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Meme

Big Bitcoin

“Big Bitcoin” is the show’s conspiracy-theory coinage for a funded, corporate-developer establishment cast as the opposite number to the BIP 110 node-runner movement — a Bitcoin-flavored analogue to “big pharma” and “big defense.” Richard Greaser introduced the term live, mid-argument, while defending the idea that Bitcoin Core’s developers are funded by a small set of companies rather than by podcasters: “let’s talk about big — so so big Bitcoin is, like, you know, with big pharma[, big defense].”1

The four horsemen

Rod Palmer catalogued Justin Bechler‘s target list for the term the same episode: Jack Mallers and Jack Dorsey as untouchable insiders Bechler would never name, and Matt Odell and Michael Saylor as the ones he was actually willing to call out.2 Bechler’s habit of posting composite “shady bunch” images naming figures like Jameson Lopp and Stephan Livera fed the same framing.3

Saylor answers

A week later, Michael Saylor made the term literal: he announced a named security consortium — BlackRock, Fidelity, Anchorage Digital, Coinbase, Blockstream, Galaxy, Ark Invest, Cathie Wood — framed as defending Bitcoin against future quantum-computing threats.4 Palmer read the move as Saylor turning on his own creation: “he’s the the architect of of modern Plebslop and AI slop… it’s Frankenstein’s monster.”5 A prominent BIP-110 defector, Need Creations, pivoted a second time to go “ride or die” with Big Bitcoin, though his enthusiasm was already visibly cooling within days.6

Palmer also framed the pro-Big-Bitcoin backlash as a protest-vote dynamic — comparing it to the 2024 election of Donald Trump: people weren’t embracing Big Bitcoin because they loved it, but because the plebs’ own behavior had made it the only palatable alternative.7

Resolution

Big Bitcoin outlasted its opposition. BIP 110’s mandatory signaling period began, the pro-BIP-110 chain forked off — and mined exactly two blocks before the fork was declared dead.8 See storylines/core-vs-knots-war for the full arc.

Footnotes

  1. Bugle Weekly 118 @ 29:31. ↩

  2. Bugle Weekly 118 @ 31:45. “Bachelor’s” is ASR for “Bechler’s”. ↩

  3. Bugle Weekly 118 @ 32:12. “Stefan Barbera” is ASR for Stephan Livera. ↩

  4. Bugle Weekly 119 @ 26:59. Member list read at t=1668-1676. ↩

  5. Bugle Weekly 119 @ 31:53. ↩

  6. Bugle Weekly 119 @ 32:20. ASR renders him “Meet Creations”/“Need Creations”; resolved to characters/need-creations, the card-canon roster figure (raw/cards/roster.json#inf-31). ↩

  7. Bugle Weekly 119 @ 25:33. ↩

  8. Bugle Weekly 120 @ 1:59; failure declared at @ 38:48. ↩