Sybil Attacks work.

Any notable ones?

The question is, are you OK with a handful of miners deciding what changes go in (core ones) or not (bip110)? If a handful of miners rule bitcoin evolution, is it still decentralized? Pkease, reply sincerely and explain what makes you so relaxed after seeing this play out. Side question, do you run a node? Not that it matters anymore in the current chain, but I am curious if you ever had to to an Initial Block Download and noticed the las 4 years take longer than the previous 13, and it is all suddenly somewhere around 2022

It's remarkable to see how fiercely people are sticking to it.

I think the point is this that No One can decide what changes Bitcoin. No centralized faction, be it miners, exchanges, or even a motivated minority of nodes can change it.

We figured out that a few large mining pools who are controlled by state governments now control the rules of bitcoin. Bitcoin is no longer decentralized.

💯 Delusional

Notable to me, yes, but none that need to be singled out for purposes of this post.

Keep studying the issues, Fren... Study the proponents and real arguments on both sides. The vast majority don't understand evil; don't hate the government nearly enough...

I am not a miner and I reject bip-110. I am a pleb.

Try to focus on what was proven with the failed attempt…

I'm not surprised by those who have been such vocal supporters of changing Bitcoin from P2P digital cash into a media hosting service.

The point is you and all other plebs have no control over the large centralized mining pools. The governments do. You just got lucky that they picked what you wanted.

No, if the miners picked against the network consensus their coins would be on a network no one uses

No one? The core team did it without asking. One of the times they were loudly told not to do it, they went ahead anyways. On Saturday bip110 attempted to undo the changes, return the proticol to rigut after taproot merged but before it was exploited. The miners said no. It was not a USARF with thousands of people behind rejecting BIP 110 explicitly, it was a handful of miners dictating bitcoin rules. I see changes from a minority here going in and the same minority rejecting changes from another minority that happens to be at least a couple of orders of magnitude bigger in numbers. Don't you see it? Don't repeat theoretical rethoric, check the facts

The core team did not change consensus.

Let me ask you this: What about the BIP110 crowd is "decentralized"? Where is the diversity of opinion? The variety of node options? To me, it sounds like BIP110 enforces a strict dogma and views everything else as heresy. Members follow the lead of a tight-knit group of leaders, view outside voices as anathema, and ostracize any dissent or criticism. The desired outcome is not a truly-decentralized chain, but rather a chain that is dictated by the preferences of one leader.

17000 individual nodes signaled by downloading the nonstandard node, and switching RDTS on. Luke did not give you RDTS on by default, you could download a version without it and even in the one I got I had to configure it explicitly. 17000 vs 6 miners and a dev team with probably a dozen or so key individuals. The small cabal prevailed. The rest of the nodes were given the chance to mount a rejection version, none did, so they effectively abstained. This is key, because if bip110 would have been rejected by nodes, you would have had a point, but no, miners decided. Bip110 basically limited op return to 83 bytes, the practical limit before most of bitcoin life. It also forbid op if were it was not expected to be used anyway I'm normal taproot txs, as this was being exploited to fill the chain and the memory. In general it just added strict filed size limits which is, BTW, standard protocol practice anyways. In fact I never understood why op retirn was never limited im size from the very begining. If you do a IBD now you would notice the impact in 2022. My agenda is my own. If a new fork is born my proposal would be to have 3 different implementations, in 3 distinct languages, so there is no single point of failure reference implementation anymore, neither at the hands of Luke nor anyone else's. But you would understand this is a long project to push for, even in the age of AI. Rust guys, for instance, seem keen to rewrite everything in Rust... except they seem frightened of bitcoin, for whatever reason. If Luke shows signs of pushing changes that seem to give him or someone in particular any edge, I would be the first to move to something else. And yes, Core did change consensus in practical terms. When you have a filter and rule 99% of the nodes, your conventions are like protocol. And the excuses they made up were totally retarded. Guacamole game, etc. Software Engineering is about guacamole game always, on every releasse you do, you know it will be affected by a CVE in a matter of days (specially now with AI), but you stop patching security issues? Nope, you patch faster!

BTW you haven't replied my question. How decentralized is a protocol whose evolution is decided by a handful of miners? This is what should keep you up at night until you can answer it properly. Specially now that you now the bip110 crazy crowd is no longer a threat to your chain.

Yes the op return limit was not formally protocol, but the filter was mostly enforced as law, and the point is the change of opinion did not make any sense. Don't you see a red flag there? Some people did care, and complained. They were ignored. Weren't they? Another red flag. Most people do not really have the time to stay on things, informed and all that, so you can't judge silence as rejection or apathy. Core devs behaved as they were running the show unilaterally. I do not see why miners would have to "go In line" once they agree to collude. The hope was they will chose safety, and thus could have been backed by promises of fiat bailouts behind the scenes. It is a possibility. For whatever reason a most hostile was decided? Who was doing anything about it? Even the 20% knots market share jump in matter of weeks was impressive, but insufficient to improve things. Anyway, decentralization means you have the right to think you hold the truth and stay on the legacy chain. If you are indeed right, things will go well for you and you'll have nothing to worry about. But if you find later you were wrong, and the legacy chain is indeed captured, you will be be thankful we forked now so you have a non captured coin to move to. And the earlier you notice that, the more you will be rewarded.

Indeed, ad hominem is never the way Just to recap the different views: You say it is still in the power of (who exactly? "The network"?) to change the op return limit back. I do not see how, core had crappy arguments for their change of opinion, and ignored and gaslighted all critics. The battle for knots was uphill and still went from nothing to over 20% of the network share. There is great asymmetry there. You said miners followed economic gravity... Except that is not what happened on Saturday. In 2017 they followed economic logic, but not this time. Signaling had zero risk, as the bip110 block is a valid non bip110 one, and if other miners defected, you were in trouble. Without a USARF signaling rejection, they had to be very sure their cronies would not defect in order to risk it as they did.

UASRF was deserted, which meant miners did not know how much real explicit opposition was there. The only way to make sense of their decision was they knew for a fact that none of the other big miners would signal. How could they know that without some collusion?

OK, let's explain. UASF is User Activated Soft Fork And URSF is User Rejected Soft Fork (was writing thatwronggly before, sorry) Here is where it was tracked

BIP-110

URSF Status | Bitcoin Signaling Monitor

Real-time Bitcoin miner version-bit signaling tracker by difficulty adjustment period.

The BIP110 USAF initial logic was from the 2017 big blockers defeat era, that is, soft fork tightens the rules and therefore miners, which are employed by node runners (who pay the fees) should be compelled to obey. This is because collusion was not contemplated, of course. So the USRF was there to give the option to node runners, not miners, to signal actual rejection towards the UASF supporters and miners. If the USRF would have been say 5% above the USAF I would concede the network was actively rejecting the change. This is because in this case not voting was passively consenting. Again, assuming no collusion of miners. I guess the USRF would have be coded to actually reject blocks signaling for the UASF, to make the point clear. Do you understand now why the way things went down on Saturday is scary? On top of that, several detractors of the BIP literary said that nodes or plebs did not matter, only miners do, because they had invested billions of USD, etc. (Sounds proof of stake to me) Not sure how you feel about that, but I don't like it. The facts are, you are now on a chain ruled by miners, nodes are only useful for privacy assurance, but don't give you a voice in the protocol. Core devs propose changes and the miners accept them. (I would be very surprised if miners actually reject a Core change, that would be an interesting scenario, theatrics? Real discrepancy?) As a result I can yell you now, even if I decide to continue to use the kegacy chain, I do not plan to run a node in there, its too much hassle for little reward. As node prices climb with data storage bloat, I guess most people will seek privacy by lighter means. But even that does not matte now.. BIP110 was fighting spam to avoid node centralisation, but on Saturday that fight was shown moot. If nodes don't matter any more and miners rule, centralization is here already.

Well it is all possible, people can get corrupted. But by their actions you will know them. I did not follow bip110 because it was pushed by certain people. I followed it because Core move was a clear attack to node runners and this temporary correction seemed reasonable, and the only attempt to do anything against the Core powergrab beyond clenching fists in the air and say how "deeply concerned" you were about it. Diversity of opinion? Anyone was invited to run either the UASF or the URSF. But node runners that were against bip110 did not exist or care enough to take the time to reject it, deferring to their miners overlords. BIP110 does not give power to anyone, it only enforces 83 bytes in op return and no op its where taproot was not designed to use them anyways. And only temporarily, until we figured out a better way. This was not really a change, but a correction on a change already done to bitcoin behind its back. Filters are almost as important as consensus, if bitcoin was a real protocol, with a formal spec and several reference implementations, long standing filters should be part of the spec and be observed by all reference implementations.