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During a hike in the forest near Kollmitzdörfl, you come across a gloomy building surrounded by a small wall. Since this building has a small bell tower, one first thinks of a chapel in the forest. In reality, however, it is a mausoleum. Baron Hugo Klinger had it built for his wife in 1926. The mausoleum is reminiscent of a drama that took place in this forest in 1926.

In 1916 the very rich Baron Hugo Klinger von Klingerstorff, one of Austria's largest textile manufacturers and a landowner, married Comtesse Sybille von Spiegelfeldt, who was 6 years his junior. The bride's father was the imperial governor of Tyrol, a high-ranking official of the nobility, but no longer so rich. The connection was beneficial for both families. Sybille, who was living in Vienna at the time and was known for her beauty and her singing voice, moved to Raabs Castle to live with her husband.

The marriage was normal so far. Three children were born, Maria Magdalena (1918), Hubert (1920) and Albertine (1921). Sybille adored her children and insisted on taking care of their upbringing. She was often seen walking through the woods with the children. Hugo loved Sybille, but he loved hunting even more. He neglected Sybille because he was either on business trips or hunting in his woods. Sybille suffered greatly from it.

When Sybille fell ill with a lung disease, the doctor prescribed a cure in Merano, and her husband accompanied her there. There the couple met the Russian émigré Cyrill Konstantin Orlow, who introduced himself as a former Grand Duke. At first, both spouses did a lot together with Cyrill. But he fell in love with Sybille, who was 10 years older than him. Sybille also quickly developed feelings for Cyrill. While still in Merano, there was a conversation between Hugo, Sybille and Cyrill, in which Sybille and Cyrill confessed their love and Hugo initially consented to a divorce. Then he left.

After her cure, Sybille returned to Raabs Castle, also under pressure from her father and because of her children, but remained in contact with Cyrill. From time to time there were secret meetings. But that wasn't enough for the couple. They wanted to live together. Hugo had now changed his mind and no longer wanted to agree to the divorce.

Cyrill, who had meanwhile moved to Vienna to be closer to his lover, tried several times to meet Hugo to ask him again to consent to the divorce. This turned out to be difficult because Sybille's father was now also living in the castle and forbade him to enter it. Sybille and Cyrill telephoned every day. When Sybille found out that her husband wanted to go hunting near the castle, she told Cyrill. He wanted to try to meet Hugo in the forest so that he could finally talk to him.

On June 2, 1926, Cyrill drove to Raabs in a rental car accompanied by a friend. They met Sybille at the sawmill on the road to Grosau. She got into the car and showed Cyrill the hunting ground near Kollmitzdörfl. Then she let herself be dropped off at the sawmill and went back to the castle.

Cyrill drove back to the hunting ground and found Hugo. The two men quickly got into an argument. Hugo no longer wanted to consent to the divorce. In the meantime, Hugo had found out that Cyrill was not a grand duke, but only a baron. He insulted Cyrill very badly. So far, the statements of the two men coincide.

Suddenly the friend who was left in the car and the chauffeur of the rental car heard two shots. After a moment, Cyrill staggered out of the forest, covered in blood. His right upper arm was completely torn open by a bullet. He told the horrified men about a duel. Hugo also staggered through the forest, hit in the back, and was picked up by a wagon owner, to whom he said someone had shot at him. Both men were transported to Raabs. Cyrill later had to be taken to the hospital in Waidhofen due to his very serious injuries.

From then on the statements of the two men are different. Cyrill explained that Hugo had already turned to leave, but then picked up his hunting rifle, whereupon Cyrill drew his pistol and shot Hugo. Hugo explained that he had turned to go and Cyrill would have shot him in the back, whereupon Hugo turned around and shot Cyrill.

First, Cyrill and Sybille were accused of a murder plot. Therefore, Sybille was to be picked up for interrogation on June 3, 1926. When the gendarmerie arrived at the castle, Sybille agreed to come with them. She explained that she only had to change clothes, went to her room, shot herself in the temple and died on the spot. When Cyrill heard of the death of his beloved in the hospital, he was very shocked and desperate. But he no longer felt obliged to keep silent and said that the conversation with Hugo was just a last attempt. The two, Sybille and Cyrill, wanted to commit suicide together should the conversation not go well, because they loved each other so much and could no longer be apart; the farewell letters were already written. The gendarmerie continued to investigate. The suspicion of the murder plot was ruled out by many testimonies and the discovery of the letters.

In addition to the serious injuries, Cyrill contracted pneumonia in the hospital and died on June 15, 1926, in the hospital in Waidhofen. He was buried in the cemetery in Waidhofen with great sympathy from the population. His grave no longer exists.

Hugo had his wife buried quietly at the point of the exchange of fire and later had the mausoleum built for her. Since then, all family members have been buried there. Hugo, too. The last funeral took place in 2020.

What exactly happened here on June 2, 1926, will probably never be found out.

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KYIV — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy fired Army Commander-in-Chief Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi on Tuesday, just a week after ousting popular Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov.

Zelenskyy had cited the dysfunctional relationship between Syrskyi and the reformist minister as his reason for firing Fedorov on July 15, but the decision triggered a wave of protests demanding he be reinstated and Syrskyi removed instead.

Zelenskyy has so far refused to return Fedorov to the defense ministry, saying he will be offered another position worthy of his talents in government.

“We will jointly determine an updated strategy of our defense [and] steps to continue the reform of the corps system, to fulfill the supply requests of combat commanders,” Zelenskyy said in an address to the nation on Tuesday evening.

He also expressed gratitude to Syrskyi for previous successful operations in 2022 in Kyiv and Kharkiv and the 2024 incursion into Russia’s Kursk region.

Joint Forces Commander Maj. Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi will become the Ukrainian Army’s new commander-in-chief, Zelenskyy said in his speech.

Drapatyi is an experienced field commander who successfully organized the protection of Kharkiv in 2024 from a Russian counteroffensive. He was among the first of Ukraine’s top commanders to openly support Fedorov last week.

Ukraine has seen nationwide protests since Zelenskyy ousted Fedorov, and it’s far from certain that Syrskyi’s ouster will suffice to quell them.

Fedorov has refused to take any post besides his old job as defense minister, two officials familiar with the talks told POLITICO. It’s not clear whether he has accepted Zelenskyy’s latest offer to return to government.

He congratulated Drapatyi, however, describing him as a “breath of fresh air.” He also called Syrskyi to thank him for his successes in Kyiv and Kharkiv, calling them now “part of history.”

“But we need to move even faster and write new chapters, correcting all previous mistakes,” Fedorov said .

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Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin is NOT Changed by Proof Of Node

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 local 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 can not, however, 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 Bitcoin 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 .

The Bitcoin node-supported soft fork 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 to 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.

Today, miners are not signaling support for BIP-110 in any significant way . In fact, according to some data, this is one of the least supported soft fork attempts by miner signaling in Bitcoin’s history . Less than one percent of the blocks mined in the current difficulty adjustment period are signaling for BIP110.

Concluding Thoughts

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.

This post Bitcoin is NOT Changed by Proof Of Node first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt .

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Street art is ubiquitous in Rotterdam, coming in all shapes and sizes, covering a vast array of topics in its own unique way. The canal vulva is one such piece that has fascinated passersby for over a decade.

Not much is known about this piece, apart from the fact that it is a female reproductive organ that was fastened to the wall close to some space invader mosaics. Locals call it 'Kutkunst' and believe that it's a feminist statement. They are generally quite fond of it, and have helped keep it free of vandalism for over a decade.