Replies (101)

If you want to see a genuine attack against bitcoin, it won’t come in the form of a polite prunable op_return that follows consensus rules. One can argue the cheaper method of embedding data is the greater attack, but to argue either is a big attack is folly. Even the ordinals spam is no more harmful to bitcoin node resource constraints than a fully used block…so if Bitcoin being fully used is bad, then bitcoin has bigger problems than spam.
Okay yes, true that’s a fair point, but still what happend to this approach?! From my perspective, Taproot mainly benefited spam and data-related use cases without providing a comparable real-world benefit for Bitcoin as money itself. And still, there has been no serious alternative proposal to adjust or mitigate the unintended consequences that came with it. Opening OP_RETURN limits also benefits spammers, while not actually reducing spam. And yes, I agree that we probably cannot stop it completely. But then why are we not even trying to limit it in a reasonable way? To me, the easiest way to prevent something like BIP110 from gaining support would be to propose an alternative approach that is less strict and more balanced. I don’t see much effort from the other side to even explore compromises or mitigations, and that is how to see bad intentions.
let’s grant that luke is hitler or the devil incarnate. with that aside, now we could get to the contentious issue: how should the network handle arbitrary data? current consensus says: do what you want with it. so it makes sense why you advocate the way you do. you have a use for arbitrary data, and I do not blame you for serving your interests. but it also makes sense why BIP110 advocates argue the way they do. they have no need for arbitrary data, and I do not blame them for serving their interests either. right now, i have no use for arbitrary data; it does not serve any interest of mine. I am on a BTC standard; it is my chosen money. just got my start9 server, my participation with the network contributes to forming bitcoins consensus so what is the affirmative case? how does the current consensus around arbitrary data serve me?
Its mostly evidence and your own statements ... but yeah I call your manipulations slop too
I think the starting point has to be a decision on whether attempts to suppress disguised data storage is a cat and mouse game favoring the data embedder or not. I think it’s fairly obvious that the only way to completely stop arbitrary data embedding is to effectively destroy bitcoin, but unless we agree on this point, we can’t effectively discuss what can and what should be done to make life harder for embedders. As far as your question, the answer is simple: by not policing the inevitable, we preserve bitcoin as a censorship resistant secure decentralized payment network with digital scarcity. The prior status quo regarding default relay is an eventual mining centralizing force and the rather premature treatment was applied rather swiftly without time for plebs and non-techies to grok the rationale.
i appreciate the response, however it misses the point of my question. the protocol itself defines what is arbitrary. arbitrary means discretionary, literally does not matter what it is. the protocol allocates space for arbitrary data. Whatever content is in that space, the data is all good and valid to the protocol. this is the conflation, validity and censorship, that shortcut circuits the logic of the “censorship resistance” argument. validity concerns form censorship concerns content to censor is to moderate the type of content going into the space for arbitrary data the protocol does not “censor” transactions outside the protocol rules. it enforces validity; it’s a different category so censorship resistance is not an answer to “how big should the space allocated for arbitrary data should be” it’s a category error how much space for arbitrary data is a legitimate question. the space could be anywhere between 0 and 4 Mb. i agree the the essence of tbe issue is “how much space should be allocated for arbitrary data.” i agree the prior status quo was not good, because node/miner policy is not consensus. 21M for supply cap is importsnt becuase all people know the protocol rules are enforced. whatever the answer is for how much space is allocated for arbitrary data, it’s important in the same way that all people know the protocol rules should be enforcer. i’ve never used it, and have not hear anyone articulate why i would use it. I am completely open to being persuaded by the best arguments. Maybe your use case could help me understand if i’m missing something. how does allocating more space for arbitrary data serve you?
You should do whatever you think best serves your interests. That's the fundamental premise upon which Bitcoin game theory rests. I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise.
Ocean is a mining pool made up of people with a certain ideology, coordinating to mine blocks that signal what they think Bitcoin should be. DATUM has nothing to do with the statement. It's part of the social engineering. It's not the only way to mine in a pool and submit your own templates.
Even on Ocean pool everyone can create their own Bitcoin block template, meaning what you say is complete BS because Ocean gives the miners the freedom to choose their own template. The centralization and dictatorship is done by the other mining pools, the ones Coretards lick their asses.
See how he didn't tell you that he knew Citrea are spamming the Bitcoin blockchain and now they even launched a shitcoin on top of Bitcoin. They were saying they want to turn Bitcoin into Ethereum 2.0 shitcoin even more than a year ago.
You misunderstand. There is no space allocated for arbitrary data. There is no space allocated for non-arbitrary data. You make the incorrect assumption that there is a provable difference between arbitrary and non-arbitrary data in every case or that these are mutually exclusive
Don’t be fooled in to thinking that just because sometimes you can see obviously non-transaction data means there aren’t easy ways to hide it. There almost certainly are many transactions already doing so, probably more now that the least harmful ways of embedding data has caused such a ruckus.
I'm no defender of 110 and I get why not everyone's so big on mempool filters depending on how you approach your expectations of them, but curious as to why you'd view OCEAN as an attack. Seems like most mining pools are an attack through centralized template creation and that OCEAN addresses this issue through DATUM. Stratum v2 may be better but doesn't really seem quite there yet. Anyway, yea, good faith reasons, how is OCEAN an attack?
I could not agree more with you. That’s the whole bitcoin game: serving one’s self interest. I asked for your counsel because I saw that you were advocating for people not to run knots, not to run BIP110, so you are already in the persuasion game, you are already trying to convince others. Just being real man, it is a little on the nose to hear you say "I'm not going to try and convince you" after I just got done reading your entire blog post trying to convince me. I am a moral philosopher. that is literally my profession. I do nothing but study and write about “what ought one do?” There is nothing wrong with persuading others through rational dialog. I am interested in the principles behind your logic and actions because I know I get a lot of things wrong, so I am constantly revalidating my thought process, asking what am I missing? The best way I have found to deal with my blindspots is to steelman every possible position I am aware of, and then pit them against each other. Of all the contentious issues I've used this method for, this one is the most lopsided, no pun intended. I am about to spin up my new node. I was running core v28 on an old laptop and never upgraded it, but that just seems like non-participation now because we signal our self interest with our actions. Like bitcoin is going left or right, there is no pause, tick tock next block. So help me steelman the case for increasing the amount of arbitrary data per transaction. I cannot make a good affirmative case for why I should run the latest version of core, why I should reject BIP110. I guess this was my final hail mary heave to make sure I'm not making a mistake in serving my interests as a bitcoiner.
Have you ever ran Knots before or you’re just signalling that you don’t like it with or without BIP110? In the latest version the BIP is automatically added but it asks for your consent to run it, but you can decline.
Somehow embedding prayers in the blockchain is ok, but storing trivial amount of state for a side chain is a shitcoin? Or is your complaint that the side chain comes with a white paper that is too long? Or that it’s an unwise EVM? Or that it uses BTC instead of a shitcoin token? I don’t believe people are thinking their criticisms through very well. Side chains are the proper place for this. Even if I think evm side chains are dumb, that doesn’t make citrea a shitcoin.
I already explained why Knots is a joke of a software project, why Luke is unfit to lead a Bitcoin implementation, and why 110 is doomed to fail. Anyone who's has read those explanations and still wants to run 110 has my blessing and will receive my roaring laughter when their node freezes in August.
I will chuckle too, but I like the fact that their retarded hearts are in the right place. Nevertheless, those with all the feels need to learn how to understand issues that are fundamentally not about feelings. What can’t be understood in depth by some can be understood superficially and can be reasoned about by analogy and intuition with some work. Bitcoin has no dedicated technical education staff, ready and waiting to bring normies up to speed on technical issues…and maybe that’s worth devoting some effort towards…some sort of “help me reason through this” logic game or something.
I know you have explained those things. Which is why I asked about the affirmative case for what benefit larger allocations of arbitrary data provide me, a regular pleb with a node on a btc standard. That’s the only answer I want. Cause that’s the essence. That’s the principle. I don’t give a fuck about personalities. It doesn’t matter how shiny the code is polished if the principles underpinning it aren’t aligned with my interest. as a person who continually steelmans many opposing sides, the complete lack of direct answers for why arbitrary data allowance should be increased is scary. I have asked and searched far and wide, and best affirmative answer I have gotten is “it will give u a faster more accurate estimation of fees.” if the only significant benefit is “it lets me do cool shit on top of bitcoin” then that’s that. for as much as you hate luke, the things you advocate for are sending a lot of people his way.
The point of the arbitrary data debate is that you can't stop it, you can only incentivize less worse usage of it. This is simple information theory; if you don't believe me or don't get it, you're doomed to spin your wheels fighting ghosts.
I understand spam can’t be stopped. It doesn’t bother me at all. The object of the question remains, as you say, “less worse usage.” Articulate in the affirmative what that means? What good comes from blowing out the op-return?
It means you get harmless prunable outputs instead of shit that looks like a real output but is just junk that bloats the UTXO set (which has more resource usage than a prunable output).
You might genuinely benefit from asking Claude code to explain stuff to you. You can sharpen your understanding without worrying about the nuances of text that can make you sound either neutral, like positive fanboy, or like a total dick depending on tone the reader somewhat arbitrarily applies to the text. It’s useful and can’t be offended.
URL links =\=media Those videos that the URLs lead to have been taken down. That's the difference. You put the actual videos into the blockchain and that's completely different. The fact that anyone would be out here supporting pedophiles turning Bitcoin into a media hosting service instead of a database of financial transactions is absolutely appalling. Just the fact you're supporting the pedophiles against what Bitcoin was made for
I read that last summer. I understand fee estimation and block propagation. It’s as beneficial to me as the car sales man saying the motor that rolls down the window is slightly more effecient. As a regular user, it wouldn’t even be noticeable. I appreciate your engament. It’s helped me choose which action to take. No matter this shakes out, the consensus process will produce an answer better than you or I could make on our own. and that makes me hopeful for bitcoin. The longest chain with the most energy will carry us forward.
I appreciate the suggestion but I don’t outsource my thinking to LLMs. In terms of research, I treat AI like I would wikipedia. I understand the limits of what they are capable of. I use AI, but to do very specific tasks for me. Also, for better or worse, I have never really cared “how I sound” i am more concerned with being honest with myself, pursing the truth best i can, and letting my work speak for itself. I am not bothered by someone calling me “retarded” or whatever variety of insult is in vouge. i break down complex issues into syllogisms and meticulously try to break positions. I have an aseptic approach: principles above all. That’s the best i can do, i’ll walk my path with the crowd or alone. That’s what’s important to me.
my understanding of printing: archival nodes can’t prune. so we need archival nodes to spin up new nodes, yes? so for an individual node runner it’s a step forward, a plus. but for tbr network as a whole, it’s no step, just stays the same at best, and bloats the chain itself at worst seems like a very meager benefit to trade for more hefty risks
I’m suggesting you are outsourcing your thinking to others at significant bandwidth burden on other human minds over relatively simple things that an LLM is better suited to helping you understand than a human.
if we want to say “new nodes just need to trust a snapshot to start validating new blocks” that’s a different discussion. that’s definately more practical. but there are tradeoffs
I’m doing my thinking. I’m asking other rational agents what they see, where and how they draw their lines, and using that information to enhance the fidelity and richness of my picture of the world. then i choose how to navigate the world “burden” is an odd word for rational dialog. When someone enters into the domain of persuasion advocating for an “ought” that is a serious thing, and that’s my domain. I’ve read the blog posts and the core letters, listened to too many spaces and podcasts on the matter. After a hurculean effort, it just doesn’t add up. I understand these changes serve interests, but those interests simply aren’t mine.
I advocate for bitcoin. I talk to people and try and persuade them rationally why bitcoin is good for them. the same standards i hold myself to in my advocacy for bitcoin, i hold to other advocates to. if i thought of that work as beneath me, then i wouldn’t be an advocate. if i thought everyone else was just retarded and didn’t get this simple obvious thing, then i would be a horrible advocate infact, when I have thought others as just retarded for not getting something, it’s been an indicator that i’m missing a part of the picture. it signals to me that i have oversimplified reality. perhaps that’s a takeaway from these exchanges. it’s never a bad idea to reassess your assumptions and ask “what am i missing?” one of the ironic things about being philosopher, i don’t walk around pretending i’m an amazing computer scientist, doctor, or aeronautical engineer. but yet every computer scientist, doctor, and aeronautical engineer i’ve ever met, thinks they are an amazing philosopher.
It degrades bitcoin as much as using bitcoin. That’s it. There is a nontechnical consideration: if pegged side chains like liquid and citrea become more valuable than bitcoin per block, moving chain forward as opposed to reorg in low subsidy era becomes trickier for miners.
This is self aggrandizing nonsense. And to reiterate what Lopp has already said: burning human time to beg for an education on a not too terribly difficult to understand topic this late in the game is tantamount to a denial of service attack, especially with bot-like page filling posts.
> It degrades bitcoin as much as using bitcoin. Using bitcoin as money strengthens bitcoin. Using bitcoin for other purposes degrades bitcoin as money. It’s a simple concept, if you understand what gives value to money and what dilutes the monetary premium.
😂 it’s ok to just say the affirmative case for the change is to do stuff ontop of btc. that’s the elephant in the room no one wants to acknowledge. “block propagation” and “fee estimates” dont wet my whistle. but maybe they wet yours. i’m not forcing anyone to respond to inquiry. If you feel those authentic questions are an attack, that says more about you than anything. i have no ill will towards you or @Jameson Lopp 🫂
The major thing to take from the core statement on the issue is the miner centralization issue from out of band transaction submission. It’s a trivial matter now, but allowing an industry to develop that makes investments based upon the expectation of fees in excess of what the bitcoin network itself would provide is not good either. But the end game down that road is that the biggest miner can afford to mine at a loss and make up the difference by guaranteeing out of band non-standard transaction confirmation…which drives everyone else out of the mining business. Do note that this is very different than inviting or explicitly permitting side chain pegs. Liquid, lightning, and citrea would both work better if bitcoin had tighter rules and also in some way looser rules…and there is no guarantee that rules will ever get tighter or loser in a way that doesn’t kill any or all of them.
let’s not pretend anyone was advocating for blowing out op_return with the message “this change makes it easier for you to anchor” we heard about “censorship resistance,” block propagation, fee estimation, and miner centralization. everything but the elephant
You clearly listen to too much Mad Kratter propaganda. OP_RETURN was already "blown out" which is why the debate was about the trade-offs of relay policies.
whatever you want to call the default change in carrier data size from 83 to 100,000 that was the change in contention. it’s absurd to say it was “already blown out” else there would have been no need to change the default there are a lot of bad arguments on both sides. it’s been a pain working through them all looking for the best affirmative case for what I ought to do.
Nuh's avatar
Nuh 3 months ago
You are pretending to be able to do anything... Doesn't make it true though.
Changing default relay policy to match consensus was meant to 1) undercut the fee market for out of band transaction submission to the biggest miners (as this was a valid existential threat “someday”) and 2) allow nodes to see the “real” mempool (so to speak, there technically is no such thing) to make estimating fees more reliable (valid but also probably premature too). IMHO, the only valid discussion points on ripping off the bandaid were ones regarding timing and communication…(the bandaid meaning including op_return size in the criteria for judging whether or not a transaction is “standard” and thus permitting non-specialized nodes to relay the tx). You’ll note that this move does not invite or condone embedding data on chain; being able to embed data via op_return isn’t guaranteed to even exist in the future. But the reality is removing op_return entirely would be totally possible, guaranteeing any data stored on chain would be non-prunable for all.
Vitalik wanted changes that were outside of consensus to make his ideas work; thus he started his own chain. A better discussion would be about changing consensus rules to make mining fees lower by restricting mining fees to only very small bitcoin transactions with minimal flexibility (to make encoding arbitrary data harder). Removing P2SH and requiring disclosure of public key to go with address before including a transaction in the chain would remove a lot of surface area for embedding data. And enforcing a maximum number of outputs of at most 2 per transaction (only change and payer; remember fee is just whatever is left over, not an output) would restrict data embedding even further. But this would very much harm bitcoin utility (no more time decaying multisig) for example!
yeah, i completely agree that relay policy should match consensus. it’s better for all, a true common good, to have everyone on the same page with relays/mempool/et al since satoshi, and for 16 yesrs, the answer for addressing the use of arbitrary data was the with relay policy. this last year has proven that given the dynamics of nodes and miners, that was not the correct solution. i think the key here is that it wasn’t addressed at consensus. it’s wasn’t an affirmative case for any particular data carrier size, it just said nothing. as long as data carrier size in answered at protocol consensus, then that solves the fee estimation, block propagation, miner stuff, whether it’s 0 or 4mb. so we are back at the essential question i asked, it’s the only question, only issue: “how much data should be allowed to do whatever anyone wants with it?” personalities dont matter, intention doesnt matter. what X person did bad, doesnt matter non-rational arguments about “what is spam” or “censorship resistance” dont matter what is the affirmative case for how much block space can be used to anchor/embed/anything goes? while i personally have never needed to anchor or embed anything, i understand there is real utility in being able to timestamp a hash or something small. so 83, even 166 probaly is some optimal goldilocks allowance for arbitrary data. it’s just space for anything goes. i get that, and it makes total sense for making bitcoin an amazing network. i think having a small op_return makes bitcoin a more valuable network to people but you get much bigger than that, and you lose me entirely. 100,000 is insane. the whole block is just a dump, no that fundamentally breaks something in bitocin. that turns the network into a third world shit hole, that’s actually bad for all people on the network. they are selling long term sustainability for short term gain. but we can’t have this discussion because the debate has devolved into 12 year old girls yelling at each other, and 10,000 red herrings and strawmen.
right now, consensus says nothing on the matter and lets the relay policy do all the talking. consensus needs to speak up, one way or the other. that fixes all the issues with mempools, miner fee estimations, block propagation, et al. and then we have legit consensus on data carrier size, everyone on same page. if we give a fuck about bitcoin at all, we should only be discussing in the affirmative, why one particular data carrier size is right, in order to work out consensus, to make the butter. rationally dialogue back and forth. should it 0 or uncapped? or something in between? there is a right answer. an answer that makes the network maximally valuable. it exists not in your head or in mine, but between us all. and if a person cannot make the affirmative case for what number they think is best, that speaks louder than words. they either lack the rational capacity for dialogue and should ostracized and shunned until they stfu. or they are bad/hostile actors. either way, children don’t belong at the adult table. i honestly don’t give a shit what number any person says, as long as they make the affirmative case for it. just be honest and say how much and why. whether people know it or not, they are answering that question with their actions. most people don’t even know that’s the question because they are debating whether sally said sue had a fat ass at gym. or debating self contradictory arguments about too busy tilting at windmills about “what is spam?” or “what is censorship?” if we are too fucking retarded to get it right, then we deserve this fiat hellscape we inhabit. @Samson Mow @Matthew Kratter @ODELL @jimmysong @TFTC @Daniel Prince @Brandon Gentile @BitcoinAnja @HODL @walker @Jameson Lopp @Luke Dashjr @jack @UNCLE ROCKSTAR
an odd thing to say while still participating in advocacy. actions speak louder. performative contradictions scream. the question always remains open: what’s the right number for carrier data size at consensus? or is that too technical?
Ah, consensus, now you have hit on something far more interesting to discuss. I think this new topic is certainly worth switching to (because the old topic is a tired trope at this point). Now to the question: should bitcoin have uses “off script,” so to speak? This is very hard to reason about because you have to account for these uses providing profit motive to miners to reorg instead of extend the chain. While at the same time — seemingly paradoxically — these external uses provide value to transactions and may someday make bitcoin and bitcoin transaction space very valuable.
when just dealing with the root principle, reasoning gets interesting and easier not harder the dialog goes: I think the limit should be X, for Y reason. then people can discuss X, and Y and the real tradeoffs. i find X>0 but <100 to be the generally most compelling direction because i acknowledge the principle of some utility value in such a diminimus limit. i am no technical expert, so would totally be open to hearing arguments for 134 would be better because Y arguments. real rational discourse increases the fidelity of all participant’s maps of the world, and helps them decide what actions to take. which is why intended or inadvertent obfuscation is gay, sterile activity i’m about productive rational discourse. i lean into disagreement becuase that is where i learn the most. i want to know when im wrong so i can stop being wrong.
You can’t predict the future. The game is to design bitcoin to be extensible but not become a tragedy of the commons. This sets a high bar for changing consensus rules as a soft fork and a very high bar for a hard fork.
completely agree. i think that is the reason this issue is so contensious. to say “match relay policy to consensus” when consensus says nothing, means there was no high bar to be met. consensus answers the “what should we do” all core v30/libera etc answered was “what can we do” those are not the same, and should never be mistaken as such
Nuh's avatar
Nuh 3 months ago
Just because you are a participant doesn't mean you have any power. You are an English speaker apparently, but you have ZERO chance of changing the language grammar, but you can delude yourself that you could.
that analogy is correct, but it disproves your point. english isn’t just a static “protocol” it’s enacted and spoken. the way people speak english today sounds nothing like it used to sound before even though it has the same grammar hence “old english” bitcoin is a protocol language of value the same as english is.
Nuh's avatar
Nuh 3 months ago
Just because that Bitcoin (and English) are dynamic doesn't mean you have any power whatsoever to change them at individual level let alone "filter" out any words or transactions you don't like. In fact we all are so powerless, I don't give a flying fuck about spam, the more the merrier I want someone to pay fees to miners so I don't, but I also want covenants but I can't, because filtering out anything already possible is so extremely fuckin hard at the current scale of Bitcoin... Chances are it ossified already.
I hear you, literally and metaphorically. you speak, I speak and there is power in that. your right, individually there is “no power” but that is because that power doesn’t exist individually. it exists relationally, between us. it’s not an all or nothing, this not that, but the dynamism of our relation. so keep speaking, keep participating, and you add contribute your power to the whole
Nuh's avatar
Nuh 3 months ago
No, life is short, if Bitcoin ossifies that is fine it will suffice and survive, for things I want and can't have on Bitcoin, it is more productive to just use Rootstock.
Gaslighting for Coretards : ))) is the above and the truth is below, the Citrea who launched a shitcoin on top of Bitcoin and all facilitated by Core and their malware Core V30+
su-do's avatar
su-do 2 months ago
To me ocean looks like a company that enables anyone to mind against their own block template. Similar to Braiins SV2. I do not see how they are attacking bitcoin
Psilocyberbull's avatar
Psilocyberbull 2 months ago
Basically, Calle thinks users being able to build their own block templates is an attack on btc. Everything calle does should be perceieved as an attack on bitcoin
Psilocyberbull's avatar
Psilocyberbull 2 months ago
I dont know what he was quoting because it wont load for me. But the bip110 blocks are generally coming from Ocean because its users building their own block templates. Which Calle really doesnt like, hes a whore