The San Diego Comic-Con kicks off tomorrow, and DC Studios and Warner Brothers are setting the stage by dropping the first full trailer for Clayface, part of the DC Universe's "Gods and Monsters" arc.
The film started out as a Mike Flanagan project (he's the horror master who brought us The Haunting of Hill House, The Fall of the House of Usher, Midnight Mass, and Doctor Sleep, among other creepy delights). Flanagan said he was inspired by the 1992 "Feat of Clay" episode in Batman: The Animated Series, aspiring to create a film that combined body horror with a tragic thriller. DC Studios CEOs James Gunn and Peter Safran loved Flanagan's pitch and brought the movie into their rebooted DCU.
Alas, Flanagan had to bow out of the project due to scheduling conflicts—he's a busy man these days—and James Watkins stepped in as director. But Gunn has said the final script retained Flanagan's original story, with Hossein Amini doing some rewrites. The film will feature the origin story of the Matt Hagen incarnation of Clayface, introduced to the DCU in the animated Creature Commandos series (Alan Tudyk voiced the character). Per the official premise:
The Odyssey might be cleaning up at the box office at the moment, but in two weeks another mega-blockbuster hits theaters: Spider-Man: Brand New Day, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings). Sony Pictures dropped one last trailer for this follow-up to 2021’s No Way Home, which is purportedly intended to launch a fresh trilogy of films with Tom Holland in the title role.
No Way Homeended on a pretty bleak note, with Peter Parker (Holland) asking Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to erase him from everyone’s memory to protect the multiverse, including his girlfriend MJ (Zendaya). Per the official synopsis:
It’s a Brand New Day for Peter Parker. Fighting crime full-time as Spider-Man in a world that doesn’t remember him—and the pressure of seeing his old friends move on without him—sparks a change in Peter he may not have the power to control. But that transformation might also be the only thing that can stop a shocking new threat to the city and those he loves–a powerful villain no one can even see. The world may have forgotten Peter Parker, but he hasn’t forgotten them.
Holland is reprising his role as Peter Parker/Spider-Man, along with Zendaya as MJ and Jacob Batalon as Peter’s former bestie Ned Leeds. The film also features Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle/Punisher, Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/Hulk, Michael Mando as Mac Gargan/Scorpion (captured by Spider-Man in Homecoming), Marvin Jones III as albino crime lord Lonnie Lincoln/Tombstone, Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock/Daredevil (briefly Peter’s lawyer in No Way Home); Liza Colon-Zayas as detective Jean DeWolf; Eman Esfandi as MJ's new boyfriend; and Trammell Tillman as Bill Metzger of the Department of Damage Control (DODC) who is policing superpowered individuals.
You might have heard about BIP-110; here’s why this fork is not just bad for Bitcoin, but it is built on a misunderstanding of what a Bitcoin node is and what it is good for. As well as why, because of this misunderstanding, BIP-110 will fail.
This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
BIP-110 is a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal titled as a Reduced Data Temporary Softfork. The BIP proposes a consensus change to Bitcoin, which attempts to limit the types and amounts of arbitrary data that can be added to consensus-valid transactions by limiting a wide range of Bitcoin’s scripting capabilities. BIP-110 is led by a pseudonymous developer known as Dathon Ohm and is widely supported by the Knots community, an alternative implementation of Bitcoin led by one of Bitcoin Core’s earliest contributors, Luke Dashjr and its supporters.
The BIP-110 consensus change is headed towards a mandatory signaling period in the coming weeks and thus a potential fork with the main consensus rules as implemented in Bitcoin Core. The proposal needs to gain a great deal of support from miners within the coming weeks to change Bitcoin consensus. As of the time of writing, miner signaling for BIP-110 stands at less than one percent.
The Knots community, widely made up of Bitcoiners running nodes on machines like Start9 and Umbrel, has rallied around Knots in protest of a series of development decisions made by Bitcoin Core, the primary open source development community and reference implementation of Bitcoin. While a majority of senior Bitcoin developers are either opposed or apathetic to the changes proposed by BIP-110, the movement has gained enough steam to become an ongoing topic of discussion on social media.
Supporters of BIP-110 believe that by running Bitcoin full nodes that signal for the consensus change, they alone can change Bitcoin. Here are the main concepts being debated, the biggest misconceptions about Bitcoin consensus, what a Bitcoin node is, and why BIP-110 is almost certain to fail.
The Power and Limits of a Bitcoin Node
Many of the disagreements and misconceptions in this recent cultural conflict within Bitcoin revolve around the idea of a Bitcoin full node. Influencers like Knut Svanholm, author and podcaster, have elevated the role of the full node to heights perhaps too close to the sun.
Knut recently tweeted: “Every person on Earth is a node in the Bitcoin network. Most to a minuscule extent, of course, but every node is first and foremost a person, not a machine. Which tools we use to interact with the network (and, by extension, to which extent they influence the network) is entirely dependent on the choices we make.”
Statements of this sort are poetically beautiful, philosophically grand, romantic even, but nevertheless technically incoherent and fundamentally meaningless. Knut’s tweet attempts to redefine what a ‘Bitcoin node’ means and fails at it, instead diluting the value of the term entirely. He might as well have said that every atom in the universe is a Bitcoin node, since apparently to him the term is all-encompassing.
Knut, though well-intentioned, is wrong. A Bitcoin node is something very specific. It is a full copy of all of Bitcoin’s transaction history, block headers and transaction-related data. Its purpose is very specific: to let users verify the integrity of Bitcoin’s supply and transaction history in relation to Bitcoin’s consensus rules.
Bitcoin nodes grant users a variety of benefits, such as privacy. Third-party wallet providers query their copy of the Bitcoin blockchain for the user’s balance and serve it back to the user via the wallet app. Most mobile wallets function this way, with users asking a third-party server for their balances. Some, very few, can connect to a user-run Bitcoin node, in which case the user’s public addresses and balances are not shared with any third-party wallet company.
Another benefit Bitcoin nodes grant users is the ability to check whether they are in consensus with the rest of the network, staying in sync. If the user mines Bitcoin or contributes any significant amount of hashing power to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work network, the node also provides the opportunity to assemble a block, choosing which transactions go into it. This is only possible if the user manages to mine a Bitcoin block, which is quite an achievement today, given the difficulty and steep competition.
Even new kinds of mining pools like Ocean, which attempt to decentralize block template production, letting retail miners have more influence over which transactions enter the chain, still need enough hashing power to win the proof-of-work race, resulting in sporadic blocks being mined and thus limited influence over the blockchain.
Bitcoin nodes also relay transactions across the network, with tens of thousands of them communicating via a flood network; this results in a censorship-resistant system where a small number of nodes can get controversial transactions to miners, bypassing any kind of filters, as demonstrated by Peter Todd’s relay libre. Thus, Bitcoin nodes can not easily filter which transactions enter the blockchain.
Even a large majority of Bitcoin nodes alone cannot alone change Bitcoin consensus. Not without having a large amount of economic activity entering the Bitcoin network through them, as exchanges do on behalf of millions of users. Not without having the protocol and application developer community behind them. Not without having the investor community behind them. Bitcoin is not a node democracy, contrary to popular memes today.
Bitcoin nodes do not grant you ‘citizenship’ in the ‘Bitcoin nation’. Satoshi Nakamoto was quite clear about this in the Bitcoin white paper. Bitcoin’s ultimate security and governance structure is: one CPU cycle, one vote, not one node, one vote. And miners, who run the CPU cycles over Bitcoin’s proof-of-work, are very sensitive to investor sentiment and the broader developer community, resulting in a distributed global protocol for money that is very difficult to change.
Bitcoin nodes ultimately let you know if you are connected to the network with the most accumulated proof-of-work and that its consensus rules are being followed, but a node alone does not let you change the consensus rules. Users who change the consensus rules of their Bitcoin node are, by definition, no longer running Bitcoin. As a result, changing Bitcoin consensus as a node runner is very difficult, and that’s a feature, not a bug. Bitcoin is money for enemies.
History and Bitcoin Consensus Games
Deep work has been done, trying to understand Bitcoin consensus, its various pillars and interest groups. Ren Crypto Fish, Steve Lee and Lyn Alden identified six of them in BCAP, an open-source effort to analyze Bitcoin consensus and risks in protocol upgrades. BCAP identified stakeholders such as Economic Nodes, Investors, Media Influencers, Miners and Protocol Developers, and Users and Application Developers
Historically, in the case of a consensus crisis, it is true that Bitcoin nodes have been used to signal support for one version of Bitcoin over another. Fork events like 2017’s Bitcoin Cash fork are often cited as examples of economic nodes winning against opposition by miners. 2017’s legendary User Activated Soft Fork (UASF) faced major opposition in theory; a large majority of mining pools and their corresponding collective hashrate supported the Segwit2x version of Bitcoin, with many exchanges and corporations having signed the infamous New York Agreement in support of it.
The Bitcoin node-supported soft fork against it won nonetheless, bluffing the Segwit2x version from a contested blockchain altogether. But that’s the thing: while the Bitcoin nodes technically won, they did so by having massive support from protocol developers, investors and media influencers: these nodes really had economic weight and rough consensus. BIP-110, on the other hand, does not have the protocol developers, nor does it have enough investors behind it. Michael Saylor has come out against it, with many industry leaders also openly opposing it or staying out of the matter entirely.
In fact, during the Bitcoin Cash fork, the limits of retail Bitcoin nodes were clearly understood. A Bitcoin node run by an exchange is orders of magnitude more influential than that of a retail user, as it introduces large amounts of new transactions into the Bitcoin network. The Bitcoin node of a major mining pool is far more influential than that of a hobbyist solo miner, as it more often assembles blocks and chooses which transactions settle to the blockchain.
Most Bitcoiners outside of exchanges use mobile wallets to access their Bitcoin. Such users and investors can ‘vote’ with their money, so to speak, by moving their bitcoins and economic activity elsewhere, be it to a wallet that supports their vision of Bitcoin, or their own full node. But while users remain on mobile wallets that talk to third-party nodes, those users have little individual influence over Bitcoin consensus. And the vast majority of mobile wallets are using a Bitcoin core-compatible back end.
The same goes for exchanges; their users effectively delegate consensus decisions to the exchange operators. In some cases, exchanges have put consensus issues to a user vote, weighed by their total holdings, returning that decision to end users weighed by capital; we may see this happen again with BIP-110.
Votes of the sort have started happening with Foundry today. One of the biggest Bitcoin mining pools in the world, Foundry, recently emailed its miners informing them that they can vote on the proposal with their hashrate. A high enough support could result in Foundry signaling for BIP-110, though that remains unlikely. Users who do not vote will effectively signal against BIP-110, defending the status quo. Thus apathy about the topic of BIP-110 would be a win for Bitcoin Core by default. BIP-110 supporters need to culturally win over a majority of the Foundry hash rate, who then must act to vote against the Bitcoin Core developer consensus, the most popular Bitcoin implementation and best supported codebase.
BIP-110 has so far failed to gain consensus across major interest groups within Bitcoin; neither developers, investors, miners, nor large economic nodes support the consensus change. The result is likely to be a chain split in the coming weeks, which could have significant consequences for lightning wallets running on BIP-110-compliant nodes, ultimately resulting in a new, yet small blockchain that would probably have to change the proof-of-work used to stay alive.
When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, it spewed molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, killing thousands of people. It's one of the most famous natural disasters in human history, so naturally there have been countless documentaries about Pompeii (and at least one popular song). But only one features actor Tom Hiddleston taking on the role of a "time detective" to bring the people of Pompeii to vivid life. That would be National Geographic's new three-part docuseries, Pompeii: Out of Time.
The Marvel connection made Out of Time happen. Executive producer Kevin Wright was also a producer on the Disney+ series Loki, which included a scene where Hiddleston's Loki travels through time to visit Pompeii. Hiddleston also studied classics at Cambridge University and had visited the Pompeii archaeological site as a teenager, which the Marvel star attributes to indirectly influencing his career path into acting.
"There is just a passion to the way Tom tells stories that's infectious," Wright told Ars. "We knew that if we could capture that and put it into [the series], it might interest people who wouldn't normally want to watch a documentary about Pompeii. "
When we formed the global steering committee for our KnowBe4 Student Edition, our primary goal was to simply listen. That listening paid off during a pivotal conversation with a private research university in Florida.
Once a quirky bastion of amateur vulva jewelry and pet portraits, Etsy is now deluged with mass-produced goods and AI knockoffs. Some customers don’t seem to mind.
With San Diego Comic-Con kicking off later this week, Marvel Studios has released the first official full trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, the penultimate film in the MCU's Phase Six and the end of the so-called "Multiverse Saga."
(Spoilers for prior relevant MCU films below.)
Marvel Studios originally planned to build its Phase Six Avengers arc (The Kang Dynasty) around Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror (and associated variants), introduced in Loki and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. But then Majors was convicted of domestic violence, and Marvel fired the actor soon after. That meant the studio needed to retool its Phase Six plans, culminating in the announced return of the Russo brothers, who directed four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s most successful films, which brought in more than $6 billion at the global box office.
This wonderfully dated online museum preserves dial-up modems, floppy drives, Windows startup chimes, and other sounds that quietly disappeared as our gadgets became smoother, faster, and much less talkative.
Organizers want the show to be the most-viewed halftime show in history. Having Shakira, Justin Bieber, Coldplay, and BTS will surely help—but do soccer fans want it?
Maggie Hollinbeck and James Wagar are leading the charge on Month Offline Seattle, a move to get people off their smartphones.
Seattle helped create the modern smartphone era. Now, nearly 40 people in the heart of one of the world’s biggest technology hubs are voluntarily putting theirs away.
The inaugural Month Offline Seattle cohort challenges participants to swap their smartphones for flip phones — or other “dumb phones” — for 35 days, gathering weekly for what organizers describe as part happy hour, part support group.
What started as a niche experiment in Washington, D.C. and Brooklyn has found an enthusiastic audience in Seattle, where organizers expected 10 to 20 participants but have already attracted the largest cohort outside those two cities.
Weekly programs are scheduled during the month-long detox from July 28 to Sept. 1, with activities on Tuesday evenings like bocce ball, bowling and mini golf slated to connect people in real time. There are also themed programs during the week, starting in week one with orientation and goal setting, and followed by topics such as “communication and relationships,” and “attention and boredom.” You can register here.
For a region like Seattle that’s home to Microsoft, Amazon, T-Mobile and a booming AI industry, the idea might sound almost rebellious. But organizers say the goal isn’t to reject technology — it’s to rethink how much of our lives should revolve around our smartphones.
James Wagar, a former investment banker and self-described techno-optimist who has carried a flip phone alongside his smartphone for years, teamed up with therapist and coach Maggie Hollinbeck, who describes herself as a techno-skeptic, to get the Seattle cohort launched. Together, they’re leading the gatherings, serving as the guides to those ready to take a break from their always-connected lifestyles.
“We (finally) seem to be at the beginning of a cultural moment with more people seriously evaluating their relationships with technology,” Wagar tells GeekWire. “Those using flip phones and simpler devices may be the canaries in the coal mine. While I remain a techno-optimist, the attention economy is not sustainable.”
Pick your favorite flip phone and disengage next month with Month Offline Seattle. Photos via James Wagar and Maggie Hollinbeck
Hollinbeck said she remembers when smartphones felt like a convenience — a way to replace multiple devices with one. But over time, she felt that same “rectangle of glass” had become harder to put down, prompting her to rethink her relationship with technology. She’s already ditched her Facebook and Instagram accounts, and was ready for the next step.
“I’m here to reclaim my time and attention, and I’m doing it in this way because I’ve found that it’s actually pretty hard to disentangle myself from this pocket-sized dementor,” said Hollinbeck. “It’s gonna take a village, so we’re building one.”
The concept has been spreading nationally through the Month Offline movement, but Seattle’s response has surprised the organizers. Most participants found the group not through social media, but through flyers, word of mouth, and conversations at neighborhood pubs during the FIFA World Cup.
Cohort members can use their own flip phone or purchase one at a discounted price of $10, and a commitment to subscribe for four months of discounted wireless service from dumb.co. That’s a total commitment of $42.
Denver, Austin, Los Angeles and Philadelphia also are jumping on the “Month Offline” bandwagon — which is kind of best described as a dry January for the tech obsessed. The organization says it is united by a common mission — “our commitment to attention liberation.”
Wagar and Hollinbeck are also encouraging a GeekWire reporter to join the movement.
So far, no takers.
Note: I actually tried a digital detox for one day back in 2013. Not sure I am ready for 35 days, 13 years later.
For all the hysteria over “woke” casting and ahistorical choices, Christopher Nolan’s epic is on track to make $200 million globally during its opening weekend.
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