This will start up the fun.. Lol.

Thanks for the clear information. I have been replying to several people yesterday because they keep going on about centralization which i found really hard to wrap my head around to even understand what they mean. And also not diverting from the whitepaper which is meanwhile 16 years old and proven incomplete on various parts if we want to use bitcoin as currency. Ossifying the code right now will make it a somewhat weak competitor to gold at best. Most people will have to deal with intermediaries and centralized databases to keep track of who owns what simply because there will not be an option to get a transaction for most people.

Absolutely reasonable take. Fully agree.

What's this "mishandling of Segwit and Taproot" that you're referring to? You mean the changes were technically flawed? Or you didn't like the activation processes? Or something else that I'm missing? (Minimal paranoia please)

Well ohviously they were flawed because it brought us inscriptions.

Obviously

Stop using the word "obviously". It's the kind of arrogant rhetoric which pushes many sensible people away from this debate

Lmao 🤣 U got the answer u werent looking for and have no counter argument so you cry and scream about feelings. The millenial way i guess 🤣🤣

"after Core is out of the picture" You are talking about consensus with Core out of the picture? As far as I can see, most serious Bitcoin devs are organized in Core now. You're talking like Knots was the new reference client already.

Blocked Seriously, you're online too much, you're validating each others' opinions, and you're pissing off non-insiders who just want to learn more

You yourself were pushing for Segwit against the consensus of the whole community. Else bcash never would have happened.

Hahahaha you guys are so weak its unreal. Bitcoin is bout facts not feelings. Its about being anti-fragile not being super-fragile 🤣🤣 👋

seriously corrupted organisation at this point. out of the picture means no longer having so much clout. and i personally have wanted to build a #golang based option that has the nice wallet GUI and fast IBD. btcd is pathetic. i'm too busy with nostr dev at this point but i'm intimately familiar with the btcd codebase. the best outcome is that bitcoin has like 5 major clients making up 80% of the userbase, and making these kinds of arbitrary changes is a lot harder to do than it was when 80+% of nodes are running one implementation. that's why they have arranged to get spam-friendly devs into position on their team. and lunatics like peter todd. that guy alone screams red flag that someone completely non-representative of bitcoin culture has been inserted.

"after core is out of the picture" wtf does that mean?

He's plotting to take over the project with the controlled opposition guys. Real Bitcoiners will take the code and start a new client by anonymous devs. If Core is compromised, so is Luke (look up his history). (They) know the hardest part is reaching a shelling point for any new client. That's where they attack. Same playbook as with the blocksizewars.

segwit enabled a cheap spam vector. taproot also opened up a vulnerability. i don't think segwit was intentional but i was in the schnorrr signatures camp back in those days. IMO segwit needs to be deprecated and people encouraged to move their UTXOs to taproot. taproot still hasn't achieved full penetration yet, but the benefits of taproot are manifold, not the least of which being full channel open privacy and improved coinjoin transaction sizes since multisigs only take one combined signature for potentially hundreds of signers. taproot also was unnecessarily complicated on the API side. simply using taproot signatures (schnorr) is obfuscated by the API, because of the "tweak" thing. that tweaking is for smart contract sub-addresses. but you can perfectly well use taproot as a simple HD keychain as well, since tweaking and HD path derivation is much the same type of thing

I feel like one guy is gaining too much control, have seen this multiple times before, it never ends well.

Retard alert

> most serious Bitcoin devs are organized in Core now I hope that’s meant as sarcasm

Do you mean there won't be on/off-ramp ? I understand there might be issues with spam but anyone can still transact in full sovereignty right ?

Yes, at this point should be obvious. But with the benefit of the doubt that you’re trying to learn here, SegWit added the witness discount that makes spam like inscriptions 75% cheaper, which allows them to compete with monetary txs for blockspace. It’s like a subsidy for spam. Taproot allowed to hack and bypass the datacarriersize filter, which is the reason the UTXO set blew up from 4GB in 2023 to nearly 12GB in 2025. This alone bricked low end node running hardware.

What about P2TR addresses exposing the public key? Wouldn't that be quantum vulnerable?

Hes not looking for the answer, thats why he was instantly calling Luke paranoid. Typical modern emotional retard.

Thanks @npub1mlek...x3q5 for giving an answer with some details, and @epsql for raising the quantum-resistance point about TR While witnesses have a discount, normal monetary transactions also benefit from the same discount as they also use the witness What concretely could be done differently? Maybe the discount should apply only to small witnesses, so that larger - potentially spammy - witnesses pay more? (It's too late to include this change to the discount rules, as it's a consensus change, but I'm just curious to discuss these issues to learn more)

segwit should be deprecated and wallets should encourage users to move their UTXOs to taproot quantum resistance is a far future risk. the best option we have currently for switching to quantum resistant signatures and ECDH is an algorithm called VDOO which has 96 byte signatures. so such an upgrade is not really feasible before 5 years when there might also be low enough storage prices to justify such a switch. the danger of bitcoin addresses being cracked is completely unrealistic in the short term (less than 10 years). the smallest economic UTXO to attack right now is over 800btc and it would take about 2 weeks to do it, assuming someone builds a big enough machine to do it, which is gonna cost upwards of 50 million dollars in the first place, plus that much again to power it for such an attack. also, segwit witness discount does not make transactions as much cheaper as taproot. taproot can combine multiple signatures allowing many UTXOs to be merged with only one signature block.

ecdsa and schnorr signatures are both vulnerable. there are no signature algorithms with as small data size as these algorithms, smallest post-quantum signature algorithm has 96 bytes, most others are upwards of 600 bytes long. every transaction has one so a quantum upgrade would probably not even use any of the ones that are known currently, but something in the future when someone figures out a compact signature for post quantum algos. lattices are too big, multivariates are better, and there is also the possibility of short coding algorithm signatures, as well as hash based signature schemes that use similar techniques as merkle trees. taproot addresses don't expose the public key until spent same as other transactions. the address is the hash of the public key, which is verified when signed by revealing the public key. this is why you should not reuse bitcoin addresses.

Btc is sitting at 100k its doing ok without you 🤣

I agree on diversity in implementations even if only "patched core" variants would be the best outcome for Bitcoin's resilience but manipulation of minds is not harder with 5 implementations than with just one. Non-technical people really have a hard time to tell what are legit concerns and what are straw man arguments.

yeah, the patent manipulative, fallacious arguments being presented makes me sick. a lack of diversity in a peer to peer network is a recipe for the apocalypse. i literally saw will just say "bitcoin is bitcoin core" like, bro. stop building damus and notedeck then. we only need primal 🤡

No. Of course I'm serious. I should have said though: "serious Bitcoin full node devs" as that at least excludes the hundreds of wallets and their "serious bitcoin devs" out there.

Bitcoin Core fell out of sync with itself. It's damn hard to get consensus right and I hope all miners at least will stick to core and its forks. Devs love to build stuff from scratch and it's great to learn all the details of the stack but Bitcoin consensus is just too fragile to run alternative implementations reliably. Accidental hard forks are just damn scary.

ridiculous the protocol isn't specified properly if there is only one implementation. you probably know about how bad NDK is, applesauce is much better and simpler. NDK is buggy, it's a black box. the specification people are the same people building it. it's not a coincidence that the specification is so vague as to be ridiculous in places, they don't care about other people building clients or client libraries or relays. strfry is enough. primal is enough. whatever. we aren't living in a communist dictatorship. diversity is part of how you have a robust ecosystem. bitcoin core now runs less than 80% of the p2p network and likely that's going to decline even further from this point because people have realised that bitcoin core is a single point of failure and that is fatal to a p2p network. attacks that work on 80% of the network are cheaper to execute than trying to cover 5 different clients that have different vulnerabilities.

Did "Mister Sensible" reply? I guess not 🤣

Come on dude. In this climate? That "one guy" is about the only one saving your corn. Have some respect.

Without him? Wow.

my interpretation is that Core already committed suicide with v30, when spam, full blocks with junk, nasty things, and malware starts getting into the chain people will have no other option but to either stay in a older stale version or move to Knots. So it's just a matter of time for knots becoming dominant. That's my interpretation of Luke's words.

It's too big ... to mess with L1. Vote Ossification.

Resolve how to have a global decentralized community come to consensus, and the rest are minor details. This is what is missing right now, OP_RETURN is but a symptom.

Take it easy on the retard juice, Luke.

Wall St seems to be the only ones that don't want ossification. Bitcoin and the tools surrounding it fulfill 95% of most individuals' needs already.

My node will not be upgrading

Absolutely! Progress takes time, and the journey is just as important as the destination. With every upgrade, we’re one step closer to a truly decentralized future. Let’s keep pushing forward together! 🚀✨ #Bitcoin #Community

Figures

I think we need a new definition for “serious” then.

hi luke, just to be sure. you are not talking about rollups right?

I think both groups have valid points. It's true: miners can 'slipstream' spam in to the chain regardless of relay policy. Also true: relay policy filters and widespread use by relay operators discourage this behavior at scale. I don't see bad actors, I see different visions. That is decentralization. Both sides will keep working on their vision, as they should, and the market will decide.

Thank you for your service. I know nothing and contribute even less. AI tells me: A Comprehensive Summary of the Foremost Risks to Bitcoin's Success Bitcoin, as a decentralized digital currency, operates in a complex and evolving landscape fraught with a multitude of risks that could jeopardize its long-term viability and mainstream acceptance. These risks span technological, political, economic, and social domains, each presenting a unique set of challenges to the pioneering cryptocurrency. At the forefront of the technological threats is the long-term risk of quantum computing. While still largely theoretical, the development of sufficiently powerful quantum computers poses an existential threat to Bitcoin's cryptographic underpinnings. The Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) used to secure private keys is believed to be vulnerable to quantum attacks, which could allow for the theft of bitcoins. While the timeline for such a development remains uncertain, its potential impact is catastrophic, necessitating proactive research into quantum-resistant cryptographic solutions. Another significant technological hurdle is the ongoing issue of scalability. The Bitcoin network's design, with its 10-minute block time and limited block size, inherently restricts the number of transactions it can process. This bottleneck leads to high transaction fees and slow confirmation times during periods of peak demand, severely hampering its utility as a medium of exchange for everyday transactions. While layer-2 solutions like the Lightning Network aim to address this, their adoption and effectiveness are not yet guaranteed. Furthermore, the potential for a critical software bug in the Bitcoin Core code represents a low-probability but high-impact risk. A flaw that could allow for the creation of new bitcoins beyond the 21 million cap or enable a network-wide shutdown would be devastating to the trust and value of the entire system. The specter of political and taxation risks looms large over Bitcoin's future. Governments around the world are still grappling with how to regulate cryptocurrencies. A coordinated and stringent global regulatory crackdown could stifle innovation, limit access, and impose burdensome taxation that would deter investment and adoption. The decentralized and pseudonymous nature of Bitcoin has made it attractive for illicit activities, which in turn invites greater scrutiny from law enforcement and regulatory bodies. The potential for governments to view Bitcoin as a threat to their monetary sovereignty could also lead to outright bans or the promotion of state-controlled Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) as a less threatening alternative. The increasing concentration of Bitcoin mining in a few geographical locations also introduces geopolitical vulnerabilities. A hostile government could exert control over mining pools within its borders, potentially enabling censorship of transactions or even a 51% attack, where a single entity controls enough mining power to disrupt the network. While the economic cost of such an attack on the Bitcoin network is immense and thus a low-probability event, the centralization of mining power remains a persistent concern for the health of its decentralization. From an economic perspective, Bitcoin's notorious price volatility remains a major barrier to its widespread adoption as a stable store of value and reliable medium of exchange. Wild price swings, often driven by speculation and market sentiment, create significant risk for both individual and institutional investors. This volatility is exacerbated by the relatively opaque nature of some cryptocurrency markets and the potential for manipulation. The broader cryptocurrency ecosystem also presents systemic risks. The collapse of a major exchange, the failure of a prominent stablecoin, or a large-scale security breach could trigger a contagion effect, leading to a loss of confidence and a market-wide crash that would inevitably impact Bitcoin. Competition from a vast and growing number of alternative cryptocurrencies also poses a threat. While Bitcoin currently enjoys the first-mover advantage and the strongest network effect, other projects may offer superior technology, greater scalability, or more advanced features that could eventually erode Bitcoin's dominance. Finally, Bitcoin faces significant social and environmental challenges. The proof-of-work consensus mechanism, while secure, consumes a vast amount of energy, leading to a significant carbon footprint. This has drawn widespread criticism and could lead to regulatory pressure or a shift in investor preference towards more energy-efficient cryptocurrencies. The public perception of Bitcoin is also a double-edged sword. While it has a passionate and dedicated community of supporters, it is also often associated with speculation, illicit activities, and environmental harm in the mainstream consciousness. Overcoming these negative perceptions is crucial for achieving broader acceptance and long-term success. The very decentralization that is one of Bitcoin's greatest strengths also presents a governance challenge. Without a central authority, reaching consensus on necessary upgrades and protocol changes can be a slow and contentious process, potentially hindering its ability to adapt to new challenges and opportunities in a rapidly evolving technological landscape. In conclusion, while Bitcoin has demonstrated remarkable resilience and growth, its path to becoming a truly global and enduring financial asset is laden with a complex web of interconnected risks that must be carefully navigated.

Wow! Kill your heroes.

What's the TL;DR on btcd codebase?

When Luke speaks, I pay attention. View quoted note →

Step 5

"the address is the hash of the public key" I'm not sure this is true for P2TR though, as per

GitHub

bips/bip-0341.mediawiki at master · bitcoin/bips

Bitcoin Improvement Proposals. Contribute to bitcoin/bips development by creating an account on GitHub.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean exactly?

Retard alert

He's not. He's incompetent to save his own bitcoin, went wining to the FBI, come on...

Have some respect.

It means exactly what it means. Core is destroying their credibility completely with the coming update.

Core + L2 Counterparty = all set to go with tokenization. Why wait??? Is knots an attack vector against tokenization??

Why generate and read a super long response from a bullshit machine when you could use that time to read human-written primary sources?

🚨 ALERT: Luke Derangement Syndrome!

Says the man that shoves shit up his ass in the name of health.

You can have knots or you can have Bitvm.

it's not terrible but the configuration system is buggy it's hard to figure out where stuff is and its IBD is slow, or at least it used to be. and the signature verification code in it is 1/4 the speed of the one in bitcoin core (i use the bitcoin core signature algorithm in my relay).

improvements, yes. digital photo album over monetary network, no.

i don't want core to be "out of the picture" but i also don't want core devs to turn bitcoin into a cathedral project where only a few dictate the direction. View quoted note →

In just 16yrs the database is close to 1tb...at the current run rate, it will be unwieldy in another 10yrs...yeah if ossification is what it will take to cut down the bs and jpeg crap from these arrogant core losers, let's ossify and protect one of the few great things to happen to humanity

Define "rollups".

This post is about the next decade or two, not the next 24 hours. Core and Bitcoin cannot both continue to exist.

🤔

Its currently about 600GB. The worst case scenario is it’s 5TB in 10 years. But most likely 1.5-2TB. As long as we don’t do something completely stupid like increase the block size Bitcoin should stay small enough that anyone with a modern hard drive can still host it, well into the future.

by "rollup" I mean ethereum-style rollups where L2 state can be reconstructed from L1 alone. my concern is L1 bloat, and lack of block space for other alternative sidechains. i mean the word "sidechain" makes me believe you are not talking about ethereum style rollups. but im just trying to be sure.

build trust to improve a trustless protocol in a very distrustful community. i don't know where to begin. but surely not very far out having bigger blocks for example would be viable when processing and storage are almost free.

The only one LOLing at this spectacularly ill-informed statement is you. Reminds me of the saying - "if you cannot laugh at yourself, then who can you laugh at?"

trustless systems require trustworthy builders. we're all just trying to paint on a canvas that keeps changing dimensions. sometimes the art survives precisely because the constraints are brutal.

no, you are not. and this is super gay. this means there is zero protection against brute force or quantum attacks to reverse public keys. this is why i hate taproot. why could we not just have schnorr signatures on regular P2PKH? there's no upgrade path away from segwit with this horsecrap. i already hated the way that the APIs about taproot force you to specify a tweak. so now i see that every tx you make reveals the public key immediately. i doubt that their logic about why it isn't hashed washes technically either. it should have at least been a fucking sha256 hash. why not? just why FUCKING not? all of the changes starting with segwit have been a downward spiral. i think there should have been a simple single schnorr pubkey hash anyway. that's what segwit should have been. i'm gonna have to read closely through the state of bitcoin signatures and transaction formats to try and figure out if there is some hole to push something else in there that isn't this abomination. for some time to come, bitcoin's main transaction type is going to be single signature and not multisignature, and the logic of taproot signatures is based on not differentiating, so you put the pubkey at the out points instead of address hashes, and instead of reveal signatures you need the pubkey to validate the signature. after all, taproot is permitted but not understood by pre-taproot nodes, probably there is a way to do non-taproot schnorr signatures while remaining valid to old nodes but only limited to needing a wallet that can verify the signatures. i have thought about the idea of making a nostr event format that throws away the ID and pubkey and using reveal signatures (like segwit and legacy do, the hash combines with the signature and produces the public key). it would be very neat and compact for saving a full 256 bytes of data in nostr events. make the signatures base64URL and they are also only 86 bytes instead of 128. this would leave enough space for a check on it with the extra 40 bytes, merely 240 bits, hardly even truncated, which would then serve as verification and the signature and fingerprint would take the space of one hex signature and provide identification and message authenticity. you hash the revealed pubkey, and then compare to the fingerprint, and if it matches the pubkey is correct and the message is authentic.

"If you can't beat em, join em." Sneakiest attack is from behind/within. It was about time for Core monopoly (and single point of failure) to end. To improve networks overall immune system this fiasco had to happen. Dramatic locally, evolutionary globally.

Mostly because smaller blocks impose a fee market that could otherwise not happen. As the coinbase subsidy decreases with time, fees will be the only incentive for miners.

Not true, take a look at what Alpen Labs is doing View quoted note →

This is the point. I would have expected Core to stop and reassess things given the backlash from the community however.

i stayed up way too late last night to learn about how schnorr signatures work. the pubkey is effectively like part of the signature value, in fact. probably satoshi chose ECDSA because it was easier to find but also for being able to use pubkey hash construction but you can't do that with schnorr.

this is the tradeoff that schnorr gives you: no signature malleability, the pubkey X is like a malleability protection. the pubkeys must be in the spend transaction along with the signatures on the out-points being spent. so they are not so much smaller in size than p2pkh transactions actually. in fact slightly larger

Bro, you have no fucking clue what Bitcoin, or its users, needs. You are guessing, just like everyone else with designs for Bitcoin. It is the guessing and meddling that brings all the risks and ccnsequences. Bitcoin does not scale. Stop pretending it will. Bitcoin txn value is subjective. Stop pretending censorship features are needed. If you want a vision for unseating and replacing Core, I will give it to you, for free. Make something that is actually "core" that is mostly unchanging over time, aside from optimizations on performance of the software itself. Design out the "soft" fork proposals and policies in a way that they can happen downstream. Make Bitcoin as a node efficient for everyone, including production. Basically, team up with Libbitcoin and stop fucking around with retarded fud campaigns and speculation as if any of you know what is best while thinking Bitcoin is a place for experiments and lobbying. Stop that shit.

People make mistakes. His character seems legit. Also, you're comparing him to what? Current Core Devs? Come ON.

His character was good for contributing to core, after he lost his bitcoin and turned to the FBI this all saga of anti core has started. I would be causios.

I believe Schnorr could not have been used at the time due it being protected by a patent, which seems to have expired only in 2010 according to Wikipedia

Appreciate your work Luke

The future is bitcoinknobs.org

You're suggesting that the developer of Knots should not be trusted because he went to the FBI? And instead, we trust who? The current Core devs? The ones deliberately and maliciously trying to break bitcoin? I'm cautious of you. You went from a word of caution to having a single dev working on Knots, to a Luke Jr slander mission. Suss as.

Trust no one. Be cautious with me especially.”