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21 sats \ 1 reply \ @028559d218 1h \ parent \ on: Feedback on the new user experience meta
Hey Girls are into Bitcoin too ;)
Spent the day last week in San Fransisco, California. Walked around for hours with a friend of mine... went to cheap areas, expensive areas, tourist areas, non-tourist areas...
How many Bitcoin Accepted Here stickers did I see?
Zero.
How many stickers at merchant shops or small stores did I see saying anything about 'Bitcoin Accepted'?
Zero.
I don't get it honestly. Even on BTCMap there's basically nowhere in San Fransisco a prominent city where you can pay in Bitcoin. There's like one Smokeshop (I don't smoke) but that's it. I don't understand it.
Thank you for your comment.
I'm not sure if I agree with "low drama". The development community has been under stress for a while, but thus far it hasn't caused irreversible bad decisions, at least not in Bitcoin Core.
I used to watch Matt Kratter almost every day... wake up, get a coffee and watch. Because he has made some great content, especially for relative beginners.
But he has IMO fallen into the "we need to filter" trap pushed by social media influencers. He doesn't talk about the downsides. He doesn't use nuance. It's all... Black and White and he encourages his users to 'run knots' without stating any of the downsides or risks of what that could entail. He preaches "us vs them" because they're "all corrupt" and "bought off"... and "running knots" is the only "solution". It's nuts.
And then there are other people, prominent folks, who go around saying "core is captured" and "they are corrupt" "bought off by the VCs" "compromised" etc etc...
And I felt like the overall presentation by Core members + Merch was extremely thorough, sober, technically logical and reasonable. "Murch" did a really great job IMO. I don't necessarily understand everything or even agree... but the presentation was very very thorough.
I DON'T get that from the filter crowd. Quite the opposite it's emotional pleas.
Historical perspective: I felt similarly in the "blocksize wars"
I wasn't "here" for the blocksize wars. But looking back... doesn't it just seem so obvious?
Deteriorated personal relations between developers (and especially groups of them) could become a significant obstacle if you consider an ideology like "there should be only Core"
My non-technical understanding of this... is that Knots isn't another "implementation". It is a fork. "Implementations" would be other blockchains (BCH BSV for example) whereas knots is a 'client'... a forked client? Twitter is so noisy and influencer-oriented it's hard to get any valuable information typically. So I understand that people cannot work in that environment. I also get that 'feedback' is valuable and 'community engagement' is too...
But there's a fine line. It's hard to find that balance and it shows the challenges of "decentralized" software development where eventually somewhere somehow decisions have to be made.
I think that if you extend the scope beyond the protocol as it is today, not all is guaranteed to be great. If the conservative, properly engineered Bitcoin protocol we have today is to remain that way and it's source of truth remain Bitcoin Core, then as bitcoiners, we must find a way
The pro-filter people... don't really talk about consensus. They talk about mempool policy. Many of the pro-filter voices on Twitter for example... could not explain the difference between mempool policy and consensus. They don't look at mempool.space. They don't coinjoin. They don't use Lightning. They want to "stop the Spam" because "core is corrupt" because "core wants spam"...
But I think they would have a hard time explaining "the spam" as it actually presents in mempool.space on a day-to-day basis.
It's very much "us vs them because they are corrupt" lol
which is why I quipped about the XEC (=Bitcoin ABC) guys in my original comment: they've found themselves on the losing side of a contentious fork twice but when I spoke to a few of them not too long ago, they were full of what almost looked like religious energy, similar to some of the filter champions, convinced that their way is the only right way.
Increasing the block size is "logically" delusional. Blockchains don't scale? No decentralized chain can contain every transaction for every coffee or every candy bar for 8 billion people across the entire Earth for hundreds of years... it's impossible. In addition we have periods now of +spam and/or half-empty blocks how people could advocate 'bigger blocks' thinking that's 'a solution' < 15 years into Bitcoin. It's like ideology over practicality especially obvious now... that Lightning works pretty good and facilities with usage for apps like Stacker News.
The influencers are really pulling their weight for 'changes' - when people want 'to change' at all costs crazy things can happen
Bitcoin's "actual" drama is low... really low. It's the social media/Twitter effect of making the drama appear 'worse' than it really is. It makes people think 'is this ok' when they should just be... using bitcoin imo
Listening to these people (without generalizing) on the podcast circuit, much less Twitter... I think they would be fanatical and hard-headed. In other words create a 'minority fork' that they don't actually believe is the minority fork.
To them it's the One True. So they would stick with it at least in the short term (that's what the influencers would say to do).
Team at least to me implies people who are 'reviewing code'? Making sure that it's safe and sustainable? Making sure that it's sourced in a safe way? That when changes are made to it there is a lot of follow-up?
I think that Ocean (the mining group) means well but they are not telling the whole story.
The spam relative to having it in the witness, is 4x as expensive when in op_return (that's my understanding at least). 4mb of data can be in the witness. A total of 1mb of data can be in the op_return (as a part of the transaction) so op_return spam is by definition smaller, more expensive, and far more limited than when included in witness.
My understanding is that Casey Rod's 'inscription' method requires 2 transactions to 'publish' the data (in witness) but that may not be the case for jpegs/nfts in op_return so the number of 'transactions' is less overall. (That's why Casey R created Runes which use op_return instead of Witness... they are a less spammy version of memecoins).
If all the 'jpegs' were instead put in op_return we would have fewer of them, more compact blocks, and the 'spam' would in general be more expensive for the same size and content.
My understanding is that certain actors are using fake public keys to add data to the chain but those UTXOs are unspendable/very bloating. Op_return outputs are unspendable/can be pruned so don't bloat the UTXO set which is the most harmful aspect of any of the spam.
In addition my understanding is that from an engineering perspective... it's just 'cleaner' and 'neater' to use op_return for arbitrary data (which is what some people seem to want) rather than witness or fake keys. So it's better from an engineered perspective... but I don't know enough to speak to that that's just what I've read...
I hadn't ever heard of Armed Clown before... but the interview made sense to me. His tweets I don't know much about they come across a little harsh.
What I respect is the total divergence from influencer-ism and the big-picture view. It reflects what i've seen in other fields/things unrelated to Bitcoin
but I doubt that a hard fork would be necessary. Forbidding things only takes a soft fork. So if knots were to forbid a transaction with a Witness beyond a certain size... And Core didn't forbid such a witness (didn't change from current rules...)
Then knots would find a given block invalid right? And Core wouldn't?
So it would be a chain split???