Knots:

People seems to be enjoying the lack of Knots propaganda here so I'll commit to making more effort and getting out of the twitter echo chamber.

Knots 29 is out! View quoted note →

Neutral monetary network = Defensible Neutral file storage = Indefensible This necessarily means maintaining the ability to discriminate between monetary activity and file storage. This is self evidently the only way Bitcoin can realistically continue to exist without centralized gatekeepers having to moderate everything for us because we couldn't handle it ourselves.

Old methods of storing evil stuff required obfuscation: they would need to break it up into multiple chunks and reassembly would require specific software and knowledge of what the data is and how to reconstruct and interpret it exactly. The old formats looked like this: "Hi, I'm a Bitcoin transaction, here's my first output of 45 outputs - <filepart1>, here's my second output <filepart2>, here's my third output<filepart3>" along with a tonne of other stuff that has to get parsed out when processing the highly obfuscated material. This is thankfully also true of inscriptions. OP_RETURN however is just a dump for raw, serialized data. It's not the same. It says the equivalent of "Hi I'm a Bitcoin transaction, here's an unspendable output: <file> end". This wasn't a problem for tiny OP_RETURNs i.e their current limit of 80 bytes. If they're permitted to be 100kb, that's where the abuse begins. And that's the end of plausible deniability. When the stuff gets processed - which it has to be for your node to verify that they are valid transactions - then you just have a raw, unadulterated file that will trigger primitive antivirus/forensics software to alert the user: "Hi, you have CP on your computer." You now need a licence to run a Bitcoin node, everyone thinks you're disgusting if you do, and they're not even wrong.

I've watched everything get destroyed at the identity level over and over again. Here is the mechanism by which it always happens: View quoted note →

The fact that filters work at all when mining is as centralized as it is today (which is going to be fixed quite soon thanks to @OCEAN 's DATUM protocol and @jack 's work in the hardware/firmware space) means filters going to become insanely powerful in the future. This is why there is this push so hard to rip filters out now, because once spammers making out-of-band "transactions" must negotiate with hundreds of miners instead of a single pool, they'll struggle to get these gamified attacks against Bitcoin going as easily and they will remain something we can tolerate rather than horrible, runaway attacks like inscriptions. Individual miners adding spam is tolerable, that's what affords Bitcoin its censorship resistance and will always be possible regardless of what nodes may choose to relay. Right now however, you can evade a filter by convincing one giant miner (such as Antpool) to ignore it. Then it does so on behalf of tens of thousands of hashers pointing their machines to it. People don't understand that "sub 1 s/vb summer" is a product of mining being almost completely centralized. It doesn't prove filters are useless, it just proves how censorship-prone Bitcoin is because you can make massive, sweeping decrees about what ends up in the blockchain by dealing with one single entity responsible for 30% of block templates. And again, even with mining in this state, MARA still elected to abandon routing around a filter because the delay in block propagation was not worth it. They are a single miner and probably the biggest miner in the world - only outsized by pools like Foundry and Antmain who must soon be broken up into their constituent parts if their hashers stop being complacent and Bitcoin finally abandons centralized mining. They are economically incentivized to do this because FPPS is usually a waste of money for a hasher. It is significantly harder to spam Bitcoin in an environment where mining is decentralized - which it obviously needs to be. It's only possible to get persistent, gamified spam attacks if nodes agree to help the spammers out which they have no reason to do if the concern about spam filters causing mining centralization is a lie - and it is. Because the reason mining is centralized is not spam filters - so removing them isn't going to fix anything. The reason is that Foundry, Antpool and others are acting as giant miners on behalf of their hashers due to the mistake that is Stratum V1. We are going to get past this horrific mistake and it makes sense to plan accordingly, not to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by tearing out filters in resignation to mining remaining centralized when it isn't going to much longer. Spam filters are a product of a network run by and for the benefit of nodes. Nodes having to relay spam is an admission of defeat - that pools will always remain centralized arbiters of what goes in blocks and thus can always be bribed into filling the chain up with crap that the nodes rejected from their mempools. It then takes this further and uses that as a rationalization for coercing nodes into trying to at least make the spam available to a few more miners to "level the playing field" among maybe a dozen miners instead of just a couple. Big whoop. The chain ends up trashed, nodes don't run for their own benefit any more and are now tacit free service providers for miners undermining their own investment. That is not a Bitcoin with a future and it's a completely unnecessary compromise. The purpose of spam filters is self evident for anyone running a node, even for a mining node. Excuses being made to justify their removal are shameful and insist that we can only ever have a Bitcoin where the Bitcoin miners of the world are mere hashers using the Stratum V1 protocol to evade their role in choosing what goes in the blockchain and that thusly, spam filters can surely be routed around easily enough that nodes must acquiesce. To reiterate: Spam filters have nothing to do with the centralization of mining, it is the poor design of the Stratum protocol which turns inevitably centralized reward split coordinators (aka "pools") into *miners* for the purposes of deciding what goes into the chain. That was never sustainable, and it's being fixed. If that gets fixed, then what nodes relay - and pretty much only what nodes relay - is what ends up in blocks as nothing out-of-band is sustainable if they can't find a miner large enough to grant them the blockspace necessary for their attack. If you only have a small group of entities deciding what goes into the chain and what doesn't, you're not decentralized or censorship resistant. But yes, you can route around spam filters trivially. Again, no one is proving what they think they are by paying a giant pool to evade a filter. The more decentralized mining gets, the more filters work. And I repeat: The fact that they work at all today with mining as centralized as it is and that Core must aggressively break stuff like datacarriersize for BitVM guys to have a shot at using OP_RETURN reliably instead of fake pubkeys should be incontrovertible proof that filters work as we say they do.

Shill me a good Lightning-accepting VPS

Some powerful orange pilling alpha: View quoted note →

Nostrudle started being weird so trying out iris again. Amethyst remains undefeated for mobile.

In the fork war nodes were being asked to store crazy amounts of data to facilitate the whole world using L1 cheaply in perpetuity. In the spam war, nodes are being asked to relay as much data as possible for no benefit whatsoever. We are not a serious project. It kills me because at least during the fork war we all agreed on what bitcoin *was* - it was just a question of tradeoffs. This war however is an effort to redefine Bitcoin entirely - as arbitrary data storage that can sort of do money as an additional cool feature.

Doing DATUM workshop in the side stage/keynote stage

Jet lag is the worst.

New Knots who dis?

I was awarded a badge for @Bitcoin Valley - Circular Economy Anyone know how I add it using Amethyst? My Nostrudel appears to have shit the bed.

God willing, Bitcoin will survive its devs.

Once a week this comes in useful.

Someone can always abuse the honor system. I will never be the one to undermine a high-trust society with "race-to-the-bottom" behaviour. And it only becomes hopeless when you have intentional subversion by bad actors. Bitcoin requires adversarial thinking but somehow you must reconcile that with the fact that no one wants to be in a community with scummy people. Respecting Core filters was an honor system thing that shouldn't work in theory but in practice has done for basically its entire existence. And it has taken intentional malice by scammers to undermine that. The best argument I can make against my position here is the point that honor systems don't scale. Leave-the-cash-in-a-box farm stand works in a village with 500 people. It's not going to work in New York City. True. But at the same time, Bitcoin is a permanently unfinished and evolving technology. All the decisions in that regard are downstream from its users. And if its users can't resist undermining their own interests with short-termist obliteration of the commons by treating nodes as a disposable but inevitable resource when its the only aspect to Bitcoin making it genuinely decentralized then the future looks extremely bleak. I don't think the alleged hopelessness of counter-spam measures is coming from people who are prepared to take all the relevant players in this ecosystem into account. Do spammers want their spam to be stored by the world's most redundant database? Sure. Do miners want to get paid for facilitating that? Sure - though that's very short sighted of them. But does my node want to relay fake transactions thinly veiling chunks of non-Bitcoin garbage from spammers to miners? Of course not. And without our nodes you don't have Bitcoin. You have another stupid crypto. 16% of the network is permissionlessly asserting their right to relay what's in the interests of themselves and the network. Just like how you can argue that me not stealing the blueberries from the farm stand and voluntarily paying for them is completely rational behaviour for someone who doesn't want to chop off the branch on which they sit.