You can read on the front page of Bitcoin’s whitepaper from 2008 that Bitcoin was intended as a very efficient means of payment that worked peer-to-peer, i.e. without an intermediary between the payer and the payee.
Bitcoin could thus become a serious competitor to, among others. Mastercard, VISA, central banks’ physical cash and partly retail banks’ payment functions.
The pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, was very clear about the goal of scaling to a widespread use of Bitcoin. He made several comparisons with the volume of VISA transactions.
Peer-to-peer electronic cash, like physical cash, does not need a financial institution between payer and payee. That empowers the user and businesses.
In addition, a general adoption will mean financial inclusion, because it is much easier to set up a digital wallet than when you need to open a bank account and have a payment card issued.
Bitcoin threatened the payment cards on their business
The Bitcoin invention does not require extensive and expensive “Know Your Customer” checks. If it is required from outside by politicians and authorities, it does not have to be a requirement for smaller transactions, just as it is not a requirement when using a small amount of physical cash.
Cheap transactions with money that works across the globe will also lead to easier and cheaper trade across the globe. Improved efficiency will make all people more prosperous and free.
Today, Bitcoin (BTC) is primarily known for being a speculative asset. It is expensive to use as a means of payment and BTC lacks the ability to scale for extensive peer-to-peer use, which makes BTC unsuited as a commonly used means of payment.
Globally, BTC can’t even handle 10 transactions per second, and every time usage approaches that level, transaction costs explode to over an insane $10 USD per transaction.
Why did the transformation of Bitcoin away from being a highly efficient and scalable peer-to-peer payment method happen?
At least Mastercard and Bilderberg Group partially secretly participated in what was effectively the sabotaging of Bitcoin, so that Bitcoin (BTC) can no longer function as a very efficient peer-to-peer means of payment.
The conflicts of interest of the two organisations are quite extensive. If you buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin, and Mastercard is not used for the transaction Mastercard will lose revenue.
The top of the Bilderberg Group, for its part, is notorious for wanting more top-down management and control. Their ultimate goal is likely a world government.
But of course, the Bilderberg Group does not say so in public. They know very well that a world government, mass surveillance and the like are not popular among ordinary citizens.
Many ordinary citizens have realized that the historical experience of massive control and top-down management has been terrible for ordinary people.
How has the transformation of Bitcoin happened in practice?
The enemies of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin invention in the form of Mastercard and Bilderberg Group have found an Achilles heel that they have exploited.
The Bitcoin invention is top-down in the sense that one set of rules applies to the whole system. These rules define exactly what requirements are set for a new block in order for it to be added to the blockchain.
The ruleset is found in the dominant node software. What the enemies of the Bitcoin invention have therefore done is that they have infiltrated the developer group which maintains the dominant node software.
It began after inventor Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared from the public eye in early 2011. At the time, Satoshi Nakamoto handed over control of the bitcoin node software to an American developer, Gavin Andresen.
Gavin Andresen was removed
The takeover was fully completed in 2016, when the new infiltrating developers removed Gavin Andresen’s rights to change the code.
Since people who infiltrate/sabotage a project can’t say it openly, they’ve developed a lot of excuses that are designed to sound good to freedom-loving people.
For example, they say that their roadmap is good for decentralization. To ensure that not many people understand what happens, the enemies of the bitcoin invention have also orchestrated an extensive takeover of news media in the bitcoin environment.
The online news media has convinced many freedom-loving people to believe that the new direction of Bitcoin (BTC) is good for freedom. At the same time, social media in the Bitcoin community has been heavily censored, so that only the saboteurs’ desired narratives could be disseminated.
The saboteurs/developers of the node software have organized themselves in the company Blockstream.
Blockstream
It looks so innocent until you find out who is in/behind at least these organizations:
Among the investors in Blockstream is AXA, which at the time was led by the then chairman of the Bilderberg Group Steering Committee, Henri de Castries. AXA has injected a minimum of $55 million USD into Blockstream.
Another investor in Blockstream is Digital Currency Group, which was started with financing from Mastercard. Digital Currency Group has invested in a lot of organizations which have influenced the direction Bitcoin has taken. Among other things, the media.
The 1 MB blocksize limit that became a scaling block
Technically, the sabotage of the usability of the bitcoin invention via the node software has taken place in several ways.
The dominant one has been to maintain a size cap on each block of 1 MB. The 1 MB blocksize limit was a temporary ceiling that Satoshi Nakamoto put into the code. He explained in the autumn of 2010 with pseudocode how to lift the blocksize limit well before it became constricting.
Satoshi’s pseudocode example showed that the 1 MB ceiling could have been lifted at block 115,000. That block was mined in March 2011. Since a block contains all of users’ new transactions, a blocksize limit is similar to a capacity limit.
The 1MB blocksize limit has effectively been an increasingly restrictive capacity constraint for Bitcoin (BTC).
When there is a space constraint that prevents all new transactions from coming into one block, miners choose to include only the transactions that pay the miners best.
It pushes users to outbid each other to get the user’s own transaction in a block. It’s that logic which sometimes lifts BTC’s transaction costs to over $10 USD.
Bitcoin Satoshi Vision
Although the above seems discouraging, there exists a blockchain today, Bitcoin Satoshi Vision aka BSV, which sticks to the original vision of Bitcoin, and respects all transactions from the launch of Bitcoin in 2009 until it split off from BTC in 2017.
The BSV blockchain can actually act as an efficient, politically neutral, scalable peer-to-peer money we can alternatively utilize. A typical BSV transaction costs around $ 0.000007 USD, and a new BSV node software, Teranode, has proof-of-concept tested over 1 million transactions per second in May 2024. That is way more than all the world’s card payment systems handle combined. The philosophy in BSV is to keep the foundational protocol stable. That model removes power from the centre, and it is that same model which has worked well for the internet. TCP/IP rules don’t change. Innovation happens on top of that stable foundation.
In most media, the BSV blockchain is either ignored or talked down about. You decide for yourself whether you want to try to let your use of blockchain be controlled by the functionality of the products or by propaganda.
This article is a slightly modified version of an article originally published in Danish on https://kontrast.dk/sektioner/artikel/artikel/saadan-har-mastercard-og-bilderberg-group-saboteret-bitcoin-btc