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What about the argument that being able to control what your node is relaying to the rest of the network is important (independent of what ends up on-chain)?
I don't think anyone would debate that. The operative phrase is "being able." Regardless of what Core ships, you are able to control what your node is relaying if you are willing to patch Core, run a fork of Core, or run another primary bitcoin protocol implementation. So the debate isn't about what you are able to do.
The debate is about whether Core should be able to NOT maintain a dial or knob for every variable in relay policy, especially dials and knobs that they think are footguns and are harming the network.
To put it another way, Core's job IMHO is providing an incredibly secure and robust bitcoin protocol reference implementation. Having a maximally configurable relay policy is out of scope and every configuration option adds more code to maintain and secure.
It's hard for me to tell definitively what the debate is about. You say "The debate is about whether Core should be able to NOT maintain..." but I'd characterize what I've heard as "Core should continue maintaining...". I'd certainly say they have no obligation to maintain anything in particular.
The argument, from what I've seen, that they should (not "must") continue maintaining these knobs and dials is that what they do will become default policy across the network (unless people abandon Core's configuration) and there clearly is not anything like community consensus on this issue yet.
Political fights over "default settings" are so interesting to me.
On the one hand, it seems silly because everyone has the option to turn off the defaults.
On the other hand, the default setting is an incredibly powerful behavioral lever.
Maybe I just hate people.
It seems especially relevant when both sides ostensibly want more bitcoiners to run their own nodes. That will inevitably mean more nodes run by less technically knowledgeable people who just accept the default settings.
My Spidey-Sense is definitely going off with how the Core folks are behaving, but I don't have the technical savvy to rely on more than my intuition.
I'd characterize what I've heard as "Core should continue maintaining..."
You're right. I overcomplicated that phrasing by stating what I think is the inverse.
I think you have it right.
My problem with 1 & 2 is that it feels defeatist.
I can see that. I see it more like accepting defeat in a battle so we can win the war.
If this were a battle deciding the outcome of the war, I'd agree that we should fight even with the knowledge that we'll lose.
my idea was some kinda merkle tree with fat and skinny blocks add some incentive to store fat blocks but people could choose to only store skinny blocks... everything still validates the same
There is no solution. This isn't about CP. Even if CP didn't exist, this debate would still be happening. This is about people - naturally - wanting to control what bitcoin is but in a roundabout way.
Among good faith, bitcoin-is-money bitcoiners, we have four-ish camps afaict: