Knots vs Core? Or Something More \ stacker news ~bitcoin

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5420 sats \ 12 comments \ @nerd2ninja 26 Sep bitcoin

Today, I'm making my stance on Knots vs core clear.

There are aspects of Knots I agree with. Namely, the philosophy of enabling options in the configuration file rather than making configurations more difficult for the sovereign node user. That's the part about Knots that people were rallying behind.

There was of course some other very debatable musings over whether me pool policy could prevent a block from getting mined or cause a block to be orphaned, however, these musings did originate from core maintainers, I don't mean Luke.

I don't care about such musings too much, but the sovereign node runner has the right to be wrong, no? I see this debate as being more about paternal Libertarianism, vs hands off libertarianism. The recent subversion away from that seems like a distraction from what matters.

There is a fundamental asymmetry in the developers ability to understand and make changes to the codebase that is meant to be a representation of the emergent social construct we're building together called Bitcoin. That asymmetry can without vigilance, lend itself to paternalism and maybe over time, aristocracy, and then oligarchy.

The conversation I was interested in seeing happen, was is our current process for "the reference implementation" really provide the resilient structure we need to stave off those undesirable tendencies of human nature into the future.

Any discussion about Luke's personality, or specifics about how Knots is run, is uninteresting, because at least to me, it kind of feels besides the point.

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123 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 13h

is our current process for "the reference implementation" really provide the resilient structure we need to stave off those undesirable tendencies of human nature into the future[?]

So why don't we discuss this here on SN? Gotta start somewhere.

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @leaf 13h

Nobody seems to have a problem accepting that there is a knowledge asymmetry between bitcoiners and nocoiners. Bitcoiners tend to accept that nocoiners, for whatever reason, don't get it. I imagine that many nocoiners have complained that bitcoiners are arrogant and are treating nocoiners as dumb.

I think I could uncontroversially use this quote in relation to nocoiners here: "It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf."

What some bitcoiners don't get, in my opinion, is there is knowledge asymmetry between bitcoiners themselves. Specifically, between the technical and nontechnical.

Many nontechnical people think they know more than they do, or think the little insight they do have makes them qualified on technical issues. The hard truth is it doesn't.

In my opinion, people generally underestimate the amount of knowledge required to do something like bitcoin development. It is gargantuan. Without that, you cannot understand the technical discussion, distinguish the strong arguments from the weak. And that assumes your mum popped enough tylenol when pregnant to give you the brain required.

So I say again, but about nontechnical bitcoiners: "It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf."

The good news is that I don't think people need to. There is a wide variety of bitcoin devs from different backgrounds with different views.

If a genuine questionable change was being pushed, we can rely on a subset of them (i.e. more than one) to raise the alarm.

This is why I'd say we want as many devs as possible: lots of funding, and reduce the pressures and demands on them so they can speak their minds. If bitcoin development is insufferable, you'll get less devs, less ethical devs, making a bad change less likely to get called out.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheCharlatan 8h

There was of course some other very debatable musings over whether me pool policy could prevent a block from getting mined or cause a block to be orphaned, however, these musings did originate from core maintainers, I don't mean Luke.

What do you mean with this? That these are just rationalizations from developers onto what a strict filter policy attempts to achieve?

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @melvincarvalho 19h

Re: Luke’s personal life & the leaked IMs, doxxing a Bitcoin dev is not cypherpunk. Cypherpunks respect privacy. Those who do or support it shouldn’t be trusted with Bitcoin development.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @jakoyoh629 20h

I don't care about such musings too much, but the sovereign node runner has the right to be wrong, no?

Taking away options is the complete opposite of what we should be doing.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @melvincarvalho 19h

Core v30 is a substantive change. The PR was merged too soon, despite a supermajority against it from the start. Shipping it as-is would be a mistake. Bitcoin is hard to change, and that’s what gives it value.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @_bilthon_ 15h

Then are you running knots?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @LibreHans 17h

If you care about process, Sjors gave you an important part of their reasoning in the optech podcast 352 around minute 15:

okay, if we're going to increase it to 150, do we really want to have this debate every time?

It's all about governance shortcuts and doing whatever they want.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @033a9e0278 17h

I already set my datacarrier to 100000.

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @gregtonoski 15h

Liar and troll. datacarrier can't be set to anything else than 0 and 1.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @BITC0IN 22h

ACK

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @035736735e 9h outlawed

stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.