Nah, this is a terrible example. Bitcoin Core was quite right to not go down the path of more filters. It's hopeless to stop these protocols as long as they're willing to pay fees.
Ultimately filters are a form of censorship. And censorship can only work if all means of communication are censored. It's trivial for the people to bypass filters, eg by running a fork like my Libre Relay: https://github.com/petertodd/bitcoin/tree/libre-relay-v27.1
If you want to see Libre Relay in action, try out https://opreturnbot.com/ with a >80 bytes message. It will get mined.
Bitcoin Core is a bit of a pretend meritocracy. But not for this reason.
Which is not bad by itself. Centralized censorship is bad. But if every participant in a distributed system consensually agrees to apply some censorship it just becomes new part of a protocol.
Well, if you treat it as a binary outcome then it is technically correct. But I don't think the filter-advocates are thinking in that terms (And tbh imho its just not a good way to think about it). It's more of spectrum thing.
For example If 30% of miners deem some transactions of type X unwanted and they don't include those in the blocks, the X transaction will have 30% less of blockspace to compete over. And it will cause them to pay larger fees thus decreasing amount of X transactions.
Censorship didn't work for full-rbf. Once a non-trivial amount of money was available by mining full-rbf txs, just a few thousand a block, every pool quickly followed and turned full-rbf on.
Politics, bias, and social matters generally are present everywhere that humans make decisions and pretending otherwise is naive if not a lie. I don't think there's reason to believe politics and bias are overshadowing merit and destroying bitcoin core, but politics are present in bitcoin core as they are anywhere. We should all admit that if we hadn't already.
I'm not thinking too much about the core repo tbh. I'm thinking about my fellow node runners. He mentioned Greg Maxwell saying that CTV is more likely to get activated if Rubin weren't its maintainer. (That's from memory not a direct quote) and he pointed out that was not a technical argument, but a political one (not a meritocracy behavior)
Greg Maxwell aside, I think my fellow node runners think the same way. I've even pointed out how it's difficult to promote CTV, when it carries Rubins baggage (his stunt of trying to pull BIP 119 from the core repo for example).
It seems all the commenters have focused on just one aspect of the video and none of them are what I was thinking about (a self awareness). I should have seen that one coming. Maybe made this a discussion instead of a link and just talk about what I was thinking.
However, this is a great example of how Bitcoin is technology second and a social construct first. (Now that's an old tune you've seen me singing for a while lol).
He also mentioned how getting an op_code merged is a prestige thing that can compromise integrity. So I'm just sort of thinking about what those kinds of things mean socially. I know node runners ought to have way more awareness about the code that they run, but I'm not sure how that would be accomplished.
Its good to hear some straight and honest views like Mechanic. Can't say I have thorough enough knowledge of bitcoins history or its workings to agree with him here. I had no idea that core is struggling with woke ideology. Is this true?
I had no idea that core is struggling with woke ideology.
This is an accusation being made not a fact. Mechanic says his evidence is Luke Dashjr not getting funded and the changes to the -datacarriersize documentation. Others are mostly citing the personal life of one the most dedicated core devs as "evidence."
-datacarriersizedocumentation. Others are mostly citing the personal life of one the most dedicated core devs as "evidence."