Mysterious Australian Man Breaks Bitcoin’s SegWit

On the morning of April 1st 2020, hundreds of thousands of bitcoiners have discovered that their full nodes no longer validate blocks larger than 1 MB. Instead, they woke up to a message which reads “The 2 weeks have passed, I broke SegWit. Welcome to computer science”.

Next to this cryptic message, bitcoiners saw an Australian flag emoji and a signed hash of the genesis block.

As it turns out, the message has been sent from the hypothetical moon of Mercury, where time passes a lot slower due to the deep gravity.

Bitcoiners react to SegWit getting broken

“At least now we get to have holy 333kb blocks that prevent the propagation of pornography. Masturbation is a grave sin, arguably even worse than murder”, said Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr.

“SegWit transactions were unfairly cheap anyway. My big block version of Bitcoin will be able to survive the upcoming halving now!”, tweeted early Bitcoin adopter Roger Ver to show everybody the light.

“Greg Maxwell initially came up with the idea of Segregated Witness, and Luke Dashjr came up with the way to implement it as a soft fork”, wrote an embarrassed Pieter Wuille in a useless attempt to blame his peers.

“SegWit introduces legal risks. Anyone can spend SegWit outputs”, observed an overly concerned Jameson Lopp, who previously set up SegWit for both BitGo and Casa.

If his advocacy for SegWit turns out to have financial repercussions on the customers, then the cypherpunk should expect a series of costly lawsuits.

A first instance of theft has also been reported by Bryce Weiner, as he pointed out that Andrew Desantis has stolen bitcoins from a SegWit address.

Popular website 99bitcoins has also posted a final obituary for BTC, which originates from the highly competent financial publication Wall Street Daily. In their article “The Exact Data of Bitcoin’s Crash to 0“, Jordan Tuwiner boldly boasts “I told you so”.

Coindesk is first to report the news

As always, the ever-ethical, non-sensationalistic, and Bitcoin-supportive news website Coindesk was first to break the news. Since all the staff writers know how to operate a full node and regularly check the mempool for anomalies, they quickly realized that blocks larger than 1 MB are getting rejected.

Correspondingly, within 10 minutes they published an impeccable article which has no technical or grammar mistakes. They constantly updated the news according to the opinions of more knowledgeable developers and only picked the final title “AHAHA, SegWit FUD Was Right, XRP The Standard” after numerous consultations with experts in the field. As can be observed, they avoided buzz words or subjective opinions in their title, and also did their best to portray Bitcoin in a positive light.

Minutes later, The Block has published the exact same article, but worded differently. It would get referenced here, but we couldn’t get past the $2500/year paywall.

Within hours, every other “crypto” news website has posted an algorithmic rewriting of their Coindesk source material, but with worse grammar and no source citation. EthereumWorldNews definitely stood out with their original title “Ahahahah suckers, we told you so, BTC DED, ETH FTW”.

Bitcoin Magazine refused to cover the news, as they stubbornly want to be the “last word” on the event and will not write anything until everybody else stops. Since this article is among the last ones to be written on the topic, it will automatically get updated every hour with new gifs.

Just in: The mysterious Australian hacker reveals himself