Bull Bitcoin CEO Francis Pouliot spent years running a Bitcoin kiosk at The Bitcoin Embassy in Montreal during Bitcoin's scaling debate. Those conversations gave him access to something most Bitcoin o
Bull Bitcoin CEO Francis Pouliot spent years running a Bitcoin kiosk at The Bitcoin Embassy in Montreal during Bitcoin's scaling debate. Those conversations gave him access to something most Bitcoin observers lacked: real insights into what ordinary users actually cared about. When he appeared on the opening panel of the Understanding Bitcoin conference in Malta, Pouliot reflected on what those interactions taught him about the block size controversy and Segregated Witness.
The customers who came through the kiosk weren't the ones complaining about rising network fees or starting flame wars on Twitter. "I came to realize that the core value proposition that was kind of unifying everyone was this aspect of censorship resistance and also this aspect of the immutability of the bitcoin supply," Pouliot said. Most were accumulating Bitcoin to hold as long-term investments. The Lightning Network excited them as a potential second-layer payment system for routine transactions. None were the voices arguing on social media over whether the block size should be increased. "These people will not update," Pouliot observed. "They're not going to update their software. They have no idea how to update."
What bothered Pouliot was a different problem. "One of the first things we noticed was that almost nobody was running a node," he said. "And almost nobody is running a node today. I think something like 0.3% of the Bitcoin users run nodes — so about like 70,000 nodes or something like that. And none of these people had a say in Bitcoin." In Bitcoin's early days, this lack of node operation wouldn't have mattered. Everyone had agreed on the same ruleset and wanted no changes. The scaling debate of the mid-2010s transformed that calculation.
The path to Segregated Witness activation required miners to signal support through Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 9. When that support stalled, developers proposed BIP 148, a more aggressive approach that would activate SegWit through a user-activated soft fork. Under this mechanism, miners would have to mine blocks compatible with SegWit rules whether they had upgraded or not.
"None of these people were able to voice any sort of opinion in terms of SegWit," Pouliot said. This gap shaped his understanding of what it meant to be a Bitcoin user rather than just an owner. "So, we tried to get people to run the nodes and to enforce their own consensus rules because if you're not running a node, you're not a user of bitcoin; you're an owner of bitcoin. You may have private keys, but you're not an actual user — you're not validating it. And ultimately, if you're not running a node, then there isn't really a point in using bitcoin. And I think that's what UASF showed."
The user-activated soft fork pushed Pouliot to run his own node, marking a personal shift in how he approached Bitcoin governance. He employed an analogy to express the change. "It's better to have one and not need it rather than need one and not have one," he said, comparing node operation to having protective equipment on hand. SegWit's eventual activation through the network showed users something fundamental: the power came from validating the chain yourself rather than trusting others to do it.
