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98 sats \ 9 replies \ @Scoresby 13 Jul \ parent \ on: What Do You Guys See As the Best Metric of Bitcoin Adoption? bitcoin
Do you think there can be significant BTC adoption without full blocks (given current consensus rules)?
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It wasn't meant to be a trick question. I'm trying to understand where we differ.
for me adoption is BTC adoption, not blockchain adoption.
I understand you to mean by this that blocks full of jpgs are not adoption?
If yes, this extends to "only monetary transactions count as adoption."
I like monetary transactions, but I also think any transaction that makes it into a block ultimately increases adoption of BTC.
Imagine a world where ASCII art became wildly popular in China. This would not be using English as language, but it might increase the adoption of English in China.
Wizard jpgs in Bitcoin blocks are like this, except they are required to actually use bitcoin as money too (pay fees to miners).
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I understand you to mean by this that blocks full of jpgs are not adoption?
jpegs on the blockchain aren't BTC-as-MoE adoption, if anything, they are detractors. This is why (from how I understand it) Luke hates the spam.
I like monetary transactions, but I also think any transaction that makes it into a block ultimately increases adoption of BTC.
If blocks are full because of jpegs, the price of a transaction goes up without there being an MoE use-case. Inscribed jpegs are also much larger than regular transactions, so per-tx capacity goes down, and that means fees are bloated. Think of what this bloat does to the profitability of liquidity providers on LN, that may need to close a channel. It deteriorates the ecosystem unneccessarily.
Wizard jpgs in Bitcoin blocks are like this, except they are required to actually use bitcoin as money too (pay fees to miners).
What you're saying is basically the Parable of the Broken Window: graffiti isn't good for the economy just because some punks buy cans of spray paint and someone is employed to remove it. This is all money spent unproductively.
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It deteriorates the ecosystem unneccessarily.
A lot hinges on "unnecessarily" here. I don't take Bitcoin adoption as a foregone conclusion. It feels to me like it's a spinning top, wobbling along, sometimes coming close to tipping over. We may need every burst of interest we can get. Perhaps this weird interest in embedding jpgs in txs is helpful in keeping the top spinning. If so, I wouldnt call it unnecessary.
I'd rather have a full block with some monetary txs and some jpgs than a half empty block get mined. Block space is there. Mining anything less than a full block is more of a waste than ming a block full of jpgs.
As far as lightning operators: if a jpg harms them, does my self transfer when I'm playing around harm them? Pay the fees, get the block space. Anything more than this is kid gloves and just lulls us into unrealistic beliefs about market dynamics.
Bitcoin graffiti is good for the economy, although less so if the janitors clean it up. (Sorry for doing contortions with your analogy).
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A lot hinges on "unnecessarily" here.
It's competition of block space and there are actual sides in this discussion. I tell myself that as there not being an intent of Bitcoin serving as a permanent file storage network but there being a mention of p2p electronic cash in the whitepaper, that the intent of using Bitcoin as an MoE is the intended use. However, that is subjective. I'm not a fan of filters, because they ultimately won't make things better, but let's be honest: abuse is crap.
But I don't understand I have to explain this - weren't you doing on-chain transaction the last couple of years? Haven't you been in that situation where you got a 50k sats fee estimate? I thought we've been there.
As far as lightning operators: if a jpg harms them, does my self transfer when I'm playing around harm them?
Have we seen "a jpeg", or millions of spam tx per day? Haven't we seen entire shitcoin protocols (BRC-20) that were aimed at racing inclusion without RBF?
Pay the fees, get the block space.
Yes. But was that really what Bitcoin was envisioning? Shitcoins? NFTs? There's a good case for purism, despite there not being a good defense.
Bitcoin graffiti is good for the economy
How?
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but there being a mention of p2p electronic cash in the whitepaper, that the intent of using Bitcoin as an MoE is the intended use.
I don't see that intention has much to do with it at this point. The network is live and permissionless -- whatever can be done will be done. If we cannot stop someone from using it a certain way, isn't that one of the ways we have to accept it will be used?
The conversation began with the OP's question: what is our proxy for bitcoin winning? I believe block space because this is how we know the network is being used. What is in those blocks is by definition following the bitcoin protocol and using bitcoin.
It doesn't make sense to me that we should say these kinds of transactions are less bitcoin-like than others. These are the consensus rules we have.
If the presence of consensus valid txs in blocks is only a proxy for success when the transactions are the kind we like, we ought to figure out how to fork to get to consensus rules that reflect that. A bitcoin that relies on good behavior will not succeed. Whatever can be done, will be done by an attacker.
I failed in my attempt to twist your analogy: the plan was to reference the broken window fallacy and take your mention of graffiti literally: if someone was doing graffiti around town that was advertising bitcoin, it might actually be good for Bitcoin--unless janitors cleaned it up. But I'll admit I was stretching it to far.