Flat earth and fixing the real problem

Ty Everett recently made an earnest plea. He argued that when people in the BSV orbit spend their public time debating whether the earth is flat, it scares off capital and serious builders. In his view, frivolous chatter makes us look unserious. On one level, I agree. Drama and low‑signal debates repel serious people. If your first impression of “BSV Twitter” is a food fight about NASA footage, you are unlikely to think, “these are the folks I want to trust with my supply chain data.” 

But that is only part of the story.

We need to be honest about what this “community” really is. We are not a church. We are not a political party. We are not a monolithic ideology. The only thing that binds us together is a shared conviction that this particular implementation of Bitcoin (the original, unbounded protocol) is important and worth building on. That’s it. 

Everything beyond that is a collection of strong personalities bringing their own backgrounds, interests, and late‑night habits into the same chat rooms. If you feel like some of your colleagues sound like your weird uncle at Thanksgiving, that is because this is the Internet, and those people are here too.

But also…

There is a reason many in the BSV space are suspicious of mainstream narratives. For years, we have watched a very real, coordinated effort to hijack Bitcoin, rewrite its history, suppress alternatives, and funnel the brand into a neutered, speculative sideshow. Exchanges delist the one chain that still scales. Media outlets repeat the same talking points. Companies that never existed when Satoshi was posting on forums now claim to be the guardians of “Bitcoin values.” If you have lived through that, of course, you are going to be skeptical when you hear the government, the press, or a Fortune 500 company say “trust us.” 

Skepticism is healthy; the question is where we aim it and what we do with it.

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Some real history

History already gives us enough real conspiracies to keep any honest person awake. We do not need to invent new ones on X. The United States went to war in Vietnam after officials misrepresented attacks on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin; declassified documents later showed that the supposed second attack on August 4 never happened.

For decades, companies like DuPont knew that a chemical used in their Teflon plant was contaminating water; secret tests conducted in 1984 found the toxin in tap water, yet they did not warn the community or regulators.

Between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service followed hundreds of Black men in Macon County, Alabama, who had syphilis; doctors told the men they were receiving treatment while withholding effective care even after penicillin became available. When a whistleblower leaked the story in 1972, it became a national scandal: at least 28 participants died of syphilis, dozens more from related complications, and the disease spread to family members.

During the Cold War, the CIA ran MK‑ULTRA, a mind‑control program that dosed unsuspecting people with LSD and other drugs; it was illegal, used hypnosis and electroshock, and the agency destroyed most records in 1973 to avoid public outrage.

Even the relationship between the CIA and the media has been murky. In 1977, journalist Carl Bernstein reported that hundreds of American journalists had secretly carried out assignments for the agency; his investigation noted that the CIA used reporters to gather information and, on occasion, to plant misinformation.

Many of these stories were dismissed as wild speculation until documentation proved them true. Today, we are much more aware that people in power sometimes lie, that information can be suppressed for decades, and entire populations can suffer because data was kept in the dark.

Arguing about whether Antarctica hides the edge of the world is less useful than confronting the lies we can actually prove. The question is not whether you suspect corruption; the question is what you do with that suspicion.

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A solution!

This is where BSV becomes more than a hobby or a bet. Bitcoin is a global, append‑only ledger. You write data; miners order it; nodes keep it; anyone can verify it. Nobody can quietly edit a block ten years later because a general or a CEO got nervous. If we care about truth, our task is not to police beliefs about satellites. Our task is to build systems that make real conspiracies harder to pull off.

Imagine a whistleblower at a chemical plant who can commit sensor logs and emails to the blockchain so the company cannot bury them. Imagine environmental contamination data automatically anchored to the chain so readings cannot be altered by lawyers. Imagine military casualty reports and rules of engagement recorded immutably; you can file a Freedom of Information Act request, but you don’t have to trust a filing cabinet.

Imagine public records (land titles, zoning decisions, campaign finance donations) written in a structured way that cannot be deleted when a new administration takes power. With tools like BitcoinSchema for structured data and Metanet Desktop for publishing, we have the plumbing to build a depoliticized data layer. Developers can create overlay indexes that let applications focus on the information they care about without forcing every node to compute token logic. This model doesn’t require co‑signing every transaction through a central API; it keeps the chain neutral and moves compliance to the edges, where issuers or regulators can apply it.

In that world, lying becomes more expensive, and the incentive to tell the truth goes up.

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This is a lot less sexy than arguing about flat earth in a group chat.

It is also more useful.

Conspiracies thrive in darkness. The way to fight them is not to yell at each other on social media; it is to build infrastructure that makes secrecy harder. Every time you publish schema definitions for a data type, every time you build a client that writes to chain, and every time you create a simple indexer that any citizen journalist can use, you are chipping away at the environments that allowed PFAS to poison families and syphilis to go untreated.

You are giving future historians and jurors an audit trail that cannot be altered by the next tyrant.

Does that mean we have to ban silly conversations? No. People need to blow off steam. Someone will always bring up aliens. Someone will always insist that we never landed on the moon. There is room for jokes and serious research. There is room for speculation and hypotheses. We are human. But those conversations should be background noise. They should not define us or dictate our public face. They certainly should not be the first thing a potential partner sees.

So here is a friendly challenge. The next time you feel like diving into a flat‑earth rabbit hole, ask yourself: could you spend that hour writing a schema, submitting a patch to a wallet library, or helping a city clerk record water tests to chain? Could you build a portal for whistleblowers or a tool to anchor court documents? Could you publish war records or environmental data in a way that cannot be disappeared? When you do that, you are not just arguing about corruption; you are making it harder. You are turning skepticism into infrastructure.

Ty is right about one thing: pointless public squabbles scare away serious people. But the solution is not to police each other’s thoughts. It is to show, through our actions, that we are serious about building. Let the outside world see a community shipping software, recording data, partnering with municipalities, and defending transparency. Let them see that we have fun, but we also do the adult work of shining light into dark places. When they do, the capital will come not because we finally silenced the weird uncle at Thanksgiving, but because we demonstrated that we are the group that makes lying expensive and truth durable.

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Watch | Texas BSV Hackathon: Ty Everett on Building an Open-Source Ecosystem