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30 sats \ 2 replies \ @Scoresby OP 16h \ parent \ on: "Quasi-consensus": help me understand this conversation with Chris Guida bitcoin
I'd like to put the statement "filters don't work" even more strongly: "filters can't work."
If filters can be effective in the face of sustained demand for a certain kind of valid transaction, Bitcoin fails to deliver on its value proposition. There is absolutely nothing that stops a state actor from attacking Bitcoin via a giant network of state-controlled nodes. And if our defense relies on some social layer, the project fails.
It's not like this threat was never considered. The block validation rules of bitcoin are designed to resist exactly this kind of attack. I'd even go so far as to say that solving the problem of a social layer is what Satoshi was trying to solve with Bitcoin in the first place.
The only social layer I believe is necessary for Bitcoin is agreement on block validation rules (what I've been calling 'consensus rules'). This was Satoshi's big innovation: he created a way that if users agreed on a minimal set of rules, no other differences were relevant.
The problem Satoshi was trying to solve was how to create a peer to peer money, a money with a third party, that was stable -- not in the sense of price or anything like that, but in the sense of useful to anyone who wanted to use it, stable in the sense of not being subject to the turmoil of disagreement in a social layer.
If a social layer beyond agreeing to block validation rules is necessary to make Bitcoin work, we are immediately confronted with the problem of how to decide things in this social layer. Is it by vote? by CPU power? by who has the most coins? In answering this question, I believe you will find that the only known solution is the same one Satoshi came up with for block validation rules. But this is just to say the social layer can only be coming to consensus on what the block validation rules are. Nothing else matters.
And so, yes, I believe
As to your distinction that block validation rules are enough locally but not globally
Check out Rob Warren's recent X thread on how difficult it is to control hash power: #1263431. A state may do everything it can to put pressure on miners in its jurisdiction, but the permissionless nature of mining is such that we may hope it is in the self-interest of miners outside such a state's jurisdiction to put disfavored transactions in blocks.
Therefore, I maintain that consensus rules are enough to maintain censorship resistance and that it is not a "function of current circumstances."
I think your point is that, as long as there's an on-chain incentive to mine the most profitable transactions, then the most profitable valid transactions will find their way into blocks.
I don't disagree with that, but my question is at what cost and at what degree of usability? I think censorability is a spectrum, not a 1 or a 0. So my argument would be that bitcoin's built-in incentive structure can keep censorship<1, but it's uncertain if it can maintain a high degree of usability and mainstream adoption.
So, I still maintain that social norms, ethos, and other soft crap like that still matters for the tradeoff matrix between censorability and usability on bitcoin
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The problem Satoshi was trying to solve was how to create a peer to peer money, a money without a third party, that was stable -- not in the sense of price or anything like that, but in the sense of useful to anyone who wanted to use it, stable in the sense of not being subject to the turmoil of disagreement in a social layer.
I never see the typos until after 10 minutes is up...
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