoin Core maintainer and contributor, Wladimir van der Laan. For those freaks who missed the events that unfolded yesterday, a con-artist claiming to be Satoshi threatened the maintainers of bitcoin.org and bitcoincore.org with a lawsuit if they did not remove copies of the Bitcoin white paper from their sites.

The lawsuit was alleging copyright infringement. The Bitcoin.org maintainers decided to keep the white paper up, but it was taken down from bitcoincore.org. Bitcoincore.org is a site dedicated to updating users about Bitcoin Core and distributing the Bitcoin Core software. Many bitcoiners were disappointed that the white paper was removed from the site because it could lead to a slippery slope that leads to questions like, "What's to stop more frivolous lawsuits from preventing the distribution of the software that many depend on the access the Bitcoin Network?" However, I have some sympathy for Wladimir and the other maintainers of bitcoincore.org. They have been tirelessly working to make the Bitcoin Core development process as robust as possible. It would be a shame if they were to be forced to deal with a litigious asshole. Their time is better spent writing and reviewing code.

Regardless of what side you fall on in this particular debate, it is hard to deny that something beautiful bloomed from the chaos; individuals standing up in an "I AM SPARTACUS"-like manner and hosting the Bitcoin white paper on their own sites. Off the top of my head, Square Crypto, Microstrategies, @nckbtc, TFTC, and many others shared links to their self hosted copies of the white paper. Highlighting the immune system response inherent at the social layer of the Bitcoin Network.

And as Wladimir explains in his blog post, he plans to make an effort to help further decentralize the distribution of the code base, release process, and the depositories where Bitcoin developers meet to work on the code. All efforts that further distribute the tools that are necessary to work on and access the Bitcoin Network. The more people who seed critical Bitcoin-related information on torrents, the better. Whether it be the Bitcoin white paper or Bitcoin Core v0.21.0, individual bitcoiners should want to see the number of peers hosting these files and the number of places they are hosted increase as much as possible.

The silver lining of this litigious asshole running amok is that it seems to have produced an urgency to harden the layer below the base layer Bitcoin code.

On another note, it seems that an official IRC meeting to discuss Taproot activation methods has been scheduled for February 2nd. This is what your Uncle Marty likes to see to end the week.