Anyone that has mined has probably made a profit from "spam". This is dumb.
I hate spam but this purity test nonsense is juvenile. This moralizing of an amoral market based incentive based system is really lazy. One man's spam is another man's art. If I were king of the world a LOT of art including music would not exist. There is a certain arrogance at play here.
I really wonder if these people that get so religious about bitcoin just need to join a church. I have a theory about humans. I'm sure many have come to the same conclusion. You can take the best aspects of religion out of a culture but you can't take the worst aspects of religion out of humans. We just interject them into other things.
That is true but what I'm describing isn't worship. Its self-pride and comparing ourselves to each other. Self-righteousness basically. Many things like this though get pinned on religion but in an ever increasingly non-religious world we still see the same traits pop up. Religions are just an easy whipping boy to blame for a problem that is inherent in our species. That's my sense at least. I guess you could say that the issue is worship of the self. If that's what you mean.
Religion is an easy external scapegoat. The problem is really us.
You can take the best aspects of religion out of a culture but you can't take the worst aspects of religion out of humans. We just interject them into other things.
This rings true for me. Maybe zealotry is latent in all of us -- just takes the right trigger to activate it.
If you don't understand that virtue signals surrounding spam or not spam are systematically inferior to censorship resistance, as evidenced by there being no consensus rule about "spam", then perhaps you should take a step back out of the echo chamber and chill out.
Oh and do something useful like making babies. Also way more fun.
While not suggesting you have to listen to them, it is still true that they made valid transactions. Doesn't it seem like the consensus rules should be changes if you don't like them?
No, because ultimately it’s a social problem, not a technical one. They have made valid transactions, that doesn’t mean anything. Vandals walk in the park like anyone else.
Adding filters just further promotes censorship and centralization. Of course, it is a tragedy of the commons; and rather than policing behavior via authority, we must do promote good behavior by incentives.
The first principle of bitcoin, in my mind, is permissionlessness.
I'm more inclined to see statements like Knut's as "not understanding the ethical principles the whole system is built on" than somebody making a valid transaction.
I think that strikes at the heart of the debate. One could support permissionlessness for monetary transactions but want to censor non financial transactions. I'm not sure I agree with that since there's a slippery slope of censorship, but I do think it is a reasonable position to take
Bitcoin is a system the rules of which you agree to when you accept bitcoin in trade. If you send me some bitcoin, I verify it with my node and by accepting it, I say, these coins follow the rules I call bitcoin.
Every valid transaction follows those rules.
To claim that someone -- who follows the rules that we all by virtue of accepting the coins agreed to -- is not using bitcoin right is absurd. What was the point of having rules in the first place?
Apparently, people like Knut think there was some other set of rules that we should all be following. Who decided those rules?
The process of deciding the rules we all agree on was the thing that Satoshi solved. There cannot be any consensus rules that are not consensus rules.
The rules are not disconnected from purpose. Satoshi designed these rules for a purpose which was to create p2p digital money.
If the rules are no longer serving the purpose well, I think it's a legitimate position to say we should change the rules.
And I don't know Knut's position, but I'm not even sure he's saying the rules should change, just that he doesn't value the opinions of a certain group
In any case, I don't agree with his original statement at all but I understand where it comes from
Neither have I spoken with Knut, so perhaps I am mischaracterizing his position.
If the rules are no longer serving the purpose well, I think it's a legitimate position to say we should change the rules.
I agree with this completely. The problem is that the filter debate has not proposed changing the rules, rather the "policies" which are not rules.
My point was that we all agree to certain rules when we start using bitcoin and it's nonsensical to say that "well actually, some of those rules that I previously agreed to are evil and bad."
Different rules = different coin. If people want others to use a different coin, convince them to follow your rules. Don't try to claim that the coin we have been using actually had different rules all along.
I'm still getting called a shitconer for the things that does not prove I hold any shitcoins (now).
Another point is that if anyone recieves an airdrop and converts it to Bitcoin instantly, does understand 'the ethical principles of Bitcoin'.
This is a silly argument. I mean, I guess that makes me a bad actor. I'm a miner with a few dozen PH, so I absolutely have benefitted more than 1 sat by the spam. Doesn't mean I support it.
He also compared blockchain spam to DDoS and I disagreed because DDoS attackers usually don't pay for the bandwidth they consume since they use botnets whereas a blockchain spammer did pay for it.
It depends on the intention... I don't think the developers from back then would've expected the rather niche features of Bitcoin to start being used too much.
For development/testing purposes as to see what Bitcoin can do, it's good, but if you still support it today with the war going on, then maybe you're not built for Bitcoin
if the state uses bitcoin to pay the police it uses to throw a person in jail and confiscate their bitcoin, is this understanding the ethical principles the whole system is built around or not?
I was thinking about the statement in your original post "It depends on intention" -- although admittedly I was stretching it a bit.
if you still support it today with the war going on, then maybe you're not built for Bitcoin
Bitcoin should always be at war. That's the nature of a permissionless system. If its concepts only work when people agree on everything, then it's not very useful.
I think it is useful, though. It's useful because it gives humans a way to agree even when they disagree about almost everything.
The only thing required of a person in order to use bitcoin is to agree to accept it. But this is also the only tool we have to actually enforce the rules (and call a transaction invalid) -- don't accept the coin if you don't like it.
The thing about money is that people value all manner of things with it. I might say if you have ever paid a stripper, your opinion about money is irrelevant, since you are using it for stupid reasons.
On the other hand, if someone who PAID a stripper wants to send you 1 Bitcoin, where are your ethics in that situation?
I'm saying you can't wash away the memory that you took a million dollars that had a wad of cum dripping off the edges of it--you know--to put it indelicately.
Like spam, it's not black and white, not deterministic. If a bunch of people have to pass the million dollar to me they might take a bit more time, so I would rather it not be full of cum.
yes, exactly. if rare sats were actually popular and people were paying increasing sums for them, I would overcome my laziness at some point and look to see if I too could sell a sat for a bitcoin!
Meh I knew of bitcoin, didn’t hold much, dabbled in NFTs through a friend’s project, not happy about that in hindsight, then got into bitcoin and only have that outside of holding like $1-2 of BCH and LTC to do transactions and explore their blockchains out of curiosity. Hard to believe it’s a one and done thing with “credibility”
Miners can be bad actors. They don't mine bitcoin so that I will like them. Litter is bad, I don't like people who litter. I have less problem with dog poop because it decomposes and if you enforce the law too heavily people put it in plastic bags and dump it in the bushes, where it won't decompose.
You can't control this kind of bad behaviour at the consensus layer because it lacks nuance and context, so you have a policy layer with one-node-one-vote, where the dominant will of the network emerges and it's incredibly difficult for anyone to sybil attack to enforce any kind of censorship.
Relaying nodes weed the garden, some weeds are allowable.
Helpful concepts are:
malum in se = bad in itself = murder = consensus invalid
malum prohibitum= bad by prohibition = pissing in the public square = policy curtailed
Bitcoin is predicated on the idea that all miners are bad actors.
No it's not, Bitcoin is predicated on the idea that all miners are self-interested.
If it was one-node-one-vote somebody with a big AWS account could control bitcoin. There is absolutely no voting in bitcoin, nor any voters.
You're confusing the consensus layer with the policy layer. There are a number of voting systems in bitcoin above the consensus layer, such as transactions, which are weighted votes in the distribution of bitcoin. Relaying nodes also vote. If it is consensus valid to spam it is consensus valid to filter spam, you cannot say consensus valid behaviour is the only thing that matters unless nodes start filtering their memepools. There is no central authority who can decide what policies are valid, or Indeed whether or not bitcoin has a policy layer.
self-interested = doing everything one can to maximize one's profits. if you find a way to cheat, you do that, too. not doing so would be selfless. therefore, self-interested = assumed bad-actor.
If it is consensus valid to spam it is consensus valid to filter spam
Yes! You are welcome to filter any spam you like. Just like the person who submits a spam transaction and gets it confirmed in a block is welcome to do that. They are both using bitcoin equally.
There is no central authority who can decide what policies are valid, or indeed whether or not bitcoin has a policy layer.
Exactly. This is why I don't care what policies anyone runs. Also, why I don't understand why some people are worked up about what policies are default in Bitcoin Core.
The "policy layer" is just people doing what they want. They can do anything they want. They can relay invalid transactions if they like. I don't care. Nor does the network. What matters is what ends up in blocks. The only way to actually affect what ends up in blocks is to enforce consensus rules. If you don't like the current consensus rules, perhaps you should change them and convince people to run your new rule set. Short of that, it's a waste of everyone's time.
Alternative implementations are attempting to propagate policies that I agree with. Filters are consensus valid. Nobody can tell me not to use filters. People who run knots are self-interested, like miners.
The people who are worked up about things are the people who have infected core that want to mass propagate the idea of having no filters at all, and relying exclusively on the consensus layer.
The policy layer makes it more difficult to put spam on the Blockchain, before the consensus layer is engaged, that is why there is an OP_RETURN limit today. If that were not true then there would not be any effect of increasing it removing the OP_RETURN limit.
You want us to go away, but we are slowing convincing people to engage in the policy layer to ensure that bitcoin is exclusively used as a monetary medium. We are the cat, spammers are the mice, you don't want us to catch mice for some reason. I don't know what you are, but I smell a mouse.
I think the miners get a slightly free pass here. I think Knut mostly means the folks generating spam. Signing the txs, not necessary the ones bundling them. Including valid transactions is the role of the miner, not to make value judgements of its need, beyond consensus validity.
We all consent to taking others transactions, because that means our transactions are more likely to be included (censorship resistance).
When the equilibrium is upset by assholes who try to ruin it, dissonance increases in the consensus.
Including spam tx’s in blocks is inventively aligned, Infact it reassigns sats to miners in the form of fees paid by parties with malicious spamming intent.
multiplication > division