@excellion shared this piece of speculative fiction on x which I've copied below.

It is possible that it is AI prompted, but I liked it anyway. It does have the tone of something he would say. I like the approach to meming via fiction. More please.

It's been three years since BIP110 activated. The suitcoiners, corrupt devs, and Blockstream call it Bipcoin, or Bcashjr, and they laugh. But we know the truth. It's the real Bitcoin.

There were 159 of us at activation. Now there are 83.

Nobody planned that number. It just happened, one excommunication at a time, one defection at a time, until someone counted the survivors and went quiet. Eighty-three. The same as the byte limit. We don't talk about it. We tell ourselves it's a coincidence, the way you tell yourself a lot of things while you wait for a block that will not come.

As I sit here writing this, I am scared, because I committed a grave offense against the network.

It wasn't even my fault, not really. I was using the new mobile wallet Dathon vibe coded, the one he shipped after asking an AI to "make it clean and monetary, no spam." Somewhere in that hallucinated spaghetti, the thing allowed an OP_RETURN of eighty-four bytes. One byte over. One byte past the sacred limit, the exact byte that separates a man of sound money from a data-abusing degenerate. I didn't type it. The wallet did. It just emitted the extra byte, cheerfully, the way vibe-coded software does the single worst possible thing with total confidence.

I messaged Dathon the moment I saw it. I explained that his own wallet had betrayed the one rule the entire chain exists to enforce. He read it. He replied, "user error." Then he blocked me.

I'm scared, and have had a long time to be, because I am now thirty-three hours into waiting for the block that confirms it. We command about half a percent of the hashrate, and it's all rented, mercenary machines that have no idea they're defending sound money and would just as happily mine a dog coin. When the rental budget runs dry, the chain stops until someone Venmos more. Salvation, meanwhile, is a difficulty adjustment two thousand blocks away, which at this rate lands sometime in the next decade.

The Great Maintainer has seen my tainted transaction. He runs the 21 all-seeing nodes that know all, and mine has lingered for thirty-three hours like a monkey-jpeg Ordinal. He hasn't said anything. That's the worst part. He just added me to a list. I don't know which list. There are many lists now. There used to be 159 of us and now there are 83, and I have started to suspect the lists and the number are related.

And the rumors are swirling. Kratter is recording a new episode. It's two hours long. The working title, I'm told, is my transaction ID. He won't say my name. He'll say it in his tone. He'll hold up my txid to the camera the way a priest holds up something he found under a floorboard, and the faithful will nod, and it will be done. Excommunication by podcast. The only due process left on the real Bitcoin.

My friend Arthur was number 104. His crime: he used nLockTime. An actual Bitcoin feature, older than most of the congregation, right there in the protocol since the beginning. But someone decided that timelocking a payment wasn't a monetary use case, it was "deferring value like a coward," which is fiat thinking, and the poll agreed. The poll had 110 votes, which, we later realized, was more people than we had left. Arthur defected to the captured chain, where the same ten-minute blocks actually arrive, and no one questions the motives behind his transactions. We don't speak of Arthur. We say his name only to warn the children.

Thirty-four hours now.

Someone messages me: "still not confirmed? sounds like a you problem, spammer."

I type back, "it was the wallet. Dathon's wallet."

"You know the rules. Don't play innocent, you pervert."

I put the phone down. Somewhere the captured chain hums along, 400 million people drowning in filth and convenience, their blocks landing every ten minutes like they're entitled to it. And here I sit, pure, principled, one of the 83, holding the real Bitcoin, undone by eighty-four bytes I did not type, waiting on hashpower we rented by the hour.

Thirty-four hours. Still no block. Still waiting for my judgement.

I have to go now. Mechanic is at my house and trying to look in my windows.