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207 sats \ 21 replies \ @SimpleStacker 13h \ on: Gmax's theocratic populist sex prohibition analogy for filters bitcoin
Yikes!
Greg really jumped the shark with that analogy. He should've explained more thoroughly why variance in what traffic gets relayed can damage the function of the network, something I could reasonably agree with.
Instead, he went on some wild tangent about theocracies as a response to someone simply wanting more options. (I suppose his point is that those options can be used for censorship; but that's kind of like saying guns are bad because guns can be used for bad things.)
Sad that social competency and technical competency aren't well correlated, and indeed sometimes appear to be anti-correlated.
its [your mempool's] purpose is to model what will get mined.
It really all comes down to this. Are you running a mempool for yourself or to attempt to exert control over other people's transactions?
If running for yourself,
blocksonly may be what you are looking for.If you are trying to exert control over other people's transactions...then: theocratic populist sex prohibition.
Meaning no sarcasm, I think the analogy works technically, and is humorous (although doubtfully intended to be), and probably should have been more concise.
I'm not sure if the filter side understands this, but my concept of their argument is that they imagine running a filter can somehow influence the type of transactions that end up in blocks.
If this is true, then, the action intends to have control over other people's actions.
If not true, then why have the argument at all? Run
blocksonly and you achieve your goal.reply
Are you running a mempool for yourself or to attempt to exert control over other people's transactions?
I dunno, I think that's a huge stretch. If I hear some information and choose not to relay it, am I trying to exert control over other people's thoughts? I think forcing me to relay is trying to exert control over my speech. People are free to get their information from someone else, I am not stopping them from doing that.
I'm not sure if the filter side understands this, but my concept of their argument is that they imagine running a filter can somehow influence the type of transactions that end up in blocks.
I agree that running a filter is probably not gonna influence what ends up in blocks. And that it could incentivize side channels and all that.
IMO Core should focus their arguments on why relay filters are bad for network functionality.
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If I hear some information and choose not to relay it, am I trying to exert control over other people's thoughts? I think forcing me to relay is trying to exert control over my speech.
You have definitely hit on the point people are disputing!
am I trying to exert control over other people's thoughts?
I never said anything about thoughts. I said transactions, particularly transactions that end up in blocks.
If you don't want to see such transactions in your mempool, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to operate a mempool that will be fairly different from the next expected block. So, run
blocksonly.If
blocksonly is not a good solution for you, why? Is it because you would like to run a useful mempool? Then you need to have as good a view as possible into the most likely next block.If you want to participate in transaction relay because you believe it may have some influence what ends up in the next block...then theocratic populist sex prohibition is not a huge stretch.
Thoughts?
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If you don't want to see such transactions in your mempool, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense ...
If blocksonly is not a good solution for you, why? Is it because you would like to run a useful mempool?
The thing is, it shouldn't matter to you, or anyone else, why I choose to relay some data and not relay others. Whether it makes sense or not is beside the point. It's my right to choose what information I want to share and what I want to keep.
I really think Core-proponents are gonna dig themselves in a deeper hole if they keep using this line of reasoning, essentially trying to claim that they are the anti-authoritarian ones, while simultaneously being the ones trying to take away options.1
They should just be up front with it: "From a technical point of view, we think inconsistent mempools is bad for the network, so we want to limit that option. If you need those options, you're free to choose another implementation, but in our view if a significant number of people did that, there will be (A) and (B) bad downstream effects."
I think niftynei did a good job in her recent post explaining this, that you actually pointed to (#1227437)
Footnotes
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Look, I understand their point of view, on how filters are an attempt to stifle the propagation of data (i.e. a form of censorship). But it's a very tortured form of argument because the choice to not propagate data in Knots' case is an individual choice and not a forced choice. At the same time, the decision to limit people's options feels like a forced choice coming from a centralized authority (Core). Thus, I don't think Greg Maxwell's line of reasoning is gonna resonate with most people. ↩
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The thing is, it shouldn't matter to you, or anyone else, why I choose to relay some data and not relay others... It's my right to choose what information I want to share and what I want to keep.
Uh, yes, but it is not your right to tell someone else to make the tool available to you and maintain it for you if they don't want to do that.
People should run whatever software they would like to run. If you want to continue to have an OP_RETURN limit, run Core v29. No one is stopping you from making the individual choice to do this.
Also, Knots exists and if there is enough community support, people will maintain that project in the way they like. This seems like a fine solution. I'm not sure I even see why there is an on-going argument, unless the people who want filters are not content with their individual choices and require others to run such filters as well.
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However, I am persuaded by approaches like this from earlier today:
The only formalized governance structure that bitcoin needs is the agreement that we should optimize for maximum user agency, so that individuals can run nodes and enforce rules (#1235383)
And also by @schmidty's PR to undeprecate OP_RETURN.
I personally don't think filters are at all effective, so if people want them, I can be convinced that we should just leave them in and move on.
(I think the only reason I've come back to this debate, after avoiding it for two years, is that I really strongly react to the idea that consensus valid transactions somehow shouldn't be allowed. We all agreed to certain rules when we accepted bitcoin in trade. if people don't like those rules, they should be straightforward and argue to change them. But nobody is talking about changing consensus rules and so all this feels fake to me, and it irritates me.)
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People should run whatever software they would like to run
Agreed.
Knots exists and if there is enough community support, people will maintain that project in the way they like. This seems like a fine solution
agreed
I personally don't think filters are at all effective, so if people want them, I can be convinced that we should just leave them in and move on.
agreed
it is not your right to tell someone else to make the tool available to you and maintain it for you
Also agreed.
I'm largely on Core's side in this debate. I think they can deprecate
datacarriersize if they want to!I am only reacting to Greg's arguments, which I think are weak and probably even counterproductive for his cause.
Sometimes it's better to say, "Sorry I can't convince you, but we're doing it this way", rather than try too hard to make an unconvincing argument. Remember Satoshi's words, "If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry."
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Sometimes it's better to say, "Sorry I can't convince you, but we're doing it this way", rather than try too hard to make an unconvincing argument.
Fair enough. You have some wisdom there (even if I disagree with you about the weakness of the theocratic populist sex prohibition argument).
I'm not sure I even see why there is an on-going argument
I don't think there is an ongoing argument anymore, it's just a bullshit slinging match, primarily from the Core side.
Calling people who don't want to relay CSAM theocratic authoritarians and making out that filters are a slippery slope towards censorship by denying the distinction between monetary and non-monetary transactions is just nakedly polluting the debate with misinformation.
Obviously you cannot deterministically distinguish spam from non-spam, but it doesn't have to be deterministic, nobody is arguing for that.
And either running knots is a threat to the network or bitcoin is not trivially vulnerable to state (even legitimately theocratic) MONETARY censorship. Which is it?
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you're going to relay CSAM anyway, it will just be spammed in addresses and you'll find out in a few confirmations when it is too late to do anything about it.
freedom is ugly, Bitcoin is ugly, people are ugly.
But you know what is beautiful? The truth.
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Fragmented?
Also, is it theocratic to prohibit sex with a 4 year old?
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it doesn't make a whole lot of sense
Bitcoin is built incentives, not the homo economics rational actor hypothesis. You try to fuck the network you get fucked. People will do what they will do. Some will passively relay. Others will make evaluative judgements. Bitcoin is censorship resistant as a monetary network due to orthogonality and the fact that if everyone together is trying to influence values on the network the aggregate result is that monetary transactions will always get through, but content will incur a cost (even if that cost is direct to miner fees, because the miner takes a risk that nodes won't relay the block fast enough for the longest chain to work in their favour). Bitcoin is not censorship resistant as a distributed database for so structured content.
If this is not true then bitcoin is vulnerable to sybil attack and monetary censorship as it is today, whether knots exists or not, because while governments don't have to resources for an effective 51% attack, they do have the resources to spin up millions of relaying nodes.
But this is new, a novel line of argumentation. Has this been a vulnerability all along, held in secret by an elite group of bitcoin insiders?
I'm calling bullshit.
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it's not really novel, there are ways of dealing with a Sybil attack on nodes. basically web of trust.
there's a primitive version of that already baked in with the bootstrapping, everybody trusts Bitcoin core basically
if the Sybil attack gets really aggressive we may need to do better than that.
but it's not like no one ever thought of this. they thought about it... a lot.
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Obviously they did. So why now is Greg freaking out about censorship and "theocratic authoritarianism"? Its ridiculous to suggest that filters for non-monetary transactions are a slippery slope towards censorship.
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It is legitimate, in fact desirable, that nodes want to exert control over non-monetary transactions.
It is not legitimate to exert control over monetary transactions, and if filters are a useful tool for sybil attacking the network then they always have been and always will be, and Core's opposition to them is pointless.
The truth is that when targeting the OP_RETURN limit filters can only be effective as a deterrent against non-monetary transactions.
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then the filter advocates should be honest and also advocate for eliminating or handicapping op return at consensus level.
but if they were honest they would appear even more ridiculous because people are greedy and don't want to pay more in transaction fees than necessary because of some ideologica or sexual purity test, which fails anyway because you can't block CSAM if the state attacker or whoever has big enough budget.
"CSAM is ok broken up across mamy monetary transactions but not ok in an op_return' yup that's what the knots argument boils down to.
It's only convincing because CSAM is so disgusting that most people's brains shut down when the argument pops up. But it's a transparently retarded argument, to me anyway.
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No, consensus is the wrong place to apply filters because you cannot define spam deterministically.
Be honest, do you think you can prevent spam without the policy layer? Or do you just not believe that spam is a thing?
Because if it's the latter then it just means the two camps are going to have to try to shout the loudest and convince enough nodes or Bitcoiners who might run a node that our ideas are better.
We're never going to agree on something that philosophically rooted.
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I, at least, am of the opinion that if spam cannot be defined at the consensus layer, then there is no such thing.
At the same time removing the OP_RETURN limit probably isn't worth this fuss. So I'll agree we should just keep it for now.
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Wisdom and intelligence aren't correlated.
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Gmax was always socially... challenged
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