BTCDecoded: BLLVM & CommonsBTCDecoded: BLLVM & Commons

On 1 November 2025, a brand new X account calling itself Bitcoin Commons (@BtcCommons) posted this:

The website associated with the account (https://thebitcoincommons.org/) says it is "A forkable governance model for Bitcoin implementations" and that it "Applying proven commons management principles to Bitcoin's development layer."

The website seems to be pretty fleshed out. There's a whitepaper and an extensive FAQ and an interactive fork comparison thingie. It looks well put together and like somebody put a lot of work into it. It also looks like an LLM generated it.

When I clicked on the documentation button, I got a 404. The whitepaper is full of statements like

Two innovations work together: BLVM provides the mathematical foundation and compiler-like architecture (Orange Paper as IR, formal verification passes); Commons provides the governance framework (coordination without civil war). The modular architecture is where both innovations meet. BLVM ensures correctness through architectural enforcement; Commons ensures coordination.

and

Commons positions as infrastructure for multiple implementations, not a Core replacement. Success measured by ecosystem health and implementation diversity (Level 2 success), not market share. BitMEX validated Type 3 software forks; Commons adds specification, governance, and economics. Success when others build on the foundation, measured by ecosystem adoption.

and it has lots of diagrams (almost 40!) that look like this:

and it was full of endless bullet pointed lists and hierarchies.

That's when I realized...it's a bunch of slopThat's when I realized...it's a bunch of slop

There was something familiar about this project that reminded me of some of the other recent projects I've seen being kicked around Bitcoin (most notably the recent fork proposals like BIP-110 and "The Cat").

When I visit the github for this "Bitcoin Commons" project, there seems to only be one contributor, going by the name of Secure Sovereign (@secsovereign). They said they launched the Commons project on Whitepaper Day, and had posted a number of teasers throughout the fall of 2025 (possibly inspired by a post from Eric Lombrozo in the summer).

This secsovereign account was familiar to me because I had recently seen it posting a lot about power concentration in Bitcoin development. I'm sympathetic to such things, but the more I read what this account produced, the less I had patience for: if you're going to rely on AI to produce complicated analysis, you should probably do a lot more double-checking before releasing sensational claims.

On 10 December, secsovereign posted:

And then the next day, a corrected sample size and the note:

If you are at all upset by the upcoming reports; please, if nothing else, give me some credit for preparing a complete Bitcoin reimplementation with an alternative codebase "commons" governance model before publishing data-backed arguments against Core, I am not arguing against Bitcoin (an asset to which I am completely allocated), nor am I arguing for/against Knots (or any sh!tcoins)..
I am simply exposing that the governance of Bitcoin is inconsistent with the values inherent in Bitcoin's technical consensus layer, something that has been long studied, but never solved.
The time is now. No more excuses.

The "upcoming reports" consisted of some fairly ill-conceived statistical analysis on the Bitcoin github repository which concluded:

By way of explaining his methodology, secsovereign wrote:

Economics (Principal-Agent Theory, Tournament Theory), Sociology (Homophily Networks, Institutional Isomorphism), Statistics (Gini coefficients, Survivorship Bias), Psychology (Toxicity Gradients), Law & Economics (Regulatory Arbitrage), Game Theory (Schelling Points), Political Science (Preference Falsification), Cognitive Science (Attention Economics), and Organizational Theory.

and finished off with this banger:

When 10+ independent frameworks from different disciplines all measure the same patterns, that's not interpretation - that's measurement.

Now, where have I heard that tone before...?

Throughout the weeks before Christmas, secsovereign got into debates with Heavily Armed Clown, Murch, and Lyn Alden -- all of whom tried to explain why secsovereign's analysis didn't make any sense.

Secsovereign did issue corrections on 14 December and 17 December, but largely maintained his original, sensational claims.

Secsovereign's sloppy friendsSecsovereign's sloppy friends

Secsovereign's X account was created in September 2024 and only posted stupid Bitcoin hype (memes starting in October 2024) with the same two likes and not much other engagement for months. In a 3 February 2025 interview on YouTube secsovereign says he bought bitcoin in 2010 but forgot about it until he went through a bad breakup and job loss and found a Western Digital hard drive in his shed in 2023 from which he recovered his bitcoin.

On New Year's Day 2025, secsovereign posted that his goals for the year include "Work on a non-custodial multi-sig wallet like @BitvaultApp. Now BitVault rings a slop bell.

Back in October, I saw this post on delving about something called B-SSL (#1260297). It was a "vault" proposal by a group out of El Salvador -- and it was stupid. They clearly used ChatGPT or some other LLM to generate the concept and had no real understanding of what they were proposing. Pretty shocking considering they call themselves "your fortress against physical attacks and hacks" and seem to charge people money to keep bitcoin safe for them.

When I visited BitVault's Team page, guess who I find listed as a project manager?

BitVault has a culture of slop production. I don't care about the use of LLMs really, but if you claim to be making "vaults" for people's bitcoin or re-implementing the Bitcoin protocol, you sure as hell better not be making the kind of stupid mistakes that show up in these projects.

Going back to secsovereign's Commons project, I noticed on the github page that it had five followers. When I clicked through to see who these people were, I also saw something familiar. The only five followers also happen to be the five people working on something called Bitcoin Echo (#1323178), which claims to be "A Faithful Implementation of the Bitcoin Protocol, Built for Permanence" and which is pretty clearly another LLM-generated website/whitepaper combo.

There sure do seem to be a lot of these.

The Strategy connectionThe Strategy connection

Mostly, I think this is a non-story. I certainly don't care if some guy wants to waste a bunch of time and tokens on trying to "fix" bitcoin. Perhaps it is a little unnerving when such endeavors attract the attention of the masses on X and you see such poorly-reasoned arguments getting traction there -- but this is the nature of dialog on the internet, is it not?

However, I noticed something a little odd in looking through the past tweets from secsovereign's Commons account on X: he retweeted a podcast episode with someone named Gil Roberts. The episode's title was "Beyond Core and Knots: Rethinking Bitcoin’s Future."

In the episode, Gil Roberts says a number of things that sound very similar to the points secsovereign makes. But then he says,

So we're here at the incubator -- not Strategy itself -- I want to make that clear -- I'm here at the hub which is where they have the startups incubating. They have a bunch of some of these bitcoin companies. one of those companies is Bitcoin Commons. Bitcoin Commons is going to share only about 15% of the codebase of Core and Knots.

Now, I remembered seeing something secsovereign posted about StrategyHub: in early October 2025, Kyle Knight posted on X that he was "one of the very first to use the new @Strategy podcast studio"

Secsovereign replied saying,

That's actually the StrategyHub podcast studio and I bought that equipment for everyone to use.
Strategy offered teh space helped with the soundproofing, I'm very grateful
But yes, the hub led that project, in particular and 5 other founding hub members.

Hopefully, the fact that they seem to be trying to make a company out of this Commons thing will make them put a little more effort in to it -- because at the moment, it mostly seems embarrassing. It also makes me question the quality of the startups at StrategyHub. I was kind of hoping for something more exciting than "I just heard about Bitcoin and I'm here to fix it."