Bitcoin has no leaders. Soft forks do. \ stacker news ~bitcoin

Bitcoin has no leaders. Soft forks do.twitter.com/francispouliot_/status/1781872134874169766

2063 sats \ 30 comments \ @Scoresby 21 Apr bitcoin

Bull Bitcoin Francis put this on Twitter this evening. It's worth reading.

Convenants soft fork proponents, think about this very very carefully: who do you want as a leader that will rally nodes to his vision and convince them to take the leap of faith with him?

"Bitcoin is leaderless" you say? It is, except during a fork war. To deny this is to deny all the history of Bitcoin we have.

Like it or not, you need economic nodes to be strongly committed to a soft fork for it to happen. Committed enough that they are willing to lose funds over it. More importantly, you need economic nodes to NOT be strongly opposed to it.

An economic node is one that is accepting Bitcoin payments. The more incoming on-chain payments your node validates, the more you have at stake to lose, the more miners will fear your potential to invalidate their blocks.

Any major contention from economic nodes about a UASF will cause a network split. If you declare a UASF and the miners don't follow, you split. If the miners follow and economic nodes declare URSF, the network split.

This is bad for business. Even miners who do like the soft fork in theory could capitulate if a network split becomes inevitable.

If both UASF and URSF are active at the same time, miners will have to pick one camp over the other. Unless the soft fork directly affects their income in a tangible and predictable manner, they will choose whichever side is more likely to maintain support of economic nodes after a split.

This is not a game of pure economic incentives. Economic incentives work perfectly within nakamoto consensus, not for protocol upgrades. These upgrades require companies with lots of money at stake to follow one vision versus the other and to determine who is the most committed. When you commit to UASF or URSF you are betting - blindly - that whatever camp you support will not be the one to capitulate first. You are in effect betting on who is the most radical, well funded intolerable minority.

If you really want covenants to succeed, expel the degenerates scammers and retarded goofs from your camp. You know excatly who I'm talking about.

Their temporary marketing power on Twitter will backfire spectacularly and you, pro-CTV engineers, will end up in a burn out just like the OG core devs did.

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38 sats \ 1 reply \ @kilianbuhn 21 Apr

Status quo Bitcoin has total dominance. All these softforks are utterly irrelevant. Also, they're boring

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 21 Apr

Do you think status quo bitcoin has more support than it did before taproot?

It seems likely to me that one of the covenant soft forks will become part of what we call bitcoin now. Who knows on what timeline.

What will you do if that happens?

37 sats \ 19 replies \ @TheBTCManual 21 Apr

Call me crazy, but why don't people who argue for a certain upgrade just prove the use on Liquid or fork you own side chain with the feature and if the market is big enough for it people will use your chain and you earn fees

Make a Squidward side-chain move all your BRC-20 and Rune stuff there, have a good time, and everyone is happy

If you build it they will come right? Right?

131 sats \ 3 replies \ @nerd2ninja 21 Apr

Because I don't respect liquid. Thought a testnet app was good enough.

I will remind everyone in this thread that CTV being one of the BIPs in LNHance by itself enables timeout trees which John Law wrote a paper on as well when combined with CSFS (as it is in LNHance) it allows for LN symmetry which you may know as Eltoo.

What I would like to see with these two structures, is a multiparty channel of pleb nodes which issues timeout trees to casual users. A pleb LSP if you will.

I do feel as though I'm the only idiot shouting into the void that CTV is useful and good and also fuck shitcoins and fuck the BIP authors whiney fits in the core repo. Can we not just claim it for ourselves? Is there no way to separate them from the code somehow?

17 sats \ 2 replies \ @TheBTCManual 21 Apr

I get that liquid has its issues, thats why I said if people don't like it, have your own chain and your own federation you're comfortable with using, I'm not against convenants, I think they will bring a lot of enhancements

But from my experience as someone who works in tech I've been in so many meetings where we are close to the project looking at data and think this feature or this change will work and then when its released customers don't give a scooby doo about it lol, we're all just making educated guesses

Hence having something out in the wild and seeing how it works should have some benefits, especially when trying to convince people of making a chance to bitcoin

161 sats \ 1 reply \ @nerd2ninja 21 Apr

Man, no sidechains are ass. I have not seen a single sidechain that doesn't have unacceptable trust assumptions and if you build a whole ecosystem on that just to prove the point that people want it, how are you gonna come out and say "Hey, by the way this solution is ass please go use these features on mainchain Bitcoin now".

On the other hand, if you start out by saying "Hey this solution is ass, but come over and see how you like it" its like, but its ass so why would I use it?

Testnet apps are the way you can demonstrate functionality of something without developing an ecosystem on a harmful solution. I don't think you're trying to present an option for development to prove a soft fork's use case, I think you're just trying to make a cop out for something you think you don't want to deal with.

On the other hand, there isn't a testnet app for CTV + CSFS LNSymmetry multi-party channels. So you would have me there. However, there is one for APO based ones. Just test it out and see how you like it.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheBTCManual 22 Apr

Agreed, if something is obviously silly or makes no sense no one will do it, and if someon does, you take on the economic loss of your time, labour and any money you put in.

But if there is something that has promise, try it on the ass option, thats what an MVP is, and if the MVP can work out its kinks fine. Testnet is obviously one way to go, but if some feature matures to a point where people want to try using real money or want open testing the ass-chain does make sense as a testing ground

Builders don't always know where something goes and crowd sourcing ideas only happens when people can F around with something and find out

21 sats \ 4 replies \ @pako 21 Apr

Because Liquid is just WBTC with its own blockchain. Fuck custodial BTC with a different coat of paint.

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @TheBTCManual 22 Apr

Lol no one is forcing you to use it, there are options and people can make their own choices, you're using a custodial LN app right now, fedmint is just liquids model without a blockchain

Liquid isn't perfect by any means, dunk on it, don't use it, but propose a solution, because LN also isn't perfect either, very few are using it non-custodially in any case

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @pako 22 Apr

Drivechsins, ARK, Mercury, zk-Rollups, CTV's timeout trees, channel factories, Enigma Network, hell even motherfucking bigger blocks with assumeUTXO and SPV enabled nodes.

There are a gazillion proposals but you mfers are too afraid to add any new thing to Bitcoin because somehow you all think Bitcoin needs your protection.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @TheBTCManual 22 Apr

LOL can I use that right now?

.....where's the liquitiy for moving in and out? Where's my unilateral exit? How would people interact with one another if theres no wallets, and no network to send to, then I just have to go back to the basechain or hope someone has a swap to LN and trust them.

You're pulling out things with no active product for me to use or send others to use and presenting it to me as a solution, anyways I think i'm done here, but do let me know when theres something to try out, always happy to give alternatives a go

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @pako 22 Apr

You asked for proposals, I gave them to you.

I won't ever call Liquid an L2 and would never tell a developer to "prove a use case on Liquid first", rather use Kraken than that joke of a custodian token.

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby OP 21 Apr

In the case of something like OP_VAULT, where the use case is primarily aimed at making cold storage safer, it would be pretty difficult to attract users to do it on liquid or some side chain, since the point of cold storage is to rely on the maximum security of the btc chain.

Maybe we will see the ordinal and other protocols do what you are talking about, but they are a little bit affinity scams and if they move off bitcoin they lose a big part of their value prop.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheBTCManual 22 Apr

Yes I get OP_VAULT wouldn't make sense on Liquid

I guess for ordinals, yes the block space and fee paid is the value prop, you could do your stupid mint/etch transaction on base and then move to the multi-sig where you go and trade, just so it reduces the need to always use block space for it

Retail who tend to get involved in this stuff are always looking for cheaper options, otherwise TRON, MATIC and other offshoots of EVMs wouldn't exist

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Fabs 21 Apr

Laugh's in Altcoins.

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @piecover 21 Apr

That's a good point, the reason they are not doing it is probably because they think they are smarter than everyone else, I doubt that.

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @TheBTCManual 21 Apr

Point taken, whenever i read altcoin material its always some massively complex gigabrain solution, that disregards a lot of the trade offs. It can't be simple, that was the altcoin space for ages, now ironically simple meta data like BRC-20 are all the rage, its weird

Thats why i thought okay if having smart contracts and all that other jazz isn't all that important, a BTC side chain where you can slap your OP_CAT or whatever upgrades your community wants would surely have a market?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @piecover 21 Apr

Yeah really, why don't they port it to a side chain and use it there?

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @bb3555be5f 21 Apr freebie

You don't even need a separate side chain. Bitcoin SV has OP_CAT I've heard.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @piecover 21 Apr

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17 sats \ 1 reply \ @rtr 21 Apr

I'm out of the loop on covenants. What exactly is it about and what is the issue that the tweet is alluding to? I feel like I'm reading a faint dig to {someone, something} but I don't know the context of it.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 21 Apr

I think it was probably prompted by this tweet from David Bailey.

Get all the degens to run a UASF for CTV and it’s done. Really that simple.

Degens in the driver seat lol

I'm mostly interested in thinking about how bitcoin changes and what happens during that process.

I thought Francis made a good point about how forks work.

17 sats \ 1 reply \ @Satosora 21 Apr

Dont you need a majority to make the soft fork? Or is that just the decisions in btc?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 21 Apr

A majority of what is the question.

Is it node runners (a majority of computers running specific software)?

Is it btc holders (a majority of the value)?

Is it developers (a majority of contributors to the code)?

Is it people willing to accept the bitcoin (a majority of merchants, economic participants)?