Aaron van Wirdum's avatar
Aaron van Wirdum 1 month ago
Other than watching a debate or talk when I was bored I ignored all this for a long time because I thought it would just go away. (As you know I was with you in that ordinals are retarded-- but I also didn't see it as some kind of fundamental threat to Bitcoin.) But when the CSAM accusations started that was like a knife being pulled out during a pub brawl. A horrible escalation that could in some worst case scenarios actually be dangerous for both individuals and even the project as a whole. Luke has always been "unique" but that should not mean ethical and moral lines don't apply to him. It's time to lower the temperature, but that is impossible if the _worst_ behaviour does not stop. So when you do call out other behaviour but not his, that does not sit right with me-- or at least I don't think it's helpful.
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Giacomo Zucco's avatar
Giacomo Zucco giacomozucco@primal.net 1 month ago
I hope to have clarified why. After our agreement about ordinals being retarded (and not a fundamental threat to Bitcoin), I couldn't really ignore the escalation, initially just because I got myself involved into OCEAN. Even if the entire deal of the pool is about miner-side template creation (which means they will be able to include everything they want), for a few day it worked using Luke's own default node, which is Knots, which was filtering out inscriptions (and incidentally also the >40b opreturn that the Samourai devs needlessly used to label pre-coinjoin txs in their terribly broken scheme). The option to switch to Core was added, as planned, a few days after that, but in that brief time the whole operation was targeted with nonsense "censorship" accusations (and even worse, for a coinjoin advocate, power-user and patron like me: accusations of sabotaging privacy practices). To this day, I still read stuff like Gmax publicly defaming the company, and I can't ignore it, since he's attacking me as well, in a way I consider absolutely unfair and unfounded. Then I've seen the github abuses after the first PR by Peter (the one eventually closed down), which I couldn't ignore because it brought me back to some serious red flag about Core development organizations and processes (namely the infamous "blocklist" episode, but also other less public discussion I was involved in, regarding developers rejected from residency program due to their perceived politics, or a couple of "DEI hire" operations ended up with maintainers explicitly praising Buterin in public). I just couldn't ignore the gaslighting attempts of people trying to re-frame some history which I was directly involved in, or suddenly labeling as "crazy", "dangerous" and "against Bitcoin's ethos" the very same sentences about onchain spam that they would have written themselves just a few years before. These two situations, combined, made it very hard for me to ignore the story as you did, and radicalized me enough to make a "Knozi" out of me, even if I fundamentally agree with Todd (who's a personal friend of mine just as much as Luke is) about mempool policies, and if I disagreed with most of them about the "existential" magnitude of the spam issue. When the CSAM FUD started, I voiced my disagreement privately and publicly, without any ambiguity. When the contentious "UASF" proposal surfaced, I did so even more. But I still remain very concerned of all the rest. I don't think Bitcoin is going to die. I think the role of Core as the reference implementation we know may. Which is not optimal for several reasons.
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