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I see the subjective part being a decision to identify some valid transaction types as bad and to be banned while leaving other valid transaction types alone. How do we decide which transaction types are spammable and which are not?
If we treat Bitcoin as objective, a valid transaction would be a valid transaction.
Now, I've heard from BIP 110 supporters that I'm being too literal in my argument and that if I held this rule of never removing the validity of a transaction, we'd never be able to change any of Bitcoin's rules.
I don't find this very compelling, though. I think there is a significant difference between banning a transaction type that is in fairly widespread use and banning a transaction type that was purposefully left undefined for future upgrades.
No one is saying the people who make spam transactions don't care about them or are content to let them be frozen. The argument is that those valid transactions are bad, immoral, harmful to bitcoin, or just not what we like. This is subjective. People may use the let's fork and ban method now on spam, but who's to say they won't use it on transactions made by criminals next?
Maybe this is where I’m confused. Are they seeking to ban valid transactions or change the criteria for being a valid transaction?
Same thing, isn't it?
There’s nothing sacred about the current cap on arbitrary data storage, whatever it is.
I don’t see why it’s not just a practical question whether or not this different cap is functionally better.
Nothing here is about blocking who can make transactions or what they are allowed to purchase, afaik. That concern seems entirely unrelated.
This is how I think about it:
Everyone agreed that a certain set of transaction types could be included in a valid block.
One group of people has decided they don't like the transactions a different group is using, and are advocating a change to what can go in a valid block so that such transactions can no longer be included in a block.
My understanding of most changes to block validation rules is that they have been designed not to remove previous ways of transacting. BIP 110 is a significant departure from this philosophy in that it's only purpose is to remove previous ways of transacting.
How would this process look different if it was a government entity pushing for a rule change that made blocks with txs containing OFAC-banned addresses invalid?
That’s different because it introduces a new party to the validation process who is outside of the network.
I’m not anything like an expert on code improvements but when an upgrade includes things designed to remove vulnerabilities aren’t those reductions in what someone can do with bitcoin?
I will also admit to not being an expert on code improvements, but as far as I have learned, rule changes designed to address vulnerabilities (or upgrades in general) have never targeted things that were commonly being done with bitcoin transactions.
In the case of the inflation bug in 2010, someone clearly expected to be able to create more bitcoin than 21 million. The soft fork that changed this certainly was a reduction in what that person thought they could do with bitcoin.
However, I don't think such a case is very much like the case we are dealing with now regarding spam.
In general, I suspect (without much real evidence, I'll admit) that vulnerability fixes in Bitcoin have usually confined themselves to altering code to return to expected behavior.
This, I believe, is where BIP 110 proponents would say spam is not part of the expected behavior of bitcoin. I agree with this. However, I don't think spam is going to be pinned down to any one kind of transaction. And I think the transaction types they want to prevent are part of expected behavior.
Bitcoin has many kinds of transactions. How are we supposed to decide when one kind of transaction is being abused enough to warrant stopping everyone from using Bitcoin in that way?
That’s different because it introduces a new party to the validation process who is outside of the network.
As far as I can tell, introducing a new party to the validation process that is outside the network is exactly the plan: "spam" will be determined by some third party called "the community" or which only includes people who are "not spammers" and who are "good bitcoiners" -- all of which is entirely subjective.
If that last part is accurate then we are talking about more than just a change to one of the parameters.
Is this introducing a mechanism that allows a particular third party to veto transactions?
Via the BIP
Fair enough. I’m trying to get at a different point though.
If there’s an exploit somewhere, pointing out that it’s within the rules is an odd critique because no one disagrees. The argument should be about whether the new rules would be better or worse.
I’m not sure what the subjective part is. Aren’t they trying to reduce the cap on arbitrary data storage, regardless of the content of that data?
That seems like a change to the objective rules.