pull down to refresh

Cypherpunk anarchist
Rust dev
BIP author
Gay furry
Catholic Christian
MAGA conservative
Interested in UFOs and aliens

Interested in hardening Bitcoin against all threats so that it is still here for us when the dollar inevitably falls

Very much against violence, coercion

Very much for free objective inquiry

I support 110

Ask me anything

133 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 27 Jun

If BIP 110 fails, does bitcoin fail?

reply

If 110 doesn't activate on 9/1/26, we will double down and fork harder.

The activation attempts will continue until morale improves.

reply

Hunter Beast looks like an agent provocateur/troll/saboteur and not an actual proponent of the BIP-110 (a.k.a. RDTS). There are many serious proponents available for discussion and who contribute to the website http://bip110.org.

reply

do you find efforts like this contributions to serious discussion?

source

reply

There are enormous contributions like the Bitcoin Knots with BIP-110 implementation which anybody can download and install to be ready before the BIP-110 activation in August 2026: https://github.com/bitcoinknots/bitcoin/releases/.

There are very good articles, e.g. http://www.citadel21.com by Hodlonaut, https://wtfhappenedinfeb2023.com/, video tutorials https://www.youtube.com/@Bitcoin_University by Matthew Kratter, podcasts, e.g. Knut Svanholm, Bitcoin Mechanic and so on.

reply

Would you be willing to help me get hodlonaut, mechanic, or kratter for an AMA on here?

reply

I literally started a group chat on Signal that has all three, and more.

Bitcoin Parley.

I will share this there.

reply
10k sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby 27 Jun

cool! thank you! they are welcome to do an AMA on here any time. if they don't mind coordinating with me, I can do my best to promote it.

reply

Will do my part to make that happen to the best of my ability.

reply

Ask them directly. Thousands of people contacted them and received responses so you can make it too.

reply

mechanic blocked me (for no reason I can see: i've never said anything remotely unkind to him)

kratter never responds to me (I have replied to his posts a number of times).

I will try to get hodlonaut.

reply

I will ask Mechanic to unblock you.

reply
212 sats \ 4 replies \ @stever 27 Jun

Maybe you can answer, then:

BIP-110 claims it can reduce the amount of arbitrary data on chain, but even napkin math shows that it, at best, gives a 0.6% increase in cost/byte for a spammer. It also does not prevent embedding contiguous image files even in policy standard Knots txs. Given its technical ineffectiveness, the remaining goal of "sending a message" is mere virtue signaling, no better than planting a sign on your lawn saying "outdoor air pollution is not welcome here!" What remaining reasons are there for supporting this?

reply

Why do you keep asking the same question of me but in different places? Are you expecting a different answer?
#1516052

reply
112 sats \ 2 replies \ @stever 27 Jun

Sorry, I thought I was asking @gregtonoski . I’m new on this site.

reply

welcome!

reply

Oh, I see you were asking him the same question you asked me, just on my AMA.

Maybe he should do his own.

reply

don't hate on Chris, he's a good friend

reply

it's not hate. but I find it very disingenuous to list business which I know are opposed to BIP 110 as "planned"

reply

fair enough

reply

What evidence do you have that I'm lying or inauthentic?

I've been doing a ton of work to advance the effort actually.

I find 110 to be a fascinating problem from a number of dimensions.

reply

Being a MAGA anarchist seems a tough row to hoe.

reply
1018 sats \ 6 replies \ @stever 27 Jun

BIP-110 claims it can reduce the amount of arbitrary data on chain, but even napkin math shows that it, at best, gives a 0.6% increase in cost/byte for a spammer. It also does not prevent embedding contiguous image files even in policy standard Knots txs. Given its technical ineffectiveness, the remaining goal of "sending a message" is mere virtue signaling, no better than planting a sign on your lawn saying "outdoor air pollution is not welcome here!" What remaining reasons are there for supporting this?

reply

110 proponents are very bad and explaining all the different ways it can help.

Inscriptions and runes do not scale (this is solved by my Carbonado and Lord efforts). Poison block attacks could make it orders of magnitude harder to sync and run a node (110 and 54 both mitigate this in different ways).

And even if it was nonsense virtue signalling, the changes aren't really as bad as they say. Some of the 110 folks are some of my favorite friends in bitcoin, and as one who has engaged with the process enough to see what it does to free-thinking, non-captured people, and also what it does to those who do not "think wrongly" of "bitcoin's central plan", to use one individual's words... (AB)

reply

How does bip110 help mitigate slow to verify blocks?

reply

Primarily through reducing the scriptPubKey length to 34 bytes.

reply
95 sats \ 1 reply \ @sedited 27 Jun

This was heavily discussed on the mailing list https://groups.google.com/g/bitcoindev/c/YO8ZwnG_ISs at the time.

reply

Yes, I don't engage on that ML, it is too heavily censored, and it's also a bit of a larp anyway since it was shut down in the past.

That said, none of those replies negate my point.

reply

dope-af summary. 110%.

someone give this stacker a raisesomeone give this stacker a raise

reply

Do you think we will see a quantum resistant soft fork activated on Bitcoin in the next two years?

reply

We will if I have any say in it

And it will be sooner than 2 years

I'm interested in lots of soft fork efforts right now

reply

Bitcoin is not exactly famous for its speed of activating soft forks. I will certainly be surprised if we see successful forks for both BIP 110 and quantum resistance.

What is your feeling about a covenants soft fork?

reply

I've followed covenants efforts closely, and have seen them bikeshedded into oblivion. Nobody worked harder or smarter than Jeremy Rubin.

At this point, I'm not too hung up on it. CTV would've been nice, and so would have Sapio (finite state machines on bitcoin).

Maybe we'll see them one day but for now I think it's pretty bleak for covenants.

Also respect Steven Roose's efforts, such as Second Ark and OP_TXHASH.

reply

So now I'm curious how we will avoid the same fate for quantum resistance soft forks. It seems like the infinite bikeshed (which could be a great horror story concept) will strike again.

How do we avoid it?

reply

Well, that's already happened, considering 360 took a massive amount of review and back and forth, and even then, the work is still not finished.

But QR efforts have something going for them that covenants do not: a real world forcing function.

reply

What is currently missing in 360?

reply

We need to finish the 110 compatibility effort, address SegWit spending rule ambiguity, and scrub the BIP of any of Isabel Foxen Duke's "contributions".

How many of the questions in this thread are "well ackchually" guy questions? Said differently - how many of these questions are so nuanced that you consider them edge cases?

I think there are many well meaning technically literate folks who want the best for Bitcoin, yet they don't see the forest for the trees.

reply

I would agree with this.

Satoshi solved a longstanding distributed consensus problem by using markets. Bitcoin is a master class in lateral thinking.

To think Bitcoin is purely technical is to ignore the social and financial components, which are just as crucial to understand.

reply

Great point, we have moved beyond a strictly technical community. IETF etiquette is good, and should be promoted, however the tent is bigger now. What is the best concern you've heard about BIP110, something that has that forest for the trees perspective?

reply
235 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b 27 Jun

My steelman of what I see BIP 110 proponents arguing:

  1. bip 110 is strictly good for bitcoin as money whether it fully solves the arbitrary data problem or not
  2. the arbitrary data problem on bitcoin is existential, ie if we don't fix it bitcoin fails
  3. there's no harm in attempting such a soft fork or, if there is harm, it is tiny relative to the harm of allowing arbitrary data on bitcoin

Did I miss anything? How would you improve my steelman?

reply

There is so much more ground to cover, but honestly, the best point I have so far in support is a game theoretic one (as much as midwit devs like TheBlueMatt find such arguments to be unconvincing):

Whenever we have a soft fork that significantly tightens consensus rules in such a way that makes the chain more defensible against real, actual threats to the protocol, it introduces a powerful game theoretic advantage that could be used to force activation of the more defensible chain.

reply
112 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 27 Jun

Have you written, or has someone else written, about this powerful game theoretic advantage and how it's used to force activation? If so, could you point me to it. If not, could you describe it for me?

reply

That work is still ongoing. I will be happy to post that here on SN once that's finished, @k00b <3

reply

An alien has a giant laser ray pointed at the earth and you have to answer this question correctly with argumentation, if not he zaps the entire planet.

Is the universe deterministic or not?

You can propose/use experiments or any creative means that would increase the chance of use not getting zapped.

reply

Depends on what fitting you use to describe what happens when one quantum system interacts with another.

I do like to think we're probably in a simulation but we do have free will and the outcome is not known in advance.

reply

Hello sir! I appreciate you taking the time to come hang out with us.

I have taken a dubious eye about the spam conversation since the beginning, because I feel together the fee market and block space limits are adequate and powerful means of controlling spam on bitcoin.

I'm curious why I should change my mind.

reply

That's fair but the present fee market is evidence that arbitrary data is of dubious value, it doesn't scale well (consider Jevons paradox), and that's not necessary for long term archival, or the best way to use Bitcoin anyway.

If we're worried about the security budget, I recommend looking into the heatpunk movement. Big fan of Tyler Stevens' work with Exergy, and also the Gridless efforts in Africa.

reply

But isn't BIP 110 a proposal to change block validation rules in order to reduce data (which I think is almost =spam in usage here)?

What I'm curious about is why aren't the fee market + block limit sufficient here. Why do we need to also pursue these changes to block validation rules?

reply

To tighten protocol consensus to make it more defensible against all threats.

We talk a lot about arbitrary data. We do not talk enough about the problem of structured data. When smart people use op codes that actually do things, but in malicious ways.

reply

Are you referring to something like a transaction that is designed to have quadratic hashing and take other nodes a very long time to verify, or are you referring to people embedding "illegal" content?

Probably there are other things of which I am not even aware. But I'd be grateful if you were willing to expand on this a bit.

reply

The illegal content argument is an argument against arbitrary data so far as I'm aware.

When I bring up structured data, it is a reference to PBAs such as those that do make use of quadratic signature verification techniques, oftentimes leveraging legacy sigops accounting rules.

1500s for a block that normally takes 1s is pretty bad in the one public demo I did see, and there are others.

reply
232 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby 27 Jun

I imagine the Great Consensus Cleanup (which also addresses many of these cases) could probably get more widespread support than BIP 110.

Given that BIP 110 has been mostly marketed as reducing arbitrary data, it feels like a strange way to go about dealing with quadratic hashing et al concerns.

reply

BIP 54 mitigates the threat but does not provide sufficient protection.

It takes 1500s to verify a block down to 5s, which is still 500% worse than what most are used to in IBD so far.

We should be restricting scriptPubKey length. 520b was good, 34b is even better.

Welcome to SN.

I would say I am ideologically pro BIP 110 (Bitcoin is money) but we have yet to see Bitcoin's natural spam filter- fees fail to root out spam over long periods of time so seems like kind of a waste of time at this point.

reply

It is not a bad idea to tighten the protocol to make it more defensible

reply

I agree with that I guess my thinking this is not currently the biggest priority in terms of making it more defensible but I totally get the movement.

reply

It is the priority only because 110 activation is set so soon.

And QR efforts are sufficiently orthogonal that so long as we aren't captured by the state somehow, and somehow activate flawed cryptography with no viable secure alternatives, I think it is useful to see the process up close and do my part to support the effort.

reply

What is your perception of the support levels for BIP 110?

My impression is that most large economic nodes (exchanges and large merchants) are not interested in running it.

Among node-runners (people who are not necessarily merchants, but who use their node to verify personal bitcoin payments) my impression is that less than half and probably less than a third of bitcoiners support BIP 110.

Do you have a different impression?

reply

We just have to make it easy for them to adopt it.

A lot of people probably aren't convinced yet, but I'm documenting everything best I can in case we need to try a different way.

reply

making it easy to adopt is one thing. attempting to force it on a majority that is not interested is another. BIP 110 feels like the latter to me.

reply

It's really not. Which node you run is a voluntary action. We are all adults and have agency over our own opinions.

reply

in my ignorance, it feels like a forcing. I see Luke saying things like unless nodes run software that resists it they will end up on the BIP 110 chain and that there is no opposition to BIP 110 as if it is a fait accompli. The language its supporters use is a language of force.

reply

it is fair to perceive it that way.

I'm talking to both sides, trying to do the work to find shared common ground, and build a bridge towards less coercive and hostile rhetoric.

We need to remember our mission: separate money from state.

If we fail to figure out how to work together to make sure that Bitcoin is secure against every threat we can imagine, the possibility of Weimar America looms closer and closer with every single day.

reply

While I can agree that Bitcoin is better with the rules activated by BIP 110, I strongly disagree with the idea of labelling a large group of bitcoin users (ordinals, inscriptions fans) as "bad."

What stops this from happening arbitrarily to any group?

reply

I also agree that is unhelpful. That's why I'm building a bridge on that side too. Bitcoin Abzu. It is not as active as I would like but I did meet with Casey and Erin this week and I do think we have a good plan that I'm executing on.

My Carbonado efforts, along with Lord and Sword are also part of that.

See: https://x.com/cryptoquick/status/2070824495636791736?s=20

reply

What concerns me is that there seems to be very little concern for this. I often am dismissed when I say that picking one group to change the rules on is bad. At some point Bitcoin needs to become agnostic to what is inside a transaction. If it is valid it should be valid forever.

reply

That contradicts a lot of changes Satoshi made. SegWit also marks things that were previously valid as invalid. All soft forks technically do in some way. But generally I do agree at a high level we should keep in line with the private property promise:

1/ coin inflation schedule is set in stone;

2/ if you can cryptographically validate a transfer, bitcoin will let you do it, i.e. you can always spend your own money;

3/ if you "locked" a utxo with a certain ruleset in the past, that ruleset will still be active and let you spend in future, i.e. you can't be locked out of your own money.

  • Art Waxwing
reply

I have kind of a grug brained approach to this: restricting what was 'anyone can spend' into can only be spent some ways feels not the same as: here are ~50% of transactions in any given day. Let's stop them from transacting.

reply

Sure, fair. Wait, you're saying that half the transactions on the network on non-monetary? You might be right but that's also a little depressing to consider.

reply

Even if it is significantly less, it worries me that we are setting this precedent: some valid Bitcoin transactions aren't good.

reply

I agree it would simply be better to give them a better option

The group in question has been the cause of the UTXO set bloat, a gradualism that has lead to where we are today. The users of the dubbed "spam" are not an arbitrary group - their use of Bitcoin causes harm.

reply

That is your opinion. What will you do when a group of bitcoin users decide that your utxos are bloat and causing harm?

Anyone who competes with me for blockspace causes me harm. Anyone who makes a transaction of any kind adds bytes to my node's drive.

You think this is clear cut. I think there will come a time when people say it is clear cut that certain monetary transactions are harmful.

How do you not see where this leads?

reply

I think these are strawman arguments. Do I have the meaning of that right? Sometimes I say something and it means something else, forgive me if I'm doing that here.

But my point is that there have been multiple good faith attempts to tackle the issue of UTXO bloat. This is a problem that I see there is consensus on.

Consensus for BIP110 is building.

reply
113 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 27 Jun

Is there anything in the gov's recent UFO releases worth checking out?

reply

Not sure yet! I've considered becoming a MUFON Field Investigator and might start that soon.

It's difficult to know what's a limited hangout and what's not.

Been very interested in what Jesse Michels has been putting out.

reply
101 sats \ 1 reply \ @anon 27 Jun

How did you become a furry? How would you recommend someone familiarize themselves with the motivations/philosophy of furries?

reply

I just kind of fell into it during a difficult time as a teen.

I don't think furry has a lot of philosophy beyond merely being a vehicle or lens for the imagination.

reply
Interested in hardening Bitcoin against all threats so that it is still here for us when the dollar inevitably falls

does that involve, like the oath of enlistment, the quite likely threat that BIP-110 itself presents?

reply

Not sure I understand this argument. What part of the 110 spec is a "quite likely" threat? Be specific.

reply

Do you fail to see that BIP-110 is/could be/has already become a threat to Bitcoin?

reply

110 isn't the real threat.

Unconstructive bickering and censorship and inaction are the real threats.

I also notice that you didn't answer my question.

reply
101 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 27 Jun

If you weren't programming in Rust, which language would you be programming in?

reply

Hmm

Idris 2, probably

reply

...and very rudely, Scoresby forgot to ask my real question:

Do you put your money where your mouth is? (or is it just empty, cheap talk?)Do you put your money where your mouth is? (or is it just empty, cheap talk?)

#1515305

nice nice nice, make sure to ask him if he's put his money where his mouth is... and how much! https://beta.predyx.com/market/will-bip-110-activate-and-be-enforced-on-bitcoin-by-sept-1-2026-1770282509
  1. What do you think were the top 3 events that caused the reaction/lead to the creation of the BIP-110?
  2. Have you ever contacted Jeffrey Epstein?
reply

Also I just saw your second question

I have never interacted with Jeffrey Epstein, but I have interacted with Isabel Foxen Duke, and I'm not certain that's all that much better if I'm being perfectly honest

I contributed to ord early on but I don't like that it doesn't scale. That's why I started this:

https://github.com/bitmask-stack/lord

reply

What does Bitcoin being successful look like to a person who describes themselves as a cypherpunk?

reply

Mass adoption

Even by people and groups of people you don't like

It scales, is ready for any conceivable threat, it is the strongest and hardest money, and for personal use, has perfect privacy

We have a lot of work to do and the solution is non obvious

reply

"Mass adoption

Even by people and groups of people you don't like"

Just not the people BIP-110 determines are bad, amirite?