Francesco

Bitcoin

[Francesco @_Francesco_R]

#Bitcoin

[Giacomo ShadowUNbanned Zucco @giacomozucco]

Regardless of how righteous your war is, and how smart your combat tactics are, choosing the right battlefield is often among the most important things.

I have some reservations on the final goals of the BIP110 warriors, and many about their combat tactics. But what really baffles me is the way they selected the hardest possible battlefield (the second-hardest of all), where a huge economic majority (which they clearly lack) is necessary to even imagine a possible victory.

The absolutely HARDEST thing to do in Bitcoin, impossible even with many exchanges, payment processors, influencers, developers, hodlers, mining pools, mining farms and ASIC manufacturers backing you, is to successfully impose a hard fork: NYA/Segwit2X people learned that the hard way in 2017. It's like attacking the enemy inside their most fortified inner citadel (on the right of the meme): you need overwhelming superiority of forces to even begin to imagine it.

The second hardest thing to do is successfully imposing a soft fork (which is what BIP110 warriors are trying now, facing certain failure in little more than a week). It's like attacking the enemy frontally on their external city walls.

Then there is: successfully imposing a more restrictive mempool policy, which is what Luke tried to do in order to fix the inscription bug a few years ago, failing. It's like attacking the enemy on open field in its own country.

Then there is: successfully ignoring a more permissive mempool policy, which is what the Knots movement (myself included) tried to do against Core V30. It's like attacking the enemy's harbor: you can impose some damage and cost for a while, which may be sometimes worth it, but you can't do much more.

Then there is: successfully imposing a more permissive mempool policy, which is what Core V30 did. It's so easy that they succeeded (to my great dismay) even in the face of very little community support, non-existent technical urgency, and amidst sloppy moves and lots of controversy.

Then there is: successfully ignoring a soft fork, which is what the network (myself included) will do now, and then successfully ignoring a hard fork, which is what we did back then against NYA/Segwit2X. As easy as defending your innermost fortified citadel: you just need some good and motivated men and some resources.

Regardless of your holy war (about nodes/devs/miners governance, about spam mitigation, about CSAM "emergency"), you should study and understand Bitcoin to pick your battlefield right.

[Francesco @_Francesco_R]

@cguida6 @giacomozucco @matteopelleg And btw imho that's also the mistake of Core 30 openness maxis trying to rationalise the end result as the reason for removing filters.
They left out the social pressure against spam, unintended consequences (like 110 ironically), precedents, etc.
Status quo > bad changes

[Francesco @_Francesco_R]

@cguida6 @giacomozucco @matteopelleg The absolute need to compromise and pick a rushed/bad solution because you feel the need to fix spam immediately is one of the things that bothers me about 110.
The rationalistic attitude to direct things from above instead of with slow and steady improvements is not for Bitcoin.

[Giacomo ShadowUNbanned Zucco @giacomozucco]

From the hardest but theoretically most effective to the easiest but least effective:
1) a consensual and uncontroversial block-size-reduction plus L2 improvement soft fork (lowering rate limits and facilitating offchain fee aggregation to combat spam)
2) a new node implementation adopted by the economic majority with sane and well-maintained spam filters
3) social ostracism of overt spammers and scammers from dev funding, IRL dev meetups, technical conferences, mailing lists, github repos
4) general improvement of the overtone window in a spam/scam-adversarial sense via social media pressure.

I think 1 is almost impossible, but order of magnitude MORE possible than a BIP110 success, obviously. 2 is very hard, but easier than 1. And so on.

[Guy Swann @TheGuySwann]

I still just don’t see how BIP110 will activate and the claims otherwise don’t add up to me.

I’ll be fine if somehow I’m proven wrong, but it also wouldn’t mean to me that there was some hostile takeover as the detractors claim. In my mind it literally *can’t* activate unless most people are ok with it. We have no idea what real support or rejection is really like because of twitter. The best signal we have are economic nodes and miners. Not perfect, but Bitcoin’s literal system is about finding consensus among conflict. Twitter isn’t made for that at all. If the consensus lands one way or the other, I don’t see why I wouldn’t take that as the highest possible signal on the issue.

My prediction is that the signal will land on “I’m not making a change I don’t fully understand” as the majority position. Neither full rejection, nor full support, but simple inertia on not making a consensus change.

I hope we don’t lose many BIP110ers when that happens and I think a persistent fork would be worse than us staying together and disagreeing. I think a second major client where there is explicit social animosity between them is a *strong* position for the network. Both will work hard to find bugs/flaws in the other. Both will be hardened by it.

Bitcoin is money for enemies after all. I think we shouldn’t get a divorce, but should stay together and keep fighting it out over what’s best for Bitcoin.

Pam: “I think you should stay. I think that we should fight”
Jim: “You really wanna fight?…”
Pam: “Yeah.”
Jim: “All right, put your duke’s up Beesley.”

[Lyn Alden @LynAldenContact]

Some proponents of making Bitcoin more programmable said the same thing when I wasn’t in support of their quick fork attempt either. And similarly, it wasn’t that I opposed the tech in principle; it just didn’t meet my threshold for supporting it.

I’m a consensus conservative; it takes a lot to get me to agree to a change. One of my favorite features of Bitcoin is how resistant it is to change, including to some of the changes I’d personally like to see.

But talk aside, I support action. Happy to let the market decide in August. If I wasn’t asked about it on a podcast, I just would’ve carried on saying nothing and let action do its thing.👍

[nvk @nvk]

I’m sorry saying “plebs don’t matter.” hurt you.

My point was about Bitcoin’s power structure, not anyone’s worth.

In a fork/consensus dispute, influence is not evenly distributed. Economically significant actors exercising validation have a lot more leverage, as do miners with substantial hashrate.

Simply running a node with little to no relative economic activity does not create meaningful consensus influence.

Bitcoin is not a democracy/rebellion/tyranny, It protects your bitcoin from it.

Economic validation and hashrate, not raw node count, set consensus.

That may be unpleasant given the disdain for some of the current block space non-standard use. But it is how Bitcoin works.

It does not mean ordinary users are worthless. There are a lot of good ppl on both sides. All this personal animosity is pointless, I have friends on all sides.

We can disagree without making each other enemies.

This whole thing is yuk.

BIP110 is DOA imo. I don’t want to see ppl lose money over it.

[Lyn Alden @LynAldenContact]

The issue is that all of that data still winds up in Bitcoin. Op return isn’t even the cheapest place to put it, it’s just historically the least harmful place to put it (that’s why it exists).

All of this fork discussion is basically a debate about which bucket to put spam into, since there isn’t a proposal on the table to materially reduce spam or materially increase the cost of the cheapest method to spam.

That’s why I didn’t bother to talk about it over the past year. And I’d see tweets regularly tagging me asking why I’m not talking about it, people claiming it’s the biggest thing and I’m not talking about it (it’s not the biggest thing. I had little reason to talk about a fork with low consensus that doesn’t materially reduce spam.) I have people emailing asking me if Bitcoin is going to die if a fork that just mildly re-arranges where spam goes doesn’t pass (because they somehow think it stops spam, and its leading proponents have called spam an emergency in need of a rapid fix).

Then I’m asked about it on a podcast. So I explained that it’s not an emergency, the fork doesn’t materially stop spam, it comes with some trade-offs, bitcoin is fine, it’s always worth exploring ways to optimize bitcoin for the future, etc.

Then I get dozens of replies from fork proponents asking if I’m compromised, why do I like spam, why don’t I want to stop spam, etc. Most of them (not all) have playground-grade ad hominems attached as well. It’s mostly not their fault though; they’ve been whipped into a frenzy by people saying if they don’t pass this fork then bitcoin dies.

I support people trying to fork if they want to. Bitcoin needs market tests once in a while. But if people ask me my opinion about this fork’s technical merits, the marketing around it, or its probability of becoming consensus, I’ll give my opinion.

[Francesco @_Francesco_R]

@MarcanoFilms @eirhavbru @saylor The delusion about it succeding with minimal support while you didn't manage to convince even a big part of the monetary camp, not even considering the ossificationists, is pretty sad, but sure i guess many use it as a way to get likes and follows.
Can't wait for this to be over.

[Francesco @_Francesco_R]

@MarcanoFilms @eirhavbru @saylor Too many words are those that i read daily from supposedly 'hard money' maxis while they act just like interventionist reactionaries trying to force into bitcoin their own special version of a rationalistic mess.
If anyone is hurting the monetary maxis camp lately is you guys.

[nvk @nvk]

It is amazing to me how many supporting a bitcoin fork don't know what reply protection is.

people will lose their precious bitcoin.

[Francesco @_Francesco_R]

@eirhavbru @MarcanoFilms @saylor Maybe a better solution or a compromise will be found in the future, one that both camps will support, even though it seems that so many are so entrenched in their own tribe that they forget that Btc needs both values.
I hope you guys will come back to reason after 110 will fail.

[Francesco @_Francesco_R]

@eirhavbru @MarcanoFilms @saylor The past year movement was useful to pinpoint issues with Core and to denounce what people deemed wrong, create an alternative, educate many about Btc.
Bip 110 is a degeneration and a reaction that imho is not what sound money is about, aka a priori-predictable stability.

[Francesco @_Francesco_R]

@BitcoinBombadil I think most of you guys are acting in good faith and with good intents but bip110 is not it.
When it fails i hope you'll come back into principled ossification camp, we'll need you.

[Francesco @_Francesco_R]

@DonalDevine It's posts like these that weakens the legit critiques you can have of Core.
What started as a good faith cultural movement is now so deranged that it's what hurts most the 'monetary side'.
I hope you'll come back to reason and principled ossification when Bip110 fails.

[Giacomo ShadowUNbanned Zucco @giacomozucco]

I absolutely agree email is a rather poor analogy, but only in the sense that Bitcoin L1 is a much more spam-prone system than email (it's like email would be if, in order to work, it required every single new SMTP server, forever, to download at least once any single email ever sent).

Before answering you in more detail (and @JuergenStrobel/@janrothen as well), let me premise that I'm always a bit shocked by the way a term which has always been extremely clear outside Bitcoin circles, suddenly has been desemantized to death in the context of ideological Bitcoin fights. Not the first time: for example "cash" was understood by everybody since forever to mean something more private/final than credit, but at the same time more expensive/slow to move around at distance...but then Roger Ver comes out with the unprecedented notion that "cash" means cheap/fast to move around at distance, so people agreeing with Ver and disagreeing with his "enemies" started pretending they didn't know about the normal meaning. Something similar, to some degree, happened recently with the "contiguous CSAM" nonsense: a distinction which would be considered absolutely crazy in any technical, legal or moral context outside Bitcoin, is sold as "natural" in the context of some Bitcoin feud.

Now, back to spam. To the degree that any word in natural language can have a precise an uncontroversial meaning at all, "spam" always meant something like "unwanted data received in bulk". The "unwanted" part obviously implies that it's the receiver to define what is spam or not. The "in bulk" part implies there is some sort of huge economy of scale, or cost sub-linearity. If somebody posts in an online forum I read many comments that I consider irrelevant or off-topic, that's spam. If my phone often rings and it's unwanted aggressive advertisement, that's spam.

This has nothing to do with whether the technical format of the message is protocol-valid (it actually has to be valid, or whether attack wouldn't work), or whether any cost has been sustained by the spammer (there's always an initial cost, but it usually grows sub-linearly with the amount of data), or whether the data has some subjective value for somebody (spam is always subjectively valuable for the spammer, otherwise he wouldn't spam), or whether the data is consuming the scarce attention of a human reader or some other non-human scarce resources (as mentioned in a very nice Lopp keynot speech, one of the huge issues with email spam was data load on relaying servers and not time wasted by the final recipient), or whether spam attacks are preventable or not without major sacrifices (typically they aren't really preventable in open systems, we can only mitigate them a bit with rate limits).

Similarly, it has nothing to do with whether the receiver already accepted that some more or less relevant data, beside overt and intentional spam, will still hit the platform/inbox/forum/protocol. Most emails I receive include again all the previous thread history which I've read already: entirely redundant, but not spam, I accepted it and expected it as part of the mechanism. In forum messages, I will ignore the long user signatures as irrelevant data: entirely redundant, but not spam, I accepted it and expected it as part of the mechanism.

In Bitcoin, I accept and expect the fact that I'm forced to track transactions I'm not the recipient of, because someday I may be recipient of some grandchild transaction spending its outputs. This doesn't mean there can be no protocol-valid, costly data-load which I can consider unexpected, unaccepted, unwanted.

[ODELL @ODELLXYZ]

remember when the richest man in the world said they were going to do a livestream video audit of the gold at fort knox

then seemingly got pushed out of his government role

neither do i