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11 sats \ 32 replies \ @standardcrypto 5 Mar \ on: Are we close to consensus for Bitcoin's next upgrade? bitcoin
OP_CTV (safe scalability) yes, OP_CAT (turing complete shitcoinery) no.
CTV doesn't scale anything, that's a myth pushed by scammers
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shocknet, after all the back and forth, leaving another breadcrumb from my notes, largely with you...
scrolling the debate on twitter I also found this
https://x.com/shocknet_justin/status/1898049077889077512
I didn't find owen kemeys's reply convincing.
there's also a whole saga of justin_shocknet and shinobi sparring across twitter and the bitcoin influencer social media.
Shinobi's an interesting guy and has interesting to say (critizing lightning mostly). eg
https://medium.com/block-digest-mempool/lightning-network-yield-and-incentives-b2b624375094
There's history behind the beef. It's too much for me to grok completely as yet, but my gestalt is that shinobi has been a lightning skeptic from the early days because of the lack of a "business model" if you will, and with ark he becomes a fan although to be fair to him not a full on kool aid drinking fanboy
But he likes it, shinobi likes ark. Because ark has a business model. "Incentive alignment" to grow the network. I think to him ASPs will work a lot better for growth than the loose coalition of LSPs that make up what up little there is of commercial lightning. He's impatient, he wants bitcoin to succeed.
But now with lightning showing signs of maturity and much better usability, albeit still not that much actual use, shinobi is having a bit of a meltdown pushing ark as better than lightning, or perhaps it's more "lightning is broken but I know how to save it." Maybe he resents his earlier lightning skepticism not proving out. Or maybe he feels that it did prove out, and the clock is ticking to "save" bitcoin before it fully ossifies.
Whatever the case, shinobi seems to be in complete denial of the (lack of) scaling pressure, and also of the messy security issues, complexity and sybil risks of ark.
I find shocknet more credible.
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I don't like Taproot wizards either. but just because they support op_ctv doesn't automatically invalidate it.
there is some icky coalition forming though.
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afaik they aren't scamming, they're pretty up front about attacking Bitcoin
I'm referring to the Ark startups, far more insidious
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IIUC, CTV enables ARK (maybe bad, I am agnostic) but also enables much improved channel factories. We probably don't currently need channel factories, but it's nice to have the upgrade path cleared without future softfork drama, if we can get it wrangled now.
"Channel factories by themselves do not require any soft-forks to be possible. However, the simple channel factories described above are probably impractical beyond small numbers of parties due to the coordination required to actually achieve a scaling benefit. Thus, covenant proposals such as OP_Evict or CTV (via txout trees) aim to allow more fine-grained outcomes where individual parties can be forced on-chain, without forcing everyone on-chain at once."
I don't care about Ark (or even understand it tbh) but I am all in on lightning.
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Nobody is using channel batching and that has less coordination issues than factories... because channels are not bottlnecked and never will be. All scaling arguments are based on a flawed presupposition that the bottleneck is throughput, this is because retards base numbers of billions of people.
The only scaling limitation Bitcoin has is supply, as in, not enough people will ever be able to own enough sats (5-6 digits worth of sats) to transact, even if the chain is at a perpetual 1 sat/byte due to gigameg blocks or other shitfork like CTV.
There are at most only a billion households/businesses that will ever be able to use real Bitcoin, that may even be a generous estimate given the size of many stockpiles.
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Just dropping a breadcrumb about lightning channel batching:
alex bosworth: "We can onboard a billion/year to LN using just batching."
(To be clear, this is in support of your argument.)
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"The only scaling limitation Bitcoin has is supply, as in, not enough people will ever be able to own enough sats (5-6 digits worth of sats) to transact, even if the chain is at a perpetual 1 sat/byte"
5 digits is 100k sats. Why do you reckon someone would need to own this much bitcoin to be able to afford to transact in bitcoin? Layer 1 sure. Assuming 100 byte transactions for simplicity, you wouldn't want to drain your wealth by 0.1% every time you make a transaction. Even more so if these are morning coffee transactions.
But given lightning and (potentially) other layer 2 solutions, why couldn't the lower limit be lower than that? 1000 sats say.
Let's call hyperbitcoinization 10mm usd bitcoin. That's a satoshi = 10 cents (a dime).
So 1000 sats would be $100 dollars. It may not seem like much to a comfortable first worlder, but I am sure there are people that that's their life savings and they'd like it not to get inflated or rug pulled by whoever the custodian is.
And why not?
Is there some technical reason for the 100k floor?
I agree that there is no scaling bottleneck currently (lightning is barely used, let's be honest) but I see no reason to at least consider how lightning might be scaled in the future if there was a spike.
I can see two sides here.
- Don't add any opcodes if there is not a clear bottleneck. (YAGNI)
- Add the opcodes asap to future proof bitcoin, because the longer we wait the harder it will be to softfork. (exception to YAGNI because bitcoin is especially hard to change, not the usual code situation)
I am sympathetic to position 1, but lean more to 2 myself. Because I think it will be harder to put together a coalition the longer we wait.
In the end, I guess the market will decide. But as someone who has some allocation to bitcoin, I would rather be hodling a bitcoin that can accomodate a lower limit on self custody.
TLDR: Of course there will always be some lower limit, this is engineering. It would be ridiculous to ask bitcoin to accomodate self custodying a billionth of a sat. But why not 1000 instead of 100,000?