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119 sats \ 7 replies \ @028559d218 11 May \ parent \ on: The Utility of Bike Shedding OP_RETURN limits bitcoin
And if people 'vote with the software'.... then what does that accomplish exactly?
When we choose what software implementation we run, we place our support behind a particular development team. This can influence a metric of success of that implementation - peers in the wild is probably the best we have - and affects the distribution of developer influence within the entirety of the ecosystem.
"Open source often naturally revolves around a meritocracy", per the
bitcoin/bitcoin contribution guidelines. Therefore it only makes sense to assign merit where we feel it belongs, by running the software that we individually feel serves us best. You have the freedom to choose your implementation, so choose.Here's an approximation of maintaining projects for active reachable nodes from the latest bitnodes api snapshot as of writing:
4 utreexod
5 bcoin
8 ckcoind
23 btcd
24 other
1821 Knots
19625 Core
It's only a rough approximation, for example I am not sure what futurebit and dojo change in the source, if anything, so i grouped them under core.
Now let's hypothesize that Knots grows further. It means more eyes and more effort spent on that repo and maybe even more funding if such a trend would persist. And although I personally don't like this hypothetical trend that's going on where sentiment over Core deteriorates and Knots grows because of the actions taken on Core, all is still good: feature, not bug.
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Running Knots doesn't change what gets into blocks. It doesn't change miner incentives. It doesn't change fee rates, or what sat/vb has to be paid to get into blocks.
It doesn't increase or decrease utxo bloat. It doesn't increase, or decrease, storage space required to run a node either. It literally changes nothing... except make fee estimation harder for the node, plus slow block propagation and make compact blocks less accurate / less representative of the types of transactions people are paying for.
Running Knots is like "no masturbate Monday" for ideological purposes. It may make you feel good, you may give yourself a 'gold star' at the end of the day for your 'good deed' of 'not touching it...'
But does it actually change what happens in the world? No.
Does it change what goes on 'outside'? No.
If it makes you feel better then great run it... but it has precisely zero effect on the real world and zero effect on the fee incentives or content of Bitcoin blocks.
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I'm not advocating running Knots, was merely formulating a hypothetical. I don't run knots even though having the additional configurability isn't a bad thing, imho.
What I'm proposing is that if you care, run something else, or configure core differently while you still can. Or write your own client. There is no rule in Bitcoin that says you have to run Bitcoin Core. You can run whatever you want. There are no kings, no heroes; just you and your sats. How you manage these is up to you and up to you alone.
So let's calm down on the emotions. I didn't write this to hear your opinion about Knots or what effects you think it has or hasn't, I wrote this because you asked what it accomplished, and my answer was "shift merit/recognition away from core". Which I honestly think is a shame, but it's a logical reaction to increased intolerance on the repo.
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That, respectfully, doesn't make any sense. if knots usage has few if any upsides, and easily identifiable, clear downsides... then the downsides outweigh the upsides and knots shouldn't be run by most people.
now people have the right to run whatever, and the more nodes that get used in general the better... but it is false equivalence to say that running knots is the technical equivalent of running core. it isn't.
there is some growing body of influencers out there advocating that people 'run knots' without explaining any of the downsides, any of the reason 'not to' filling in the blanks with baseless conspiracy and this doesn't 'help bitcoin' i think this much is clear.
identifying risks and managing upside vs downside in the software is what developers do... but infleuncers don't [as they're] advocating using incomplete information and i see our job (as non-technical plebs) to call this out
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if knots usage has few if any upsides
Like I said I don't run it, so I'm not an expert, but from the code I've seen that Luke has been adding the past couple of years, there are a whole lot more configuration options. It could be useful for tuning.
the more nodes that get used in general the better
The more nodes that don't blindly do whatever a bunch of devs says, the better, but also to a limit; hops are a thing and thousands of useless nodes that guard no economic value will just introduce more hops and that doesn't make things better for the whole, per-se.
However, people thinking about what they want their node to do is good though. People watching what's going on on the network and having an opinion about that is good too. It would be even better if they question the influencers and get better informed, agreed.
A whole bunch of people that just do X because someone was saying it on X (excuse the pun), is of course not an improvement, but long term, there is great value in people thinking about things. It's easy to call sheep but these people - if they're young - will also evolve.
i see our job (as non-technical plebs) to call this out
Okay, so why are you calling me out? You think I'm an influencer? 😂
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No. but i think bs has a way of permeating any environment, and it doesn't help. eventually reality sets in and the BS makes a system weaker, not stronger.
the 'bigger risk' to bitcoin isn't bitcoin core or jpegs (and i believe that btc core's approach has been very thoughtful over all?) it's irrelevance.
negligible layer 1 usage kills bitcoin eventually. Not today, not tomorrow, but it does eventually because it [btc] can't only be a store of value for institutions and for 'NGU' forever.
lightning works, coinjoins work and are extremely cheap, and yet at 1 sat/vb clearly the 'demand' to use Bitcoin isn't there. This is a much bigger deal and it would help to have the smartest people in this space talking about it instead of whether there are frog jpegs at all of 1 sat/vbyte.