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Anyone can introduce a new policy into consensus that hardforks into 1984-Bitcoin where Luke is Big Brother and will correct your moral decline
The direction I'm coming from is this... when the filters people see that filters aren't working... when some degens deliberately send to MARA Jpegs for publishing on-chain taking an entire block...
What will filter people say then? They will say they need a consensus change to fix things.
Core doesn't support a consensus change. Knots will. That's a hard fork. Right?
Wouldn't Knots need 90% nodeshare... to filter the bare multisigs? I am pretty sure (although I am not an expert by any imagination) that unspendable UTXOs was the primary reason for the recent delimiting of op_return...
227 sats \ 5 replies \ @Murch 11 Jun
So far their reaction to the evidence has been to continue claiming that filters work. I have not seen anyone actually propose a fork over this, but I doubt that a hard fork would be necessary. Forbidding things only takes a soft fork. 100% Knots would be insufficient if the people that want bare multisig directly hand them to miners who include them in blocks.
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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???
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Only if you are dumb and don't take the L when your softfork doesn't activate.
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Could you explain this better? Take the L?
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @Murch 11 Jun
If Knots were to introduce soft fork rules that forbid some types of data transactions at the consensus level, they would probably have some method for activating this soft fork. If the activation fails to get broad support, they would be forced to decide to either create a minority fork that enforces the new consensus rules, or to "take the loss" and forego enforcing the new rules.
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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).
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I don't think Knots supports a hardfork, but maybe I'm wrong because I'm fully off the social media dumpster fire (for 2 days because I felt the need to provide a pointer on nostr re: coinos)
Have you got any reference of Luke saying he'd support that?
Wouldn't Knots need 90% nodeshare... to filter the bare multisigs?
100% miner share.
am pretty sure (although I am not an expert by any imagination) that unspendable UTXOs was the primary reason for the recent delimiting of op_return...
Correct, but counterparty has been doing this (with 1-of-3) for a longer time (Note: I suspect it still does but honestly it's been over a decade since I last looked at that)
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100% miner share
Then what exactly... is the entire point of Knots or forking Core?
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Comprehensive configurability, and some form of highly symbolic protest but unfortunately mostly by people that have no idea what they are doing.
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some form of highly symbolic protest
Is this really good for Bitcoin though?
mostly by people that have no idea what they are doing.
That's what I thought... but I wasn't sure
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The drama isn't good for bitcoin either, so it doesn't really matter. It's already toxic.
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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
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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.
Historical perspective: I felt similarly in the "blocksize wars" era1, the effect of which still resonates sometimes in narratives today2. The opinion of developers doesn't matter much for those that remain on the status quo side - after all, nothing changes - but it matters a lot if you're on the "alt" side3 and people will chose a losing side, which can be disastrous, to them. However, you can't stop anyone that wants to fork off, so therefore you can only "let them".
In more recent times, we saw for example a particular rage quit where some of the things that were said, especially about people that were just trying to establish what consensus was or voice their opinion about the proposals made, were coming close to character assassination. All because the process of extending script, from idea to activation is a bit fuzzy and it goes super slow.
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"4. If that truly is going to remain the main direction (it has been implicitly and sometimes explicitly since the start), then even though I recently accepted Murch's proposal to "agree to disagree"5 regarding banning people from the bitcoin github org, and let it go for the time being, I may have to come back to that and try to convince some key people to the current moderation rules to loosen them.
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 where the polarization that is all too common in western societies at large is overcome in favor of consensus. For consensus you have to communicate though and I hope that a smallest denominator (=consensus rules) can remain common to everyone that is validating them right now, and those that enthusiastically validate them in the future.

Footnotes

  1. Leaving the hyperbole at the door, do we really believe that Gavin or Mike were actual bad guys? And vice versa, do bcashers really believe gmax or sipa are evil? It's what current statements on twitter/nostr and sometimes even here on SN would make one believe, especially newcomers! ↩
  2. 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. ↩
  3. #1003579, which is argued to have been Satoshi's practical policy. ↩
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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...
I read ALL of this thread #971277 and this one #978404 reading through ALL of the questions...
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.
No I have no direct references. And Luke has not said that. But I can guess what Human nature will do next based on life experience.
Heavily Armed Clown imo gives the best explanation of this whole "situation" that I've heard anywhere.
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You mean from the tweet in there? Or the later one?? Or the whole show?
I agree with both statements, of course another hard fork would suck. But you can't stop it, so it's pointless to argue. Therefore, if the same retards that are incapable of thinking critically and just repeat the same underinformed crap over and over will fork the coin, then fuck their shitcoin. It's not worth worrying over and spending a ton of time on: if they fork, they fork. Not our problem.
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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
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Yeah I think he's mostly right and not as controversial as he makes it out to be (but let the man have that self-image; doesn't hurt.)
Bitcoin isn't "influencer-ed". If it were, we'd have CTV and OP_CAT activated already. Thats just the social media drama, and why I left that. I still try to read when people prod (like you did right now) but I don't enjoy it, and it's often moronic af. I didn't mind reading through a month worth of this dude's tweets though, makes some reasonable points.
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