No

Me

I answer a lot of the criticisms -- including the one about miner incentives -- in this post: #127974

People who tip more than 100 sats per day get them

Exchanges already have whitelists

I don't think covenants make them worse

The recipient creates the covenant, not the sender, so just don't create a covenant that restricts how you can spend your money

If your concern is that exchanges might require you to create a covenant address that matches their template, otherwise they won't let you withdraw, they can already do this thing that seems equivalent:

Exchanges can -- right now -- only let you withdraw to a 2 of 2 where they control one key

Then they'd get to veto any future expenditure you try to make

Are covenants worse than that?

Even if they are, just fall back on this: don't make a covenant encumbered address and exchanges can't harm you (except by refusing to send money to you, which they can also already do)

If you follow the above guide (which forwards to Alby) and then configure Alby to use your own node, you're done. Alby itself provides a wizard for connecting it to your own node so download the extension and have at it.

Excellent post, consider adding libertyx.com to the list of no kyc options. They are one of the most painless, albeit expensive, ways to get sats with no kyc.

Who won you over? I thought you were a nostr bear like Nick

When you learn a dance like the electric slide you have to learn the steps so that you and your friends all dance the same dance. The steps are the protocol.

Nostr is like the electric slide for computers. As more and more computers learn the steps, it gets more and more impressive.

Two people on different computers send messages to one another. Protocols let both computers display the same thing. They are a set of rules about what to display if you receive message X or message Y.

To provide a bit of context, in March 2013 Gregory Maxwell wrote a patch for bitcoin core that censored satoshidice transactions by refusing to relay or mine transactions with outputs less than 10k sats. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=149668.msg1598216#msg1598216

This patch was explicitly called out as censorship by people in that thread (see the post by OneMiner at the top of that thread) but within a few months bitcoin merged a code change that implemented a less severe form of the same thing, making the dust limit 5400 sats. Satoshi Dice relied on its ability to create utxos below that dust limit as a way to alert users of the service if they lost. But once that change went into place, the number of dust transactions fell drastically.

In other words, censorship works. I'd like to use it once again and "dust" off this reliable old tool from our tool belt.

I think I found it: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/8de9bb53af32f7f6b09c06f831f2c0a7b4e95303

That git commit is called "Define dust transaction outputs, and make them non-standard"

Because of that code change (made in May 2013), Bitcoin Core began censoring transactions from the mempool if they contained very small outputs. The change was made with this comment:

The minimum relay fee at the time was higher than it is now, later it was lowered by a factor of 10 and the dust limit went down to 540 sats.

I wasn't around during the satoshi dice era, is it true that bitcoiners successfully squelched that project through a censoring mempool policy? In your opinion, are Satoshi dice outputs comparable with inscriptions? I think they are because both bloat my node's database with messages/files that would be better stored elsewhere, and both make it harder to sync a node. I think those things make bitcoin worse money. What do you think?

I'm suggesting it. First I want to start with blocking inscriptions via mempool policy, and if the inscription people regularly route around that, I want to start blocking them altogether with a soft fork.

Bitcoin moves forward by censoring things that make bitcoin worse money. Segwit censored transactions that tried to exploit the signature malleability bug. Taproot censored transactions that try to spend from bc1p addresses without a schnorr signature. A long time ago, during the misnamed op_return wars, a mempool policy of censoring op_returns with greater than 80 bytes was successful at stopping that particular type of spam. Before that, during the Satoshi dice era, a mempool policy of censoring 1 sat outputs succeeded at stopping that spam.

Censorship is not bad if the thing you're censoring makes bitcoin a worse money. So I want to do it again. Inscriptions make bitcoin a worse money (in my opinion) by confusing it with BitTorrent (where censorship resistant file storage is already a success). So yeah, I'd like to censor inscriptions because that particular censorship will make bitcoin better money, like segwit did and like taproot did. And if the mempool policy doesn't work I'd like to try a soft fork.

Yes, a drivechain for the plebs

Great to see you here, you should do an AMA about rootstock here on stacker news. @k00b let's get that set up!

You can do drivechains inside drivechains, so really, one drivechain is enough

Relevant: https://twitter.com/super_testnet/status/1618140484941271040

The miners I talk to do not seem to follow profit incentives with radical efficiency. They do not all mine RSK, even though it's profitable, they do not all move to regions with the cheapest energy, even though that means they are overpaying, they do not all have a side hustle, even though it would increase their revenues. In short, they do not act as if every possible profitable action is mandatory. The ones I talk to act like they have a smorgasbord of potentially profitable choices and they pick and choose among them, trying some and neglecting others. Mining a drivechain seems like it would be just another potentially profitable option among many.

There is a second alternative: any miner can ignore drivechain entirely and just mine blocks the way they currently do. They will still make money off the drivechain without even paying attention to it, because if miners ignore a drivechain, its users have to pay bitcoin fees to commit their drivechain's blocks to bitcoin's blockchain inside normal, fee-paying bitcoin transactions.

They have three months to figure out which one to support. When each miner mines a bitcoin block they get to increment or decrement the timelock on a withdrawal attempt. So they don't have to talk to one another, just decide individually what they want to happen, and then the number will go up or down based on the action that each miner performs. If, without coordination, precisely 50% of miners + 1 increment it every time they mine a block, it will very gradually climb toward the height when the withdrawal goes through. If not, it will gradually recede back to it's initial value, allowing the rightful owner to get ahead.

I'm also simplifying a bit, you can read https://bips.xyz/300 for the full details.