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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @fourrules 15h \ parent \ on: Gold was used for persistent data storage too bitcoin
You sound like the people who think proof of work should do useful work. The work has to be useless, and the data has to be exclusively monetary.
I think it's very good at converting unstructured data to structured data and rather than generating anything new it will help us to navigate a fragmented and noisy internet, which was prohibitively expensive for traditional parse engineering.
Its already extremely cheap to do this, it's the overlooked value proposition because the word "generative" has lead people astray, thinking that AI is going to be a producer of new knowledge and insights.
I think of it like the touch screen, something that had been around for a couple of decades before the iPhone, but took a long time even after the iPhone to really change the way with interfaced with computers.
Right now there is a rush to layer AI on top of products, where as to really shine it needs to be threaded seamlessly into products where appropriate from inception, right through the development process. It is very difficult to retrofit into software systems beyond gimmicks and minor features. I hate the AI bloat as much as anyone.
Yet where it's built into new and novel products it's dramatically opening up the kinds of things developers can achieve.
I am working on solving event aggregation, because event data is fragmented and contained in unstructured sources that are poorly indexed by search engines. Event data is only valid between the announcement and the date of the event, and can change at any time between those dates, making caching tricky. But updates are in WhatsApp and Instagram and email newsletters, so it's all a mess.
LLMs open up this opportunity, $3.2 billion has been burned by startups from Songkick to IRL.com, because before LLMs a feed of event updates has been impossible despite the data being mostly public.
Cheap models with OCR can do it.
There are many many things that LLMs blow right open, it's just going to take time for people like me to build the solutions to previously intractable problems.
So yeah, people are going to be disappointed that vibe coding doesn't make software engineering a trivial pursuit, but then who is to blame for that, AI or people?
And people pay for more jewellery. If CSAM was written into gold would it be melted down to remove the immoral content?
I don't agree that we lose credibility at all. I'm comfortable with SoV and allowing the Lindy effect to do it's thing until the incumbents are out of ammunition. This is a war of attrition, but our advantage is that it's possible to go from collectable to SoV to MoE, but you cannot go backwards once you lose the property or collectible and SoV, which they arguably have.
Monetary transactions cannot compete with spam if they are tolerated and facilitated, for the same reason that proof of work must be arbitrary work without any intrinsic value that competes with the core purpose of securing the network. Spam will always pay more in transaction fees than ordinary transactions, because to the sender it's not spam, it's only spam in the eyes of everyone else, so there must be a zero tolerance policy that all content is spam, only monetary transactions are not spam.
Empty blocks with transactions on L2 is a sign of a healthy network at our current stage of evolution.
There are valid transactions, and invalid ones, and between them there are users and a policy layer, with defaults. That is the case today, and you're advocating removing that layer, pretending it has never existed or had a meaningful impact on the monetary value of the network, when it obviously has because so many other blockchains emerged to service the demand for spam.
Because doing so wouldn't implicate existing nodes in the propagation of CSAM. Changing the default policies in Bitcoin Core would implicate nodes in CSAM propagation. Bitcoin Core is so synonymous with Bitcoin that if it is corrupted in this way then not even Knots users could cleanse themselves of me taint associated with the Core users, including most of the miners, relaying such transactions.
The sybil attack you're describing simply isn't worth to effort, it would defeat itself. They need us to stab ourselves in the eye and you are willing entertain the idea for them.
So why haven't they done it?
The answer is that unless Bitcoin Core changes default policies this sybil attack would be expensive and ineffective. If Bitcoin Core decides that the policy level is irrelevant to consensus then it's a trivial attack
You're ignoring the fact that policy changes mean nodes relay it before it's confirmed, so they are directly implicated, as opposed to a bad actor engaging in graffiti with the complicity of a negligent and identifiable miner.
So a mining pool would do this and destroy their reputation and devalue the network, why? It would have to be a lot of money or a lot of coercion, and the Bitcoin nodes would not be implicated because it would not have been relayed before it were confirmed.
A sybil attack via Bitcoin Core policy defaults compared to a bad actor with an alternative implementation is like the difference between being stabbed in the eye and stabbing yourself in the eye.
If someone tries to stab you in the eye you can engage in countermeasures. If you stab yourself in the eye then who is there to deploy countermeasures?
I don't agree with that.
New monetary systems start as collectibles. In that regard bitcoin has already succeeded, everyone agrees.
The next stage can either be MoE or SoV, but it depends upon the reaction of the incumbent system. The incumbent system and entrenched interests will use any technique they can to forestall the adoption of the new system, including sybil attacks that make the general population suspicious or morally opposed to the new system.
In principle Bitcoin should be like gold, in that it can hold out as a SoV for 1000 years without getting corrupted by a sophisticated attacker. It cannot depend upon becoming a MoE in order to succeed, it must succeed to the extent that MoE is inevitable, even if that ultimately takes a very long time.
If it were the case that there were no strong incumbent then Bitcoin would have already succeeded as a MoE, but we would still be having this conversation, because the very permanence of the Blockchain makes it attractive as a data storage and transmission system, although at that point the debate would be more easily resolved because the amount of mainstream investment in Bitcoin as a neutral monetary medium would overwhelm the case for tolerating and facilitating spam.
Bottom line: if bitcoin succeeds as a permanent SoV then it will eventually and inevitably become the dominant MoE even if that is beyond our life times. As the saying goes, society grows strong when men plant trees under whose shade they will never sit.
The only two things that I can see that might thwart that are:
- a sudden innovation in quantum computing that drains prominent addresses and with the current block size takes a year for all addresses to migrate to quantum safe addresses
- the evolution at the policy layer of bitcoin from a neutral monetary medium hostile to content rich transactions to a culture that tolerates and facilitates spam, and treats hostility as censorship and all data as equivalent.
They can't really commit though, because they'd need at minimum central bank independence, or to adopt Bitcoin, neither of which they will do.
Just hoping no one mines such transactions
Who is doing that though? Knots advocates? Bitcoin is 15 years old and the quantity of those transactions as a percentage of the overall compared to other blockchains is vanishingly small. Changing default policies by sneaking in an upgrade via the inertia and the apathy of node operators, and the trust they have for the long standing credibility of Core developers, is what will invite content rich transactions to a degree that makes Bitcoin a useful tool for non-monetary data transmission and storage.
Basic information theory prevents a rigorous absolute solution, so we are left with the sufficient policy and cultural layer.
Fair point. I was alluding to the post and thread and wider discourse rather than a specific comment of Scores by. If I could point at a rhetorical technique it would be to repetitively ask questions that have been answered clearly over the past few months as though Scoresby were just entering the discussion today, which they haven't.
Scoresby knows that Bitcoin Core default policy settings are there by demand from the earliest days of Bitcoin development, rather than a temporary artefact, and that spinning up an alternative implementation, a fork of Bitcoin Core, in order to overwhelm the current policies of nodes would be an obvious sybil attack. They are two entirely different things. Pretending to not see the distinction is a rhetorical trick in a zero sum game, not a legitimate argument in a good faith debate.
Its a bad question, it's not a matter of percentages.
If a government or other bad actors spun up 10% or 900% of the current node count using a Bitcoin Core fork it would identifiably be considered a sybil attack, by overwhelming the policy settings of existing nodes. Countermeasures would be deployed to mitigate the damage and demonstrate hostility to spam and CSAM in particular.
But by getting rid of policy settings entirely via Bitcoin Core software it gets rid of the idea that policies are part of the consensus mechanism and security of the network. You can believe that is the case, and other people disagree, and so we fight it out in public discourse.
Dismissing knots advocates with rhetorical techniques is just the strategy of people who want to change Bitcoin by getting rid of a core function of nodes within the system.
: if filters are that powerful, what will we do when a government decides to use filters to prevent transactions they don't like?
Explain the mechanism of co-opting all of the nodes. Its not enough to overwhelm the nodes by number, if that were feasible.
Because by being relayed first they are acting on the tacit approval of the network, or a significant portion of it, and are not more culpable than those nodes who saw the content and chose to relay it.
Bottom line: are nodes relating CSAM today? Would removing the filters as Core policy increase or decrease the likelihood of them doing so?
Bitcoin will always be vulnerable to spam, but being vulnerable doesn't mean that the system is destroyed by the vulnerability, unless nodes decide that this vulnerability is in fact a feature.
If spam is simply data, which has as much a place on the chain as any arbitrary data then bitcoin changes from a system that represents value via transaction data, to a protocol for sending and receiving data with intrinsic value, i.e. not a neutral medium of exchange.
Another staw man argument, I know that, as does every prominent knots advocate. Nobody is saying spam transactions are invalid, but the valid spam transactions are not relayed due to Core defaults, and that has always been known. If a miner is paid directly to include a CSAM transaction that has not been relayed by nodes then they would obviously destroy their reputation by tarnishing that of Bitcoin, so that's never happened.
Bad actors put CSAM directly into OP_Return on BSV, a comparable if inconsequential Blockchain, after they increased the limit to 100kb, exactly as is proposed in v30 of Bitcoin Core.
Why would states or other bad actors not do this as soon as it was possible?
Using specialised techniques to store fragmentary data that can reproduce an illegal image is an entirely different thing to storing the entire data in a single transaction within OP_Return.