Why is OCEAN merely pretending to censor data transactions by using mempool filters instead of actually censoring them by refusing to validate any blocks that contain data transactions? Rijndael made "Bitcoin Purifier" so your pool can start a "spam" free fork of Bitcoin: https://github.com/rot13maxi/bitcoin-purifier
This question is deliberately deceptive/leading. If you're running a node you're "pretending to censor" as well. Happy to discuss what we're actually doing if you're interested in being genuine.
Bitcoin is a great revolution in the field of currency that can save the world from unipolarity provided that a solid infrastructure is created for it in all countries.
We don't want to cut corners like that. "Lightning addresses" require DNS which absolutely sucks frankly, BOLT12 is Lightning native and the correct way to do things.
I don't think we'll see one, but I'm not against them - assuming no social contamination a la Wiztards/OPCAT and well-reasoned about.
Fundamentally I believe Bitcoin's use as a permissionless payment network (as opposed to gold 2.0) is hindered by capital gains tax and general disinterest, not lack of OP codes.
Obviously in theory one day that can change and it'd be good to have the primitives necessary for scaling that MoE use-case should it happen but not my first rodeo. The likelihood of sophisticated tech getting added to Bitcoin actually being used the way anyone predicts is almost zero, the scammer-to-bitcoiner ratio is way out of whack among proponents of these upgrades (meaning that's the use case that'll actually get fleshed out - NFTs and other scams rather than coinpools/ARK etc). There's non-zero risk of any upgrade/unintended consequences (learnt my lesson post Segwit).
tldr: if something like CTV can happen in a fairly non-contentious way then it's likely no more scary that CLTV/CSV. I would love Symmetry. But I'm basically not under any illusion that unlocking this stuff would change the way people use Bitcoin. Currently almost no one ever uses Bitcoin as a permissionless payment network compared to the millions using it as Gold 2.0 and it is currently trivial and cheap to do so.
The desire for this stuff just doesn't exist, and if it were to in the future there's a 99% chance that no one can handle the complexity involved and they just resort to centralized solutions - this is why I am not fussed if nothing progresses here.
Final point - adding new OP codes rugs devs attempting to build on what we have already. It takes years for the ecosystem to adapt after each change, that's a significant and not always obvious cost.
May I ask why do you believe that adding functionality rugs the devs not using said functionality? I understand most of the reasoning in your comment (although I don't share it at all), but this part really doesn't make any sense to me, it's like saying that updating a library rugs the devs that were using the previous version of the library because they have been building something this far with functionality and optimizations they didn't have before, makes no sense IMO. If anything the devs now have more tools and they could chose to use it or not use it.
We don't though I would be interested to know. Miners on OCEAN don't use accounts, and can split among as many addresses as they like so we don't have super reliable data to go off.
Miner-side template construction whilst still pooling rewards is the holy grail of practical approaches to decentralizing mining. Asking everyone to go lotto-mine is not realistic, and pools naturally centralize (due to how much better they work at scale - limiting Bitcoin to < 40 or so pools realistically).
So it's about designing a pool in such a way as it doesn't really have much influence over anything which is the goal of OCEAN. If we were to turn rogue it should have minimal impact on the network and everything we're doing works towards diminishing our role.
Can go into more detail if needed, your question seems like you just wanted me to keep it broad-stroke level so I'll stop there.
Do you think Foundry miners (sorry hashers) will eventually recognize the damage they are doing to Bitcoin? Will they eventually choose to leave once they see the damage they do to censorship resistance?
I saw this a few hours ago and it's the only thing concerning me about Bitcoin long term (foundry 7 blocks in a row)
No, I think if/when they leave it'll be because FPPS just becomes unsustainable for the pool. It's overkill as far as variance reduction goes to such an extreme degree that miners at some point get fed up paying for it. Sadly clown world economics persist and as a result money finds its way to places it shouldn't.
Is there a public Ocean lightning node for miners to connect to? I know liquidity would be on Ocean's side upon opening, but eventually it might make payouts more efficient?
This isn't really a scalable approach. We ask that OCEAN miners who want to get paid out over Lightning figure out how to get decent liquidity and reliable payments from the network in general rather than directly connecting to us.
How do you describe the importance of Ocean to a non-technical newbie who isn't proficient in the dynamics of the Bitcoin Mining market? Give me the elevator pitch
Mining has a bunch of elements, hashing is just one of them.
Miners only hash these days which means the guys who choose what goes in/doesn't go in to Bitcoin's blockchain became a tiny centralized group. This means Bitcoin is censorship resistant to the extent we trust that group rather than PoW. This undermines everything and makes us look like every other "DINO" crypto.
Looking at mining over a slightly longer time frame, what's the most surprising change you've seen? (centralization, demand-response programs, geographic distribution, etc)
If ribeye - anything except rare and well done is great.
Technique is to always order "medium" in restaurants as if I get rare/well-done I can always complain. Medium rare is ideal but then when they make it rare I feel too British to complain about it.
I frequently ask this question to people who host AMA and most of them write about the same trick: if you order a steak you have to order rare and you'll get medium. If you do it yourself just make it medium
I've heard you say you only spend "money" once a month. Presumably this means you're using a credit card for daily spending and pay it off with bitcoin using certain exchange services.
Aside from your work at Ocean, how do you think about the network competing with the dollar and should bitcoiners be concerned with using it as a "currency" in this respect?
What do miners think about fusion power? Are they worried, do they think we won’t achieve it in any time frame that would be relevant right now or something entirely else?
I really enjoyed the "Bitcoin Roundtable" discussion you did with Guy Swann on his podcast a while back. I only listened to the first one though, from back in December IIRC.
Is that a regular thing? Or will it be? Would love more of those.
Why is OCEAN merely pretending to censor data transactions by using mempool filters instead of actually censoring them by refusing to validate any blocks that contain data transactions? Rijndael made "Bitcoin Purifier" so your pool can start a "spam" free fork of Bitcoin: https://github.com/rot13maxi/bitcoin-purifier
This question is deliberately deceptive/leading. If you're running a node you're "pretending to censor" as well. Happy to discuss what we're actually doing if you're interested in being genuine.
I am interested in being genuine: If you actually wanted to stop "spam" on Bitcoin, why aren't you running Bitcoin Purifier?
من علاقمند وکنجکاو در همه ی زمینه
ها هستم ودوست ندارم چیزی یا کسی را متوقفف کنم
Bitcoin is a great revolution in the field of currency that can save the world from unipolarity provided that a solid infrastructure is created for it in all countries.
Do you anticipate broadening your lightning payout methods towards something like what Braiins has?
We don't want to cut corners like that. "Lightning addresses" require DNS which absolutely sucks frankly, BOLT12 is Lightning native and the correct way to do things.
Thanks for the info.
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Braiins is underrated
I follow their CEO on X and Primal
In your opinion, will we see a covenant enabling soft fork in the next few years? Would you personally signal for a covenant soft fork?
I don't think we'll see one, but I'm not against them - assuming no social contamination a la Wiztards/OPCAT and well-reasoned about.
Fundamentally I believe Bitcoin's use as a permissionless payment network (as opposed to gold 2.0) is hindered by capital gains tax and general disinterest, not lack of OP codes.
Obviously in theory one day that can change and it'd be good to have the primitives necessary for scaling that MoE use-case should it happen but not my first rodeo. The likelihood of sophisticated tech getting added to Bitcoin actually being used the way anyone predicts is almost zero, the scammer-to-bitcoiner ratio is way out of whack among proponents of these upgrades (meaning that's the use case that'll actually get fleshed out - NFTs and other scams rather than coinpools/ARK etc). There's non-zero risk of any upgrade/unintended consequences (learnt my lesson post Segwit).
tldr: if something like CTV can happen in a fairly non-contentious way then it's likely no more scary that CLTV/CSV. I would love Symmetry. But I'm basically not under any illusion that unlocking this stuff would change the way people use Bitcoin. Currently almost no one ever uses Bitcoin as a permissionless payment network compared to the millions using it as Gold 2.0 and it is currently trivial and cheap to do so.
The desire for this stuff just doesn't exist, and if it were to in the future there's a 99% chance that no one can handle the complexity involved and they just resort to centralized solutions - this is why I am not fussed if nothing progresses here.
Final point - adding new OP codes rugs devs attempting to build on what we have already. It takes years for the ecosystem to adapt after each change, that's a significant and not always obvious cost.
May I ask why do you believe that adding functionality rugs the devs not using said functionality?
I understand most of the reasoning in your comment (although I don't share it at all), but this part really doesn't make any sense to me, it's like saying that updating a library rugs the devs that were using the previous version of the library because they have been building something this far with functionality and optimizations they didn't have before, makes no sense IMO.
If anything the devs now have more tools and they could chose to use it or not use it.
Thanks for doing this! Do you keep any stats about growth of small home miners v. the big guys?
We don't though I would be interested to know. Miners on OCEAN don't use accounts, and can split among as many addresses as they like so we don't have super reliable data to go off.
In real-world scenarios, what are the implications of setting up a template (datum) that's not Ocean's?
Miner-side template construction whilst still pooling rewards is the holy grail of practical approaches to decentralizing mining. Asking everyone to go lotto-mine is not realistic, and pools naturally centralize (due to how much better they work at scale - limiting Bitcoin to < 40 or so pools realistically).
So it's about designing a pool in such a way as it doesn't really have much influence over anything which is the goal of OCEAN. If we were to turn rogue it should have minimal impact on the network and everything we're doing works towards diminishing our role.
Can go into more detail if needed, your question seems like you just wanted me to keep it broad-stroke level so I'll stop there.
Do you think Foundry miners (sorry hashers) will eventually recognize the damage they are doing to Bitcoin? Will they eventually choose to leave once they see the damage they do to censorship resistance?
I saw this a few hours ago and it's the only thing concerning me about Bitcoin long term (foundry 7 blocks in a row)
Thank you
No, I think if/when they leave it'll be because FPPS just becomes unsustainable for the pool. It's overkill as far as variance reduction goes to such an extreme degree that miners at some point get fed up paying for it. Sadly clown world economics persist and as a result money finds its way to places it shouldn't.
Thank you so much. Keep up the great work at Ocean... hopefully the Foundry people get with the program and diversify.
I've never heard of/read about a 7-block reorg, but it would cause final settlement to default to 7 blocks totally self-inflicted
What's the most surprising thing you've learn building OCEAN?
How captured mining is. Revenue simply isn't the motivator it's cracked up to be.
Can you elaborate on this?!
Is there a public Ocean lightning node for miners to connect to? I know liquidity would be on Ocean's side upon opening, but eventually it might make payouts more efficient?
This isn't really a scalable approach. We ask that OCEAN miners who want to get paid out over Lightning figure out how to get decent liquidity and reliable payments from the network in general rather than directly connecting to us.
I had a feeling...
How do you describe the importance of Ocean to a non-technical newbie who isn't proficient in the dynamics of the Bitcoin Mining market? Give me the elevator pitch
Mining has a bunch of elements, hashing is just one of them.
Miners only hash these days which means the guys who choose what goes in/doesn't go in to Bitcoin's blockchain became a tiny centralized group. This means Bitcoin is censorship resistant to the extent we trust that group rather than PoW. This undermines everything and makes us look like every other "DINO" crypto.
How did you get into bitcoin mining?
With a Macbook Pro CPU in 2011 lol.
Are LND payouts functional at this time?
[edit]: apparently I don't know how to read: LND is not functional as they still don't support BOLT12.
Yes, requires CLN until the ecosystem (cough LND) finally starts using BOLT12.
(Phoenix would work but they don't support descriptions yet, but working on a workaround for that).
Thanks for clearing this up. There was some discussion here re using Phoenix.
Yeah we have an idea about how we can get around their hesitance to support BOLT12 descriptions.
I think I read that Coinos is an option (if you are okay with temporarily keeping it custodial) since they support bolt12 as well.
Looking at mining over a slightly longer time frame, what's the most surprising change you've seen? (centralization, demand-response programs, geographic distribution, etc)
How it still even works at all in its current state.
what do you mean "works"? the design, that it hasn't been coopted (more)?
Centralized at the hardware and template level and overwhelmingly closed source.
What's something you believe about bitcoin mining that few bitcoin miners agree with you on?
That using closed-source-everything isn't the least bit OK.
(Bitaxe miners agree with me but they make up probably <0.01% of the network hashrate.)
That StratumV2 fixes anything.
Where do you see your biggest growth opportunities in decentralization?
DATUM adoption.
Thanks I need to look into that more!
What a steak doneness do you prefer?
If ribeye - anything except rare and well done is great.
Technique is to always order "medium" in restaurants as if I get rare/well-done I can always complain. Medium rare is ideal but then when they make it rare I feel too British to complain about it.
Medium is the most delicious, yeah
I frequently ask this question to people who host AMA and most of them write about the same trick: if you order a steak you have to order rare and you'll get medium. If you do it yourself just make it medium
Thanks for your answer, have a good day
What is your take on Bitmain's near monopoly on ASIC production given their history of deception (ASIC Boost)?
Nothing unique, just praying one day the near monopoly ends.
What are things you can do to decentralize Ocean mining at a broader scale?
I've heard you say you only spend "money" once a month. Presumably this means you're using a credit card for daily spending and pay it off with bitcoin using certain exchange services.
Aside from your work at Ocean, how do you think about the network competing with the dollar and should bitcoiners be concerned with using it as a "currency" in this respect?
What do miners think about fusion power? Are they worried, do they think we won’t achieve it in any time frame that would be relevant right now or something entirely else?
I really enjoyed the "Bitcoin Roundtable" discussion you did with Guy Swann on his podcast a while back. I only listened to the first one though, from back in December IIRC.
Is that a regular thing? Or will it be? Would love more of those.
It's monthly, we've done four(?) I think now.
What's your favorite podcast appearance you've ever done?
I think the third Satoshi Roundtable with Guy Swann.
Who is the smartest person in bitcoin mining that you've ever met?
Jason Hughes (wrote the DATUM protocol in a few months).
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