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1921 sats \ 11 replies \ @028559d218 1 May \ on: Can Someone Please Tell Me What is Going On With Bitcoin Core AskSN
The entire 'debate' around core as I understand it... is about mempool policies. It's not about consensus.
Bitcoin Core is the most popular Bitcoin node software... and it has had a 'middle of the road' mempool policy. Not too restrictive... not too permissive in terms of "which transactions" it will broadcast and/or accept into its default mempool.
Libre Relay IIUC accepts almost everything as long as its consensus valid - the rules for the mempool are way way relaxed. Things appear in the mempool, including non-standard transactions, that can't and don't appear in other implementations of Bitcoin Core.
Bitcoin Knots is by far the most conservative, highly restrictive in terms of 'monetary transactions' and what appear in memepools. Inscriptions (certain data blobs in witness data) and op_return transactions are disallowed in the mempool completely. They are considered 'spam'. Those things still appear in blocks as they as 100% consensus valid and they are stored in blocks in Knots nodes... they just don't appear in the knots mempool.
The whole debate right now is around 'how relaxed' the transaction mempool should be in 'Bitcoin Core' - as it's the most common and influential default node implementation.
Spammers are using Witness Data (inscriptions) to embed large amounts of information usually for the purpose of memecoins or creating nfts-jpegs. OR spammers are using op_return in large quantities to create and trade memecoins. Core is proposing that op_return standards become more relaxed in Core so that op_return is used... instead of "more harmful" things like witness data or dust outputs that that are 1) impossible to prune and 2) impossible to be spent. A UTXO that can never be spent and cannot be pruned bloats the UTXO set... making it harder to run nodes especially on limited hardware. And by comparison, accepting more arbitrary data in op_return, rather than Witness or unspendable dust outputs, would be arguably 'less harmful' to the network than the ways in which arbitrary data is currently appearing.
Regardless of what people run and for how long... inscriptions, op_return, and other forms of arbitrary data are consensus valid and are stored in the nodes of node-runners. They may not be stored in the mempools of nodes by default... but in any case if a transactor broadcast the transaction at a premium to a miner... the miner can and will include it.
Core argues that this makes 'mempool policy' less and less relevant... because if some mempools accept certain transactions and others don't... it fragments the mempool, makes fee estimation harder, slows the network block propagation and doesn't actually filter transactions those transactions.
The Knots followers believe that none of this really matters... making spam harder on the network is a worthy goal regardless of it being ineffective and 'filtering' is what we should all do.
The debate continues.
Great explanation~~
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Fantastic explanation thank you so much! I guess one thing that I’m curious about is once all the BTC is mined the blockchain is going to depend on transaction fees unless there is some huge change… does the blockchain generate enough fees to sustain itself? It was my understanding at least that this was not the case and was going to be an issue in 100+ years when the last block was mined.
Is that correct? Would it be possible then if the fees aren’t enough that Knot proponents are kinda just kicking the can down the road compared to the Core group?
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See Fees vs Subsidy - all of it needs to be green eventually
It's arguable that the Knots people are doing that essentially...
Why? Because eventually the fees will need to power/incentivize the entire mining network.
There will be less and less subsidy... or not much of one, as the subsidy decreases 50% every 4 years. So every four years we need a relatively large increase in BTC's price (which we'll have over the short/medium) OR we need more and transactional demand.
The monkey JPEG and memecoin people are not long-term sustainably going to pay to use Bitcoin. They are here for speculation only, and could more cheaply use a PoS centralized network...
They aren't going to stick and 'pay the miners' in my opinion, they're not going to subsidize them, it won't be enough revenue, they only pay at 1-2 sats/vb typically and most of the spam is BRC20 tokens with a few lines of JSON which takes up almost no space anyway.
Sure it bloats the UTXO set... but they are wasting money? Are they going to do this forever?
In my view, any time there is an economic downturn or tightening in Chinese economic policy, the memecoins stop or slow temporarily. Why is that?
Because that's where most of them (memes) come from and the Chinese love to gamble.
But they won't be around forever they aren't going to 'pay the miners' to make the entire 'ring' green.
Monetary transactions have to take over BIG TIME and long term they are the only source of monetary revenue for miners.
SOME miners that are state-sponsored will mine even at a loss... to ensure the economic viability of the nation-state or its institutions that pay them but that is a long ways off.
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The block subsidy is decreasing exponentially. Currently it is ₿3.125, at block 1,050,000 it will drop to ₿1.60625, at block 1,260,000 it will drop to ₿0.803125 per block and so forth. In about 15 years, it will be slightly more than ₿0.1 per block. ₿1 in transaction fees is about a full block at 100 sats/vB. So, a block subsidy of ₿0.1 is exceeded by fees, if the transactions pay more than 10 sats/vB in average. As you can see, this is becoming relevant a bit earlier than in 100 years.
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also fragmented mempool makes estimating fees for L2 justice type transactions (like in lightning) harder
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There is a contradiction when saying that spam filters do not work and simultaneously wanting to remove the opreturn limit. Isn't there?
Why is most arbitrary data stored in the witness then? Likely, since there is a opreturn limit, i.e. effective spam filter in place
Note that witness data can be ignored by node runners to keep our machines as lean as possible
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The spam filters literally aren't working currently. If they were... we wouldn't even be talking about this stuff.
It's stored in the witness because it's disguised as program code... and because witness data gets the ~75% discount.
It can be 'ignored' ie not 'computed' (that's my understanding at least) but it cannot be pruned. The nodes ignore anything in op_if op_end (iiuc) but it is still stored.
Op_return outputs can be pruned plus don't bloat the utxo set plus are 4x more expensive for spammers
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