Blockstream’s Adam Back defends BlackRock ad that questioned Bitcoin’s 21M cap

Blockstream CEO and Hashcash inventor Adam Back has come to the defense of BlackRock after the company’s recent Bitcoin ad triggered an outrage across the crypto community. It featured a small but explosive disclaimer: “There is no guarantee that Bitcoin’s 21 million supply cap will not be changed.”

For Bitcoiners, the Bitcoin ad was a shot at the heart of what the asset stands for. Back, though, has downplayed the controversy. He explained that the disclaimer was a legal protection inserted by BlackRock’s lawyers, not a statement of intent.

“Obviously, their lawyers made them write that as they sell investment products and don’t have control,” Back said. But for a community allergic to corporate meddling, his words did little to extinguish the fire.

Bitcoiners can’t trust BlackRock

There have already been concerns of forceful centralization by what is largely believed to be the most powerful company on the planet. X users speculated that BlackRock might be preparing to influence the Bitcoin protocol. One even called the ad “very spooky.”

The ad’s timing only added to the suspicion. BlackRock manages over 524,000 Bitcoin worth $53 billion through its exchange-traded fund (ETF), making it the largest institutional player in the market. For Bitcoin’s true believers, such concentrated influence is unnerving.

Critics outside the Bitcoin bubble joined in. Longtime Bitcoin antagonist Peter Schiff wasted no time tearing into the ad, calling it packed with falsehoods and labeling Wall Street’s embrace of Bitcoin as disingenuous. And though his words may not carry weight with Bitcoiners, they amplified the outrage surrounding the ad.

Bitcoin’s 21 million supply cap is the bedrock of its value proposition. It’s what sets it apart from inflation-prone fiat currencies. The cap is hard-coded into Bitcoin’s design, making it impossible to change without consensus. Even so, the mere suggestion of altering it has always been a taboo topic.

Old battles with new players

The ad is dragging people back to the Blocksize War, that hostile beef in the Bitcoin community from 2015 to 2017. The whole argument was about whether Bitcoin’s block size should be increased to make transactions faster and cheaper.

On one side were the “big blockers,” who pushed for larger block sizes to scale Bitcoin as a payment system. On the other were the “small blockers,” who argued that increasing the block size would centralize the network by making it harder for individuals to run nodes.

The conflict reached a boiling point with the New York Agreement in 2017 proposal, which wanted to implement Segregated Witness (SegWit) while also doubling the block size.

Some folks saw it as an attempt by corporations to hijack Bitcoin, and a grassroots movement known as the User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF) forced SegWit activation without miner approval. The fallout though led to the creation of Bitcoin Cash, a hard fork that adopted larger block sizes. Its effects are still felt to this day.

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