reply on: Giacomo Zucco on the history of filters in Bitcoin \ stacker news ~bitcoin

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100 sats \ 6 replies \ @Scoresby OP 19h \ parent \ on: Giacomo Zucco on the history of filters in Bitcoin bitcoin

A miner filling the entire block with fake addresses in a 0.92MB coinbase tx is consensus-valid. What would you call that?

If the miner didn't have much hashrate, I'd call it their choice. If they were a big pool, I'd call it an attack.

Bitcoin is mostly interesting to me because of censorship resistance. Everything else grows out of that. If valid transactions can ruin bitcoin, then we probably need to consider a fork to make such transactions invalid (I'd love to see the Great Consensus Cleanup get forked in post haste).

Miners don't even have to do fake addresses. A big enough pool could prevent others from transacting simply by filling blocks with transactions that sent themselves their own uxtos. This is certainly a vulnerability. The fee market is our only defense against it.

The same is true for "spam." As Betty Hutton¹ says, anything little jpeg gremlins can do, a state actor can do better. If spam is a real thing and harmful, a state actor can use it to wreck Bitcoin. We would need to make it something that cannot be done. If this is not achievable, the system had better get used to it -- and if it breaks Bitcoin, I'd like to know as soon as possible.

(I don't think it breaks Bitcoin, which is why I don't think spam is a problem.)

102 sats \ 5 replies \ @optimism 19h

Mind you I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just exploring the limits.

I think that what Luke argues is that a miner including all these shitty txs is comparable. (Though you can't change it so I take this as an observation, judgement would be pointless)

What makes us think that the bulk of those inscriptions weren't government sponsored or corporate attacks? Or some shitcoiners?

All we know is that it didn't kill bitcoin. The only result it had for me personally was that it was uneconomical to subswap out some sats to L1 after a string of sats earned so I temp swapped to Liquid at the time. Which I don't really wanna but it was more economical to take remote rug risk and use boltz twice, in the end.

202 sats \ 1 reply \ @Murch 18h

I think that what Luke argues is that a miner including all these shitty txs is comparable.

That’s charitable of you, but Luke literally claims that -datacarrier has always referred to all forms of embedding data, when that is in direct contradiction to the discussion around and documentation of the introduction of -datacarrier. He even unilaterally filed a CVE for that. As far as I am aware, no other Bitcoin Core contributor shares this interpretation.

152 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 18h

I don't agree with that claim or the CVE either. I'm not a Luke apologist and instead am of the blunt opinion that all the endless whining and "you lie" and CVE filing is what you'd expect from an 8yo. I am also fully of the opinion that it's a non-issue because he literally has filters in his fork, so there is nothing to discuss anymore. But apparently this behavior works on a subset of people susceptible to drama, like a cult... idk.

I don't mean to speak to Luke's actions being right (or even his take on the problem at hand) but instead I'm trying to illustrate how this view evolves in people and where even a slightly different interpretation of what acceptable use is, and what the role of a developer is in steering these norms, can lead to a completely different view.

TLDR; I don't agree with Luke's view and I think he behaves like a child but as an outside observer I can at least respect the sentiment, while not sharing it.

135 sats \ 2 replies \ @Scoresby OP 19h

Let's pretend inscriptions are a government sponsored attack: clearly a government that wants to attack bitcoin isn't going to stop because we are trying to filter them out. If filters are that powerful, why are we using a difficulty -adjusted proof-of-work blockchain?

I agree. I delayed a few consolidations, and maybe used boltz or lightning more than I would have previously.

All in all, I think it's good that Bitcoin has had to deal with the inscribers and stampers and such. The more Bitcoin gets tested by people using it in ways we never anticipated, the more likely we find the problems and fix them. I get frustrated with the filter camp because they aren't proposing a solution that actually fixes this problem in the face of a state attacker. Any solution less than that isn't worth pursuing, from my ignorant, non-developer viewpoint.

102 sats \ 1 reply \ @optimism 18h

If filters are that powerful, why are we using a difficulty -adjusted proof-of-work blockchain?

If you can incentivize a pool to mine jpegs rather than real transactions that you can sell at 1+x the cost to mine, why would you need any hashpower at all? This completely removes difficulty adjustments from an attack. Especially if you can literally create jpegs and shitcoins and uninformed people will buy them, gamble with them. It would make a pretty neat psyop. mind you I don't believe this is true, just doing the red-team thing

Governments can print money. It takes time for currencies to devalue against BTC on the open market, unless said printer would be used to directly buy BTC, when they're being printed and initially spent. Also this doesn't have to be done transparently. We don't really know that we can defeat large governments that actively attack Bitcoin. We will probably find out one day when we're in an oversold dip? Hopefully not soon though.

I agree that it's good that this happened, because there's tons more monitoring now and tons more discussion, even though it's very fucking cringe at times. I hate the narratives and personas, though. I personally subscribe to Peter's libre idea much more than to filters, but it's good that that's not the only opinion.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 16h

There's a lot to think about in this one. But it might be even more fun to think about than AI consciousness!

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