Any "bitcoiner" who wants Bitcoin to have more than one use case is just a pathetic shitcoiner scammer larping as a bitcoiner.
Don't trust anything people like this say, all they want is to take your money.
If you need something to do today, go and download a Nigerian government budget and go through it. You’ll see signs and wonders.
Even small businesses must not run their finances with the kind of anyhowness that they are using to run Nigeria. It’s insane.
You’ll see two different ministries being in charge of the exact same projects, with billions allocated to each of them separately. Projects that never get executed, by the way.
The most irritating ones are the vague terms like “special projects” or “empowerment” with billions in front of them. What does “special projects” even mean? Let’s not even talk about the typo errors and incomplete sentences.
You will randomly see line items like “federal ministry of.” Who is “Federal ministry of” and why are they getting billions? In some areas, you can tell it’s just copy and paste from last year’s budgets.
It’s insane!!
The predominant term used in the white paper is "transaction." Satoshi's Bitcoin obtained, relayed, and redundantly stored transactions. Where "message" is used in the white paper it is just referring to a sub-protocol used to communicate transaction information between nodes. It's just common technical terminology used in protocol work -- protocols are by definition algorithms that send and receive messages, so "messages" in this computer science context is a generic technical term that can be used for any kind of data sent by any kind of protocol, regardless of formats, restrictions, or intended usage of that data, and that's how it's being used in the white paper. The term "transaction" and the formats and space restrictions in the code much better inform us what the intended use was or is.
That said, it's always been possible to embed non-financial content in blockchain transactions, akin to how it has always been possible to draw scrawls on a dollar bill. However, embedding *legible* non-textual content, and thus most legally risky kinds of content, was quite difficult in Bitcoin during its early years, due to several kinds of enforced limitations, until SegWit and some other "upgrades" made it easier, culminating in the inscriptions hack and core30, which has practically invited legible non-textual content, and thus a far wider variety of content for which node operators can be held legally liable, which, unlike other services for which legal precedents exist, blockchain node operators have no ability to delete without severely degrading or destroying their functionality.
37% of Bitcoin block space is now non-financial data (~0.58MB/block).
The tx fees spammers pay are very low for getting their files stored forever on someone else's computer. They're essentially free-riding on a $2T network built and secured for payments.
And v30 was just released. This gets worse.
And some are still wondering why a soft fork is now on the table.
Arbitrary content on blockchains makes them far more risky, legally and morally, to operate, than with blockchains confined to financial transactions. Running a node where one cannot selectively delete unacceptable content without wider functional disruption is also far riskier than running data services where one can selectively delete unacceptable content without causing wider functional disruption.
There are a wide variety of moral and legal categories of arbitrary content, and many of them are radically different from each other. CSAM/CP, other kinds of obscenity, copyrighted material, censored political content, trade secrets, classified material, and many other such categories are treated in extremely different ways from each other by morality and by law. What's more, each of the 100s of jurisdictions over which a blockchain runs has its own wide variations. Some legal prohibitions, such as those against CSAM/CP, have extremely high popularity and involve highly motivated enforcement.
Government response to one kind of content is an extremely poor predictor of its response to another kind of content. The response of one government to a kind of content is often a poor predictor of a response to another government to the same content.
Nodes on blockchains that, through means such as escalating fee schedules, byte limits, format enforcement, etc., discourage arbitrary content, are far less risky to run than nodes on blockchains that encourage arbitrary content.
Bitcoin should be pure. It should serve only two functions.
1. A store of value
2. A medium of monetary exchange
These two functions should be protected at all costs. Everything else should be filtered as much as humanly possible, ideally at a consensus level.
@adam3us Calmly, yes. Hats off for that, many should take that attitude as example (including the undersigned).
But making sense... let's say I calmly, respectfully but firmly disagree with that part.
Humanity is going to do just fine without an immutable database of arbitrary data, but is completely fuçk3d if we don't have Bitcoin as MONEY.
We only get one chance.
Run Knots, hurry up.
Luke removed from Core security list after a decade. No process, no appeal, no accountability
$2T running on handshake agreements
Either we build governance institutions, or informal power becomes formal hierarchy
h/t @eric_lombrozo