Yes. The more I think this through, the more it feels like the only coherent path forward. To me, the Core vs. Knots debate has become a reflection of binary politics. Both sides begin with conclusions and then defend them with a lot of subjectivity. I think Bitcoin deserves something better while acknowledging both parties. Rather than asking what Core wants or what Knots wants, we should ask what the physics of Bitcoin requires. Nick and I have converged on this direction after talking about it, and others are beginning to arrive at the same conclusion through the mathematics. Lightning does not require witness discounting or an implicit increase in block size. The mistake in SegWit was not transaction malleability fixes or enabling second-layer protocols. The mistake was altering the economics of blockspace by discounting one class of permanent memory relative to another. In doing so, we departed from the constants Satoshi established at Genesis. We are no longer mining blocks with the same conserved symmetry that defined the original protocol. We have changed Bitcoin’s “speed of light” (speed of memory). If every permanently stored bit imposes the same physical burden on every node forever, then every bit should compete under the same economic rules. That is the conservation law Bitcoin originally satisfied. SegWit broke that symmetry. I believe restoring those original block economics would resolve much of what we now call the “spam problem.” It would dramatically reduce the amount of discounted space available for abuse while forcing every participant to pay the same price for the same permanent burden placed upon the network. Whether additional policy limits are desirable becomes a separate discussion. The first step is restoring the conservation law. As we investigate the mathematics and the physics we can see Bitcoin has operated for nearly nine years under a distorted economic geometry. Over two halvings, we have fundamentally changed the relationship between a fixed supply of 21 million BTC and a finite supply of blockspace. We expanded the effective memory surface while simultaneously assigning unequal prices to equal physical bits. The original protocol satisfied two simple conservation principles: 1 sat = 1 sat 1 bit = 1 bit The first still holds. The second no longer does. Bitcoin’s fee market is fundamentally an exchange between sats and bits. Satoshis bid for permanent memory. When we discounted witness data, we devalued one class of bits relative to another and broke the economic equivalence between identical physical memory. In distorting the bits we also distorted the sats since the relationship of energy/value, information and time are what’s fundamental. Recovering 1 bit = 1 bit conservation is just as fundamental as 1 sat = 1 sat

Replies (7)

JackTheMimic's avatar
JackTheMimic 1 month ago
I guess the real hard pill to swallow is that everyone's perception that we won the blocksize war is actually false. The same way that these United States didn't survive the Civil War, they became THE United States.
“If every permanently stored bit imposes the same physical burden on every node forever, then every bit should compete under the same economic rules.” 💯❤️‍🔥🔥
It’s incredibly arrogant that you would rather revert bitcoin to a previous state without lightning than admit you are wrong about core. This is not politics. This is simply a defense of Bitcoin as a decentralized monetary system. There is no legitimate hard fork being proposed. It’s nothing like the block wars. Core has zero counterpoints, and there is no URSF. RDTS, is a temporary soft fork with a fast growing base of nodes (more than BIP 148 had at its activation), mined blocks and an implementation that doesn’t effect Bitcoin as money. What isn’t legitimate is CORE. Nothing they did in the last two years that was helpful to Bitcoin… it’s pure malware, serving only the interests of getting more funding, no matter the source and by any means necessary: Core deleted wallets. They exposed IP. They received funding from Epstien through MIT media lab and Adam back went to the island… then they hired incompetent devs, who ignorantly made these radical changes to Bitcoin like op return blow out and flooded the chain with a stablecoin scam, runes, ordinals and even memecoins- not just “spam”. This wasn’t enough for them. After that they sought to protect their dying reputation and funding with absolute lies concerning the alternative client. Claiming RDTS was contentious and irresponsible. They claimed it did things it didn’t, because the truth would lose their credibility as a dominant client. The truth is Core is contentious and harmful to the network, not knots. Core is captured by corporations and are an enemy to Bitcoin. Full stop. Anyone defending them at this point is either ignorant or a fraud. What’s even worse is your proposal to avoid this issue by going back to pre segwitt. A pre segwitt BTC would disable lightning (bip110 preserves this). Lighting was the mechanism that made bitcoin a more scalable medium of exchange and what made Bitcoin one of the fastest payment systems on earth. Hell, it’s the reason this app exists. BIP 110 doesn’t change this… your proposal does, for no other reason than to avoid the possibility that Core is comprised… You are so terrified of what the Core supporters think, and wishing to remain in their inner group, that you have to run logical circles to defend alternatives. It’s making you look like a fool, when you have actually really great ideas outside of this issue. I suggest you take other look at RDTS and what Core is really doing then ask yourself: Is bitcoin decentralized money? Or should it be a data storage system controlled by a bunch of centralized node servers? … because that’s where we are headed without RDTS.