1207 sats \ 6 replies \ @petertodd 13 Jul \ on: Bitcoin Mechanic on Pretend Meritocracy in Bitcoin bitcoin
Nah, this is a terrible example. Bitcoin Core was quite right to not go down the path of more filters. It's hopeless to stop these protocols as long as they're willing to pay fees.
Ultimately filters are a form of censorship. And censorship can only work if all means of communication are censored. It's trivial for the people to bypass filters, eg by running a fork like my Libre Relay: https://github.com/petertodd/bitcoin/tree/libre-relay-v27.1
If you want to see Libre Relay in action, try out https://opreturnbot.com/ with a >80 bytes message. It will get mined.
Bitcoin Core is a bit of a pretend meritocracy. But not for this reason.
Speaking of, here's an OP_Return from https://opreturnbot.com of my entire post: https://mempool.space/tx/ee566a1c66ad43cfb20004222cad555236225cd852d19fa42fad6feef9265670
Mined by Mara Pool.
reply
Ultimately filters are a form of censorship.
Which is not bad by itself. Centralized censorship is bad. But if every participant in a distributed system consensually agrees to apply some censorship it just becomes new part of a protocol.
reply
Bad or not is irrelevant. The point is that censorship will not work.
reply
The point is that censorship will not work.
Well, if you treat it as a binary outcome then it is technically correct. But I don't think the filter-advocates are thinking in that terms (And tbh imho its just not a good way to think about it). It's more of spectrum thing.
For example If 30% of miners deem some transactions of type X unwanted and they don't include those in the blocks, the X transaction will have 30% less of blockspace to compete over. And it will cause them to pay larger fees thus decreasing amount of X transactions.
reply
Censorship didn't work for full-rbf. Once a non-trivial amount of money was available by mining full-rbf txs, just a few thousand a block, every pool quickly followed and turned full-rbf on.
reply
We proved that with full RBF, but I posted the video for the whole of its commentary.
reply