I would refer to Sjor's reasoning

I'm simplifying terribly, but I think the general issue is that putting the data in the witness makes syncing and validating the chain harder for future and current node operators. Validating each transaction requires checking it against all unspent transaction outputs from the entire blockchain (utxo set.) These have to be kept in memory by the nodes forever. If you can avoid having every node add to this with something that's in fact unspendable and only meant to record data, it makes validation quicker and nodes are cheaper to operate. It's a tragedy of the commons situation. Obviously the utxo set is going to grow regardless, but we might as well not encourage it to get worse by needlessly adding outputs that can never be removed.

Buying a ledger without having a P.O. Box. At least it taught me that all customer data really is toxic.

This is an incredibly lazy argument, and this self-righteous moral high ground is a complete nonstarter for me. Are we for a free market or not? How about a free and open protocol anyone can use? Yes, I'm sure most of us would love it if the bitcoin network was only used for actual bitcoin transactions. But guess what, it's not. It turns out people love to use bitcoin in ways that may seem irrational to us. Whether that's messages memorializing life events, Merkle tree roots of timestamped data, or meme jpegs, it doesn't really matter. There are ways to embed this data in bitcoin transactions, and the worst offenders will bloat the utxo set in such a way that it makes running and syncing a node harder for everyone joining the network. OP_RETURN was always a pragmatic solution here. Furthermore, the relay policy has increasingly little bearing on what makes it into blocks, much less what's allowable by consensus. All limiting mempool relay does is encourage third party, out-of-band tx relay, which further incentivizes mining centralization. Is there anyone who really thinks mining pools aren't already centralized enough? Next they're going to explain to us how no speak easies existed during American prohibition because alcohol was outlawed.

The icing on the cake is that filling blocks with 700KB of OP_RETURN data would actually go a long way towards Luke's goal of 300KB blocks to validate. (An argument that was interesting and thought provoking.) Most of the time to sync a new node is in validating transactions and mapping the UTXO set, to which OP_RETURN doesn't contribute as it's unspendable. It doesn't even get a witness discount!

I'm so tired of this debate. I get that you're morally superior, but at least develop a coherent argument I can entertain before throwing ad hominems and then claiming victimhood at the hands of the cabal.

I appreciate your contributions Murch! Zero moderation is not practically feasible without a tragedy of the commons situation. I'm sorry that the alternative inevitably puts every action under a microscope for public airing of the grievances. We're all just passionate about the project.

This is interesting, and somehow I don't doubt the results. Much like assuming absolute responsibility for your place in life is beneficial on an individual level yet can lead to problems when applied to society at large, perhaps the existence of smartphones and social media is anxiety inducing for society as a whole, yet the rational individual choice is still to participate, so as not to get ostracized and miss out on social engagement. We can't compare results with a counterfactual society, but maybe polling students at schools with no phone policies vs students elsewhere could provide some insight.

Exactly this. But I would also assign a rebuttal (could be brief), and even the counter-argument to the rebuttal. Get comfortable with the process of reasoning and laying out an argument. Logical reasoning shouldn't stop because your agenda is satisfied. After all, empathy and an understand your opposing view's perspective should help you refine your case, or even your position if you have an open mind.

We recently did one of these with my son on fracking. While the initial stance was "not worth the risks," there were several compelling counter arguments, especially when taking second order effects into account. It's clearly not a cut and dry issue, but one that depends heavily on context.

As an engineer and someone who has filed several patents, I like the idea of incentivizing creativity with a temporary monopoly on your own work, and then opening it up to the commons with full documentation. In practice, I think the system is abused and does more harm than good in this day and age. Patents are now mostly used as defense in high cost, high stakes lawfare.

The patent system needs major reform and the USPTO needs much better help vetting submissions. The duration is too long on fast developing fields and claims are being accepted that should never be patentable in the first place. There's a whole cottage industry of patent trolls who have never created anything of their own, but can theorize someone else might try to make a product that does X and they file an overly broad patent for it. If these sort of abuses can't be corrected, I think we'd be better off without IP rights entirely.

I worked in one for many years as an engineer. Granted, I did mostly design work, but I had a great time automating some of our more tedious manual processes. Creating custom tools for the technicians and the real time feedback of improving designs for manufacturability was rewarding as well.

Czar of the universe answer is to fix this in an elegant way early with a decade or so to move the coins before anything consequential happened. In the real world, you would never build consensus for such a thing. Even if you did, the process would be so contentious that a vocal contingent could cause a substantial loss of faith in the immutability of bitcoin. It might even be preferable to let the chaos play out. Unless there's overwhelming consensus, any solution becomes a poisoned chalice - even if it's technically elegant.

Literally pay a mining fee? Because then once you brute force a private key you just buy some mining hardware and sit on the tx until you can mine a single block, right?

I'm pretty sure St. Anne's in Zimbabwe has been doing this for like 5 years at this point. There have been several @anita posch podcasts with the school's principal, Ms. Aurra. When your local currency is garbage it kind of becomes a necessity. Good for Lomond School though!

There's a long way to go yet, but it does feel like bitcoin the monetary network is transitioning to a new era. (I'm also encouraged by the record high 1 zettahash hashtate as miners turn on even more hashpower in the face of global trade and monetary uncertainty.) As someone who was sick of seeing bitcoin trade as just another leveraged tech play, this is really quite exciting development. Once it establishes a safe haven reputation, the game will be in full swing.

Prior to working on lightning I designed electronics and ran a pick and place machine for a small EE company. We could produce thousands of PCBs per day on one line (solder stencil + pick & place + reflow oven) though the average run was much smaller. We did the same basic operations as described in this article - populate PCBs, flash with firmware, package them, and test. Pretty much all of these steps can be made much more efficient if you have the volume to justify it. My takeaway was that it's really a numbers game.

I can't imagine they sell that many $2,000 underspecced phones, but I'm sure if they did, they could find further efficiencies in chip procurement costs, assembly, testing, even shipping. And that's not to mention amortizing the engineering and design costs over a large number of goods sold.

Mempools are brilliant for censorship resistance. They're also critical to:

IMO, mempools are highly underappreciated for all the benefits they bring.

Is it a nice service, or does it hinder accurate fee estimation for peer-peer users when a significant portion of fees are paid out-of-band? Is this peer-peer usage of the network? What affect does it have on miner decentralization?

Sounds like a completely different experience with the WiFi version of this miner. I'm running the BMM100 with ethernet connection and it's been rock solid and easy to use.

I've got a kid who's going to have to start thinking about a direction in life over the next few years. I'm not very confident in what advice to give, though I do think fields of study that offer practical training for an in demand profession are always en vogue. I'm not surprised to see CS, engineering, or nursing at the top of the list of least-regretted majors, but those tend to benefit from fairly specific personality types, and even then the industries stand to see significant disruption in the next decade.

Part of university should be about nurturing your own natural curiosity and exploring your interests. But ignoring the practical reality of the prospects of a good paying job in that pression is daft, especially with the ever increasing tuition rates. I hope he's able to settle on something like one of these few fields that satisfies his personal interests, offers a creative outlet and plenty of opportunity. The prospect of choosing a career on the first try that perfectly satisfies one's ikigai is daunting, especially when the stakes are so high. His personality is different enough from my own that I wonder if he might be happier with an entrepreneurial endeavor rather than something like engineering/CS. If so, I'll try to encourage that, but it's certainly a path that could likewise lead to regret. It's certainly an interesting time to be facing this decision and finding a place in the world.

I'm not sure raising the outbound fee of that channel would prevent any of this from happening. It sounds like the node operator should have set fees higher to cover the actual cost of draining their channels' liquidity.

One strategy is to open up large enough (and probably fewer) channels and set the fees such that if they're entirely depleted, opening and closing costs will be recouped. If the channel is depleted, it's done it's job, just open another.

Another is to dynamically adjust fees such that as liquidity becomes more scare in a channel, the fee rate (ppm) goes up. This naturally balances supply and demand. There are many plugins or node managers that will do this in an automated fashion, i.e. CLBoss.

There does seem to be a general equilibrium problem, where you can find the stables effective fees for your channels only to gain a peer (or even just liquidity with an existing peer) who has much greater demand for outbound liquidity and then your channels get saturated/depleted. Again, I think the only viable solutions are to completely automate channel fee management, or to set fees very conservatively.

I read a critique of these sorts of figures that suggested the conclusions are generally wildly out of line due to the wording and nature of the surveys conducted. Basically, people like me that keep just enough money in their bank account to pay off a credit card statement and mortgage every month would be categorized as "paycheck-to-paycheck." Hint to the headline writers: my savings are not held in a bank account.

Yeah, their hashrate measurement is a moving average over several days. I'm sure there's randomness/noise when looking at the hourly data, but maintaining 1ZH for even half a day impresses me regardless.

One can dream, right? I need to complete the set. =D