Shitrea Scammers Launch Shipcoin

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]This is Matthew Crowder's Bitcoin University. Today I want to talk about Citria scammers launching a shipcoin.

[00:00:07]Remember Citria, the Bitcoin affinity scam company invested in by Jameson Lob, of course, who voted for blowing open oper last year in the first oper skirmish last year when Mechanic and others got banned from the Bitcoin Core GitHub for pointing out LOP's conflict of interest. That's what really opened the current war. Remember how Bitcoin Core blew open upturn after Bitcoin Core dev Antoine Puanso spoke with Citria?

[00:00:32]Well, not surprisingly, it looks like the whole point of this was so that Citria could launch launch a shipcoin.

[00:00:39]Here's their post from a couple days ago. Today, we introduced CTR, the coordination asset for the Bitcoin economy. I thought the coordination asset for the Bitcoin economy was Bitcoin, but maybe I was confused. They go on to write, "Over the past two years, we built an end-to-end Bitcoin economy that relies on the Bitcoin network as a source of truth. With CTR, we're handing control of this economy to the people who use it while giving themselves a huge bunch of tokens as we're going to see what we build. We build a Bitcoin economy. Citro ship the first uh ZK rollup secured by Bitcoin and Clementine, etc., etc. Now, users users must lead this Bitcoin economy.

[00:01:14]Solving ownership gap in the Bitcoin economy. Well, I think you have to buy Bitcoin. That's how you solve that." And then if we scroll down here, we can see that they have their own token CTR distribution supply, fixed supply of 10 billion tokens, 60% goes to the ecosystem and community including 12% for initial claims. But when we look at this, we can see down here early contributors and investors get 40%. So this is a premine. This is just a classic shipcoin scam with a huge premine that goes to insiders. 40% goes to insiders. They basically print up free money for themselves. As I wrote here, really great job, Bitcoin Core.

[00:01:49]You blew open up return for the shipcoin scam. So glad you quote unquote protected us from 64 bytes of fake pub keys that would never even have occurred anyway. I thought this meme from Mechanic and Daniel Prince was pretty good. Duh. You can't define spam. Be honest. Yeah, but whatever. Filters don't work. Tell the truth. The truth.

[00:02:09]We need your mempool to launch our shipcoin. Thank you. And that's basically what Citria did. Their investment, their company was funded.

[00:02:18]The funding round was led by Founders Fund with Peter Teal of course Bology who was the guy who helped introduce shipcoins to Coinbase, Eric Voy Vorhees, well-known ship coiner, and then of course Jameson Lop and all these all these different people. So this is basically a scam that prints up their own token. Here's a screenshot from Ghost of Unhosted Marcellis showing the GitHub where Jameson LOP is basically approving of the change of blowing open return. He's acknowledging it or saying yes concept act. It's time to come to terms with the fact that Bitcoin is desirable for some people to use as a data anchor. Well, it's desirable when you're investing in a company that's about to launch a shipcoin. And of course, James and Lop is going to get a lot of these CTR tokens. Uh he writes they're going to use it as a data anchor and they will find a way to use it as such. Thus, thus should we we should be asking what the preferred means of data anchoring is and how to incentivize it over less preferable options. And then one MA response, lop, I think it would be appropriate appropriate for you to disclose that you're one of the VCs backing Citria, a company that is currently abusing unspendable taproot outputs to embed arbitrary data on chain and whose behavior motivated the ML dis the mailing list discussion and this poll request. So this was when the oper turn thing really blew up in April of last year. Hollow not has a great summary of the series of events here. He writes, "There's a narrative circulating that Cria had nothing to do with the oper uncap that Citria didn't need it, didn't ask for it, was just caught in some drama that it didn't start. This thread explores what the people who pushed the change initially said.

[00:03:48]Starting with Peter Todd, he filed poll request 32359, the opera turn removal PR that started the public controversy. on stacker news. He wrote, "This poll request wasn't my idea. I was asked to open it by an active core dev because entities like Citra are using unprintable output." So this is Antoine Puanso who who was talking to Peter Todd about this Todd. And yes, that's the thing that has changed since. He's explained why the PR was reopened after years of dormcancy. The thing that changed Citra named explicitly by the man who filed the PR as a reason it was filed. Before Todd filed anything, Pono had already published a mailing list post arguing for relaxing the limits.

[00:04:26]Pono confirmed this himself at the May 1 IRC meeting. I explained that the r explained the rationale in the mailing list. Todd only opened the PR days after that. Antoan Pono employed or funded by Chenode Labs named Citra explicitly on his own blog described their specific technical situation in detail. You can read the rest of the thread yourself. A reminder for mechanic. Reminder, Citria don't need the blockchain. They need your mempool. Which is why spam filters had to be ridiculed and ripped out of core for Citria to be able to confidently build and launch their product. Kill it today by refusing to host their stuff in your meool. And of course, if you run Bitcoin knots plus BIP 110, it stops Catraa from being able to use your mempool today, even before the soft fork happens. And then Luke de Wolf says, "Can you explain it like I'm five? Why they need everyone's mempool?"

[00:05:14]mechanic responds, "The blockchain is too slow for their purposes. They need it to flood the network basically immediately as unconfirmed. In other words, in people's memp pools and not treated as spam transactions do." The final kick in the teeth is that the data is useless to sata beyond that and miners presumably stick it in the chain anyway where it serves no purpose to anyone stuck until the end of time. I'll put a link to Antoine Pono's email here from the Bitcoin development mailing list where he writes, "Developers are now designing constructions that work around these limitations. An example is Clementine, the recently announced Catria bridge, which uses unspendable tap routt outputs to store data data in its watchtower challenge transaction due to the standardist restrictions. In other words, memple filters on the size of op returns. Meanwhile, we've witnessed in recent change that the nudge is ineffective to deter storing data on chain. Since the restrictions on the usage of operturn outputs encourage harmful practices while being ineffective in deterring unwanted usage, which is untrue, I propose to drop them.

[00:06:13]I propose to basically blow up an operturn completely. I suggest to start by lifting the rest restriction on the size of the script pub key for operturn outputs as a first minimal step to stop encouraging harmful behavior and then to proceed to lift the restriction on the number of upper return outputs per transactions and this is what Bitcoin core version 30 did as well. It enabled you to send multiple out return outputs per transaction. This is something that is good for companies like Citria.

[00:06:41]Mechanic writes here, can we reunite given how gross Citria is? So on the left side we have the solution which is BIP 110. On the right side we have Citra premine scams using Bitcoin as free data storage. He goes on to write it should be obvious how building Ethereum on Bitcoin creates horrible malinccentives that backslide and further corrupt development processes while sullying the mission. The time to stop fence sitting and adopt the solution available to you is now. There are many people who would like to see something different from BIP 10 or tweak it this way or tweak it that way. But what they don't understand is that we have a real shelling point around BIP 110 and thus we have a real chance at stopping companies like Catraa that want to pollute the blockchain. So I'll put a link to this website that talks about what BIP 10 BIP 110 does as well as my summary of it. What does BIP 110 actually do? This is going to become an increasing problem. companies like Citra ABU abusing our memp pools and the blockchain for their Bitcoin affinity scams. And I'm hoping that this will begin to wake people up about the data storage problem that exists on Bitcoin today. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to hit the subscribe and like buttons. Hit the notification bell if you want to be notified when I publish my next video. And let me know your questions and comments in the comment section below. Thanks a lot for watching and I'll see you in the next