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No. Because I don't see how we can have a "permanent" reduction in arbitrary data storage. People will just figure out other hacky ways to embed arbitrary data. So I don't see the point in chasing. I think the block size limit and the fee market are adequate to address this problem.
It's not a matter of knowing how to find it, its a matter of bothering to look.
Most users won't bother to look (I haven't in the past). I think platforms can make push a user one way or the other. Telegram pushes users toward not bothering.
I am one such dumb user who did not know this.
I still see a difference in ease of scammyness between some communication channels and others. But perhaps the best solution is a platform that only lets users have the name "scammer" so that everyone is always reminded that they could be interacting with a scammer. We could call it scammergram.
I would argue that the mechanism being introduced is this soft-fork-to-stop-spam pattern. It puts the decision of which transactions should be valid up to frequent and recurring debate.
I believe it is encapsulated in this exchange:
When BIP 110 expires, what do its advocates expect to happen? From my conversations with them, it seems that they expect either 1) another soft fork or 2) another soft fork.
In the case of 1) where they manage to get most bitcoiners and miners on board, they need another fork to make it all permanent, and then more forks when spammers embed data in new ways. In the case of 2) where they do not get support, they seem interested in trying again and floating a different fork to "fix the spam."
While this is not a mechanism in bitcoin's block validation rules that allows anyone to veto transactions, it creates a system where Bitcoiners must decide which transactions are "spammy" and to be stopped from happening and which ones are "real." Already, BIP 110 is setting up two such occasions in as many years (deciding whether to run BIP 110, and then deciding whether to run whatever comes next when it expires).
telegram does a horrible job of identity. they simultaneously make it look like identity is solid and yet make it trivial to fake.
If telegram made everyone function as an anon, people would be forced to evaluate a user based on what they said.
there are some places where it is easier to scam someone than others. companies don't have to use the worst ones.
Good decision! Telegram is such a horrible place for support. It shocks me how many bitcoin companies use it.
I will also admit to not being an expert on code improvements, but as far as I have learned, rule changes designed to address vulnerabilities (or upgrades in general) have never targeted things that were commonly being done with bitcoin transactions.
In the case of the inflation bug in 2010, someone clearly expected to be able to create more bitcoin than 21 million. The soft fork that changed this certainly was a reduction in what that person thought they could do with bitcoin.
However, I don't think such a case is very much like the case we are dealing with now regarding spam.
In general, I suspect (without much real evidence, I'll admit) that vulnerability fixes in Bitcoin have usually confined themselves to altering code to return to expected behavior.
This, I believe, is where BIP 110 proponents would say spam is not part of the expected behavior of bitcoin. I agree with this. However, I don't think spam is going to be pinned down to any one kind of transaction. And I think the transaction types they want to prevent are part of expected behavior.
Bitcoin has many kinds of transactions. How are we supposed to decide when one kind of transaction is being abused enough to warrant stopping everyone from using Bitcoin in that way?
That’s different because it introduces a new party to the validation process who is outside of the network.
As far as I can tell, introducing a new party to the validation process that is outside the network is exactly the plan: "spam" will be determined by some third party called "the community" or which only includes people who are "not spammers" and who are "good bitcoiners" -- all of which is entirely subjective.
This is adjacent to something I've been thinking about for a while:
All writing is advertising.
I even have a post I've drafted about it. I differ with Didion in that I'm not so convinced that it's hostile (at least it's not overtly so). Perhaps more like seduction. Not all seduction is hostile.
I'm closer to that last part: "tricking the reader into listening to the dream." Writers are tricksy people.
I appreciate your response here, and I agree with many of your points.
I, too, am running an old version of Core. Nor do I have any particular attachment to that project.
I've read the BIP, although I'll certainly admit that I am capable of misunderstanding things. The BIP's statements that "spam is best fought with policy/filters, not consensus" are given the lie by the very fact that RDTS is temporary. Additionally, if one listens to Luke or Dathon or Mechanic, it seems that continual forking is very much in line with the BIP 110 vision.
I think Bitcoin is quite a bit different than a telephone network. And we should be very careful about calling previously valid transaction types "exploits." It may even be the case that with Bitcoin once a transaction type is valid and widely-used, we're stuck with it.
I use bitcoin because it is the best chance I have to resist state control of my money. It achieves this by making it very hard for the state to prevent me from getting my utxos in a confirmed block.
BIP 110 claims to improve this censorship resistance of bitcoin by maintaining low burdens on node runners. But in doing so, it seems to me to sacrifice the confidence a utxo-holder has that they will be able to use Bitcoin the way they thought they could when they first bought in.
As far as I can tell, a user of bitcoin who bought bitcoin in 2011 can still use bitcoin in the same ways they did when they first started using it (plus in a bunch of new ways). And so on and so on until BIP 110. Now, there is a proposal to say all these people who used Bitcoin in a way that we don't like lose their guarantees. This seems like a very dangerous path to me.
Like I said at the top, I agree with many of your points, especially that we should be thinking about how we pay for bitcoin development. But I am entirely unconvinced by BIP 110.
This is how I think about it:
Everyone agreed that a certain set of transaction types could be included in a valid block.
One group of people has decided they don't like the transactions a different group is using, and are advocating a change to what can go in a valid block so that such transactions can no longer be included in a block.
My understanding of most changes to block validation rules is that they have been designed not to remove previous ways of transacting. BIP 110 is a significant departure from this philosophy in that it's only purpose is to remove previous ways of transacting.
How would this process look different if it was a government entity pushing for a rule change that made blocks with txs containing OFAC-banned addresses invalid?
I see the subjective part being a decision to identify some valid transaction types as bad and to be banned while leaving other valid transaction types alone. How do we decide which transaction types are spammable and which are not?
If we treat Bitcoin as objective, a valid transaction would be a valid transaction.
Now, I've heard from BIP 110 supporters that I'm being too literal in my argument and that if I held this rule of never removing the validity of a transaction, we'd never be able to change any of Bitcoin's rules.
I don't find this very compelling, though. I think there is a significant difference between banning a transaction type that is in fairly widespread use and banning a transaction type that was purposefully left undefined for future upgrades.
No one is saying the people who make spam transactions don't care about them or are content to let them be frozen. The argument is that those valid transactions are bad, immoral, harmful to bitcoin, or just not what we like. This is subjective. People may use the let's fork and ban method now on spam, but who's to say they won't use it on transactions made by criminals next?
Thanks for taking the time to write this up. I remember all the talk about Spruce Pine, but as with so many things, as soon as everybody else stopped talking about it, I stopped thinking about it.
It seems to me that people always figure out ways around choke points if they need to. Wasn't Germany refining gasoline from coal during WWII? Probably the best case scenario is a sort of begrudging ongoing trade like we seem to have now, where nations talk a big game, but it's more trouble than it's worth to bring everything in house.
It is strange that this became a thing that everybody is willing to make a stand on.
I think it comes down to each side feeling there is a threat to an essential aspect of bitcoin: the BIP 110 side sees spam as a threat to node runners, the Core side sees overly strong spam mitigation efforts as a threat to Bitcoin's incentive structure (hmm, that isn't quite right when I say it: what I mean is Bitcoin's" game theory" but that phrase gets used so widely as to be almost without meaning).
spam is spam. there's nothing wrong with coordinating among peers to disincentivize it.
The BIP 110 approach is to go down a road of perpetual 51% attacks to root out spam. What make me nervous is that they want Bitcoiners to get used to the idea of "bad" valid transactions. If we go down this road, I have zero confidence that we stop with spam.
I don't think the meme applies.
In the context of the US, we have a constitution which supposedly limits the powers of the government. Thing needs to be interpreted though. How we do the interpretation is constantly being negotiated.
Setting a norm for an interpretation that says when using a third party, people have abdicated their fourth amendment protections weakens the cases where the fourth amendment used to be clear (I think we aren't far from US government arguing it has the right to review the data on your phone without a warrant).
Think about TSA: normalizing the suspension of rights in order to do something as basic as traveling because of 9/11 allows for people in government positions to argue for suspensions in similar but adjacent places (eg banking, using the internet).
Another case is the way congress likes to play games with their rules of order (no more filibuster, no need for a supermajority, etc). Once these things are removed, they'll be used by both parties. It's short sighted for whoever is in power to choose expedience over the protection afforded by such things. And things like a supermajority requirement on some votes can be a protection against tyranny...but it can also be dispensed with.
I believe that it is the case that some constraints on government power only hold as long as we keep them universally in place.
But if you are in on the trick, there aren't any surprises. and surprises are one lovely thing of stories. so there must be some amount of the reader still being willing to have the trick played on them.
Looking forward to your review.