"Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's" - Matthew 22:21

The Christian doctrine says pay your taxes. Jesus said to pay em. Yes, Christian ethics does not consider paying state taxes to be immoral, rather, it is a duty. The ancient people were smart enough to not accept fiat currency, they wanted coins of silver and gold! Ancient civilizations had far less trust.

(Not religious myself but wanted to offer another data point to this).

An LLM rephrasing of my comment? I think it still captures the core ideas, and seem to be a universal truth, or at least a human truth.

It depends how we define taxation.

The free market providing services, even on a voluntary basis, becomes de facto involuntary tax due to social pressure or necessity. Its just ongoing payment for something. That the monetary flow goes: Me -> Service Provider vs Me-> Gov tax -> Service Provider , may have efficiency gains, but its not so simple.

I consider tax to be maintenance of a service or common property. In the case of Land, that's paying for the state guns to defend it, you cant remove it without removing the defense. Someone is getting paid for the risk.

Could we get better value for our monetary spend to private providers vs Gov distribution to private providers from Taxation? Maybe, but i am also not convinced a private market would always come out cheaper. There are efficiencies and negotiation at scale by governments too.

What about things that are shared possessions, common possessions. Corporal, physical 'ownership' is just one type.

There is maintenance costs in terms of energy, compute and storage to maintain something even digitally owned by someone.

Running a node is supplying to the commons, and the resource costs are a form of implicit taxation on the participants.

Fiat is worse by far. Taxation, or maintenance of the commons, becomes inevitable in sufficiently advanced social system systems. It is unavoidable, the argument is for the specifics of what is taxed, how it is taxed, etc.

Even a hypothetical 10 person Bitcoin citadel is going to need everyone to contribute in some way, that is tax. 10 people will argue over the specifics.

But Fiat:

Humanity thrived for thousands of years under regimes of taxation, to the the ruler, the King, the State. It is sound money, or lack there of, that is causing such social issues in our society today. Fiat, or unbound money, leads to lack of discipline.

It was the unbinding of physical quantities (like gold in storage), from monetary supply that lead to such dramatic devaluations per unit of account. Inflation eats away at peoples savings and purchasing power, it acts as a invisible tax to all economic participants.

If we could eliminate tax entirely, every sufficiently advanced social system would fail. Bad. If we could eliminate fiat (by going back to sound money, where the politician cannot change the monetary supply by fiat), we may trend towards utopia.

We can’t accept bloat in the name of post quantum. 100kb per tx are already a non-starter. This is and always will be a prohibitively expensive tx in BTC at 1s/vb.

We do need more opcodes for expressability, but implementing those that encourage or require massive tx sizes is irresponsible.

Don’t forget the west securitized debt in the 80s with the invention of mortgage backed securities. So the property ponzi became a systemic attribute and the engine of low velocity money, it could not stop, lest we ire capital and the retired.

That and the ‘71 gold conversion cancelation are the two largest macroeconomic events of our world, and impact us today.

I hope for a correction in pricing of real estate. That and student debt are the two greatest burdens for the youth, and seem to exist only today to transfer wealth from young to old. Bring on the 1 BTC houses, then 1 BTC mansions, then 1 BTC estates.

A very stupid take. Running mail infrastructure requires technical knowledge. It requires ongoing maintenance. People avoid it today because it is and always was difficult. Complexity lies with things like SPF, DKIM and DMARC. All which require custom configurations to interact with the mail network.

Even running a Bitcoin Core full node is trivial compared to Mail, it requires no out of the box configurations. Download, run it, sync the chain. I would not accept the argument that running a full node is like running a mail server either, its significantly easier, but does require some resources (fast net connection, storage for blocks, etc).

Running a self-custodial wallet, and recording the seed phrase, like with Blockstream Green Wallet, is a basic thing that everyone on the planet can do. The level of complexity is somewhere near "install candy crush" and "use a pen and paper". Trivial for billions to do right here and now, today.

Don't let these morons come up with excuses. Install an app. Write down some words. Any idiot on the planet can do this.

tidalcycles -- was unfamiliar. Cool stuff, ill have to experiment myself

What format are these music notation in? How do you play this back?

You have a chain split, which defeats the purpose of a single distributed consensus.

You don't solve the byzantine generals problem by adding more generals, especially untruthful ones.

What you want is a change to the consensus rules to remove transactions you don't like. This whole debate is about the standardness rules (which allow p2p unconfirmed tx propagation) which are being relaxed.

Blocking propagation of tx's achieves nothing when the block is mined and your client has to request the tx from the p2p network anyway. Ive taken a very negative view of spam, and non-monetary transactions too. I'm pro-single client (Core), and anti-spam, pro-monetary usage. You can be all these things and anti-censorship.

The problem is that you cannot deterministically determine if something is spam. Its an immutable property of the internet. If spam was easy to detect and filter, we would never see a spam email again. Its not as simple as looking for a 'bad op code'.

The more heavy handed one gets with the filter, the more false positives for monetary transactions, and thus explicit censorship is enabled. There is also the issue that by creating more rules -- which is what Luke is proposing, you end up with more knobs to enforce censorship. And absolutely Luke wants control over what is and isn't allowed to be done.

Its never been about the first order effects -- Its about building capabilities for censorship. Give a censor (like Luke) an inch, and he will take a mile. History has demonstrated this! You have to understand that your true adversary is the spammers, and they are wilful, and will dedicate their pathetic lives to trying to bypass any standardness filters. Such is the internet, and always has been. The more you filter, the harder they fight back, and inflate the UXTO set, increase node resources required etc.

Bitcoin has been striving for to achieve transaction "indistinguishability" with taproot -- for censorship resistance. You cannot have both things. Tx's can be indistinguishable and uncensorable, or distinguishable and censorable.

What has been proposed makes no difference if you run knots. The only "advantage" in running knots is that you want to support a fork chain if and when it happens. Knots is already blocking propagation of monetary transactions in the form of lightning force closes. Lets not make it worse by running broken clients.

If you want to change the consensus rules, that is fine -- Its looking more like Luke's consensus changes to his minority fork client will proceed, and you can enjoy his fork chain, and leave the people who understand whats actually happening in peace.

You might want to refresh your memory on what happened last time a vocal community member and minority-client community thought Bitcoin was going in the wrong direction.

I wish you would direct your anger at the vandals, not at the janitors.

It is not good to have multiple clients.

"I don't believe a second, compatible implementation of Bitcoin will ever be a good idea. So much of the design depends on all nodes getting exactly identical results in lockstep that a second implementation would be a menace to the network. The MIT license is compatible with all other licenses and commercial uses, so there is no need to rewrite it from a licensing standpoint." --SN, 2010

Bitcoin Core, the satoshi client, is fine.

Time won’t tell. No miner is that stupid when money is on the line.

Stop listening to this nonsense. Core is not malicious. These fears are being whipped up by a non-technical group of Johnny come lately folks who do not know history, or the risk in delegating trust to one man.

Knots is broken, and will filter out essential LN txs. Don't run Knots with LND, you are only going to have pain.

You’re arguing in bad faith and trying to make it a religious thing. I won’t argue anything along the road you are trying to lead.

It’s about a crazy man doing crazy things. Not about religion.

You are misstating the argument. It’s about individual behaviors, not genetics or lineage or even religion.

Luke has a decade and more of unacceptable behavior in this and other projects. Calling into question his ability to lead a project is absolutely valid. It’s not even about nitpicking some IRC comment, it’s year after year of poisonous actions. Even this whole affair is poison that Bitcoin did not need.

Everything you have said is ass backward friend. If you believe a single word of this, please rethink where you are getting your information. I’ve been around a long time, and can tell you that you are listening to the wrong people.

Re Knots, Please be warned that Knots will fork off the network one day. Then Luke’s followers can enjoy his “no hookers and no blackjack” “bitcoin” minority fork. It will be like bcash again, airdrop for everyone!

He’s been trying to take control of things for a decade+, and now, thanks to useful idiots, actually has a decent amount of suckers running his minority fork software. Be careful who you listen to.

Is it tho?

Conways law states that organizations design systems based on their communication, that is we write software the way we behave and communicate with each other. It’s all fractal reflections of invisible structures, each subsystem is similar the more you zoom in.

It is not absurd to state that a contentious, frequently half-truth spouting and authoritarian leader would write software that is contentious, non-truthful and authoritarian.

They both do fiat, shitcoins and bitcoin.