The Bitcoin Historian Pete Rizzo has been chronicling Bitcoin longer than almost anyone.

Former editor at CoinDesk and Bitcoin Magazine (and more recently the Bitcoin anchor Blockworks), Pete seems to be close to the helm of *the* top crypto media publication at any given time.

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In this episode of Bitcoin Rails, Pete and I sit down to unpack the cultural rifts surfacing in Bitcoin — primarily around the use of Bitcoin for storing "arbitrary data," as is common for developing metaprotocols and Bitcoin Layer 2s.

We dive deep into the heart of this rift — and why the use of Bitcoin for data availability is so triggering to some, while others see its expanded use as THE technical feature pushing Bitcoin forward.

We also discuss the origins of Bitcoin maximalism, the unresolved pain of scaling debates, and the growing tension between economic incentives, protocol change, and the shifting power of Bitcoin Core developers.

Is another fork wars potentially on the table? Who ACTUALLY runs Bitcoin? Are just some of the questions we debate in this episode.

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This episode is powered by Best In Slot, the leading API for Ordinals and BRC20 data aggregation and indexing — as well as Citrea, a leading Bitcoin Rollup technology and contributor to the BitVM alliance.