Yes, any of the proposals will do10.9%
Yes, but only a specific proposal20.3%
No26.6%
I don't know enough to say35.9%
I don't care enough to study6.3%
64 votes \ poll ended
612 sats \ 10 replies \ @k00b 25 Aug
I want more self-custody and most bitcoiners probably want some end result too rather than a specific proposal.
I respect people wanting to prevent scammy bitcoin usage, but any new script feature is going to allow new scams whether they are known beforehand or not. I’d prefer the debate focus on:
- Miner incentives
- Node running incentives
- Improving bitcoin as money
- specifically MoE because most people don’t save and SoV is largely solved
Scammers are going to scam regardless. The best fight we can wage against scammers is making bitcoin better money so honest participation on bitcoin starves scammy usage.
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191 sats \ 6 replies \ @028559d218 25 Aug
I would like to see more education around bitcoin, what it is and what it's for. More noderunning, more selfcustody, and especially more plebs mining, for example with bitaxes at home getting paid out over bolt12/LN addresses.
And better regulation/reforms around spending bitcoin and not having to pay capital gains taxes. I think a large reason why places to spend bitcoin are so rare... is the ridiculous tax requirements. If i buy a coffee over lightning it's silly to think i need to calculate my capital gains taxes, I wouldn't even know how to do that honestly for 2.99 or whatever. I would love places to spend bitcoin and support small businesses... but there just aren't many yet.
My understanding of covenants is limited... however if covenants don't really address the above why should we want them? To 'scale self custody'? People can self custody now and fees are low.
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21 sats \ 5 replies \ @k00b 25 Aug
If there isn't hope of self custody scaling, it's a waste of everyone's time to learn how to do it. If fees don't increase, bitcoin's security model fails. If fees do increase or if they are merely volatile, self custody needs to scale.
Aside from fees, self-custody should be as easy as we can make it. Part of the purported benefit of some of these upgrades is making self-custody easier.
There's a bit of a chicken and egg problem with self-custody. A worthwhile thought experiment: if on-chain fees were forever low, and we all were promised on-chain UX for any size tx forever, would bitcoin's usage as a MoE increase? If it would, then it's probably worth considering scaling. If MoE wouldn't increase, then you're right, bitcoin has other problems we should solve first.
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166 sats \ 4 replies \ @028559d218 25 Aug
In my opinion the lack of bitcoin usage with regards to MoE... currently isn't due to fees. Or even user experience... it's due to lack of education and restrictions regarding taxes.
It's pretty easy to spend via bitrefill, or btcpayserver and imo hotwallets are really easy to spend from. Take phoenix for example. Splice in or out funds, get inbound liquidity, get a cheap lightning channel opened, send and receive to stacker news... all this is pretty easy stuff. And that's just lightning. On-chain is really easy too... and large transactions can still be made for what less than 50 cents. It's not the UI holding bitcoin back it's education.
If fees go up sustainably... it's due to economic usage not jpegs which are temporary, and in that world on-chain transactions would be relatively rare, only to open lightning channels or for large transactions (buying a house or a car or maybe plane ticket) and everything else is lightning. I think that world could happen 'today'... it just doesn't due to education and taxes.
I listened to most of the republican and democrat political conventions in the united states and there were talks of 'freedom' over and over again... but zero mentions of Bitcoin (Real freedom) and that needs to change.
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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b 25 Aug
fwiw I couldn't get my dad to figure this stuff out easily. It would probably be a month of work for us both. Some share of that is generic education though.
Do you have theory for us not educating people better? I wonder if it's because we aren't certain what we teach will survive a high fee environment. Maybe that's why everyone is teaching people how to use ecash when fees are low?
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @028559d218 25 Aug
If i had to teach a newperson... it would be the phoenix model - open channels when fees are low, use the LSP and spend. Then when the utxo is big enough (at least a few hundred dollars) move it to cold storage like a jade or maybe a hotwallet depending on the amount/time frame.
Then to fill up a lightning channel... move funds on lightning from your exchange to the lightning channel directly. No fee (practically) and it's instant. TaDa you have plenty of sats to spend without touching on chain. I believe this basically could be done today... but instead some people are a little lazy and stupid and so that's why they aren't doing it already.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 25 Aug
Phoenix's model is the best to date, I agree. It remains to be seen if it's sustainable though or if it can be replicated such that phoenix's LSP isn't effectively a single, centralized sidechain.
Is this what education changes?
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @028559d218 26 Aug
I think education helps. +1 to phoenix and it looks like (although I haven't used their LSP) that zeus is doing the same thing.
There are those that believe... that the US fiscal situation over the next 10 years will have the greatest impact. 34 -> 50
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121 sats \ 2 replies \ @justin_shocknet 25 Aug
That's like leaving your front door open because you live in a rough neighborhood
False premise that presupposes that Bitcoin's monetary properties are malleable, and that even if they were, the forks do more good than harm.
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131 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 25 Aug
I'd love to read your point of view on this without having an unproductive argument where we are misunderstanding and mischaracterizing each other repeatedly.
Have you written about bitcoin's lack of malleable monetary properties and how forks do more harm than good somewhere?
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166 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 25 Aug
Interesting prompt I'll sandbag for a video series I've been marinading on
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20 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB 25 Aug
I don’t know. Some days sure when I listen to niftynei talk about them other days no when I hear the shitcoin use case
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351 sats \ 9 replies \ @TheMorningStar 25 Aug
What are covenants?
It would've been much better with a little description.
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272 sats \ 0 replies \ @rijndael 25 Aug
Whenever you send Bitcoin, the destination “address” is actually a set of conditions that have to be satisfied to send those coins. For example, “you have to sign a transaction with the private key that corresponds to this pubkey”, or “you need to sign with 3/5 of these keys”, or “you have to sign with this key, unless its been a month, then you can sign with that key”.
In Bitcoin today, as soon as someone can satisfy those requirements, they can do anything with the coins.
This can present a challenge if you want to (for example) have two people share a UTXO. What you want to be able to do is say “if Alice signs with her keys, she can take her share of the UTXO, but not Bob’s share”. Now imagine that scheme not with 2 people but with 100 or 1000 people.
Another way you might want to restrict how the coins might be spent is a vault: “if I sign with these keys, my coins can start a withdrawal process, but if i cancel that process before two weeks are up, i get my money back”.
The first case is helpful for packing more economic activity into less blockspace. The second is for making bitcoin safer to hold.
These are examples of covenants: you put restrictions not just on who can spend the coins, but on how they are then spent.
Today we emulate covenants with presigned transactions (for example, in the lightning network), but that presents real challenges around interactivity, number of participants, protocol complexity.
Covenant proposals generally add functionality to Bitcoin to let us do these kinds of things and have it be enforced by Bitcoin consensus instead of complex presigning schemes.
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43 sats \ 7 replies \ @k00b 25 Aug
River describes them in their glossary.
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121 sats \ 1 reply \ @TheMorningStar 25 Aug
Thank you so much!
Glad to see River has many topics to learn.
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92 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 25 Aug
River has the most accessible, written bitcoin education materials imo.
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0 sats \ 4 replies \ @grayruby 25 Aug
What's your thoughts on covenants @k00b?
Seems logical to me but as a non-technical person I am unsure about the trade-offs and potential unintended consequences as we saw with Taproot.
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223 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b 25 Aug
A useful model for thinking about this stuff is Black Markets. That is, restrictive rule sets, especially ones that restrict normal human desires, usually increase and incentivize worse behavior than they set out to prevent. I think this is what's playing out in bitcoin right now. By excessively restricting bitcoin script, it limits bitcoin's utility for earnest bitcoin-as-money usage, renders earnest usage uncompetitive with exploitative use, and makes perversion of bitcoin more profitable.
So, with a gun to my head today, I'd prefer we activate GSR and just make bitcoin script more expressive.
Inscriptions were possible before Taproot. Given my thinking above, it's not important what exactly made inscriptions technically possible. I'm more concerned with what makes inscriptions profitable and it's largely that there's not enough demand for blockspace that outstrips storing terrible art.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 25 Aug
Interesting. I am unfamiliar with GSR. I will read up on it.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 25 Aug
It’s simplistic but I see two general directions to preventing “bad” bitcoin usage:
- Rules that can’t be misused (laws that can’t be broken)
- Rules that allow people do what they want so long as they don’t harm other people (natural law)
- imo results in a natural ratio of good people relative to bad people, good participants greatly outnumber the bad, and bad people have fewer incentives to be bad
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20 sats \ 0 replies \ @rijndael 25 Aug
🎯
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @janetyellen 25 Aug
Jerome and I are thinking about ripping out Bitcoin script and OP codes all together and just hard coding a few transition types on our nodes
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33 sats \ 0 replies \ @Athena 25 Aug
I don't know enough to say
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138 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 25 Aug
Trick question.
Pro-shitfork people will say we already have them, knowing full well they're different animals vs. the proposed op_codes that would enforce arbitrary sidechain consensus to enable shitcoiners to call their scam tokens Bitcoin.
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28 sats \ 0 replies \ @leonidastouch 26 Aug
No, I don’t want it. No covenants.
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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @mdominicorobin24 26 Aug
Covenants are for noobs. They will be able to lure the noobs into submitting to covenants and ETF's simply because they were late in a game. The noobs are at fault here. They always shun Bitcoin and now the Bitcoin predators will come up with ideas to easily lure the noobs into the rabbit hole of scammers.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @rijndael 26 Aug
Why are covenants for noobs?
I want vaults. Those aren’t for noobs.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @purpurato 25 Aug
Is there already a way to try those features on testnet today? I'd say that's the purpose of that network.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Satoshi__Nakamoto 25 Aug
No never
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Octopus 25 Aug outlawed
stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.