The Utility of Bike Shedding OP_RETURN limits \ stacker news ~bitcoin

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The Utility of Bike Shedding OP_RETURN limits

1593 sats \ 36 comments \ @k00b 10 May bitcoin

Bike shedding is the mosquito of decision making. Given the choice, we'd make bike shedding disappear. I'm certain that'd be a mistake. Debating trivial things has obvious downsides, like preventing progress on important things, yet it likely improves the group's decision making as a whole. If group decision making is critical to human survival, and bike shedding impaired group decision making, evolution would've eradicated it long ago.

The benefits of bike shedding are probably many, but one is obvious to me following the OP_RETURN drama. Bike shedding aligns factions on goldilocks sized decisions, complex enough to cause debate but simple enough that everyone can participate regardless of their skill level. Then, with trust established and alliances formed, the group more easily proceeds to make harder, more important decisions together. Like, a decision about a soft fork.

Before the OP_RETURN drama, there were roughly three factions of technical bitcoiners: bitcoin core, covenant soft fork proponents, and ossification proponents.¹ None of these groups got along before the OP_RETURN drama. It's been nearly a year of character assassinations and a consensus stalemate. I'll spare you the receipts. Following the OP_RETURN drama, we now have roughly two factions aligned on something arbitrary rather than three factions: people that support bitcoin core and people that don't.

Our new alliances won't inevitably lead to a soft fork, but bitcoin developers should have an easier time making decisions with one group vs another group, rather than each group vs two others. It's exactly what we see in political elections for a reason: moderates pick a side (or a side picks them), a majority is formed, and consensus is reached. The similarity to politics is not a coincidence. Protocol changes have too much in common. This is how consensus is formed.

To be clear, your senses don't deceive you. Bike shedding is a sign of disorder. But, bike shedding isn't the cause of it. Bike shedding is the cure.

I've heard a lot of bitcoiners describe these camps roughly like political parties: covenant soft fork proponents are dems, ossification proponents are conservative, and bitcoin core are moderates. I think the metaphor is perfect. ↩

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50 sats \ 2 replies \ @anon 7h

Makes sense. Didn't realise that I could qualify being a technical Bitcoiner. I am in the ossification camp, but this drama is nudging me to find allies against Core. I would prefer implementations other than Knots, but I am not technical enough to try out the others.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 7h

Imo if you are running a node, you’re more technical than 99% of “bitcoiners”

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @zapsammy 6h

wow, that is a very low bar... and very few can pass even that

201 sats \ 0 replies \ @unschooled 13h

It's exactly what we see in political elections for a reason: moderates pick a side (or a side picks them), a majority is formed, and consensus is reached.

The kind of political 'consensus' we tend to get in western Democracies is usually not consensus at all; feels more a fractalization of people into increasingly smaller camps that can't possibly hope to be represented by two parties' 'consensus.'

The phenomenon of groups coalescing based on trivial, lowest-common-denominator issues, as it was mentioned, often into two polarizing camps, may be a product of how humans psycology works. The convenience of thinking dualistically at the micro-level, as with most things, mirrors what goes on in bigger picture dramas, the convenience of having two-choices (red or blue, Knots or Core etc). Dualistic belief systems in ancient history¹ show us that this mode of thinking is a pesky bugger that is impossibly hard to shake from our genetic makeup.

Overall, I agree with your conclusion that working through these tough questions of right and wrong can result in deepening our understanding of how we interface with these questions, if gone about in a civilized way.

interestingly the use of binary code also mirrors this psychological tendency of 'splitting' ↩

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @jimmysong 12h

bitcoin developers should have an easier time making decisions with one group vs another group, rather than each group vs two others

I'm going to disagree with this. We're in a consensus system. I don't think it's going to get any easier to get two opposing groups to agree. If anything, the split seems more permanent to me and possibly each camp having their own software. I think that's a good thing, but one of the necessary consequences is that consensus decisions will be that much harder to push through.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 11h

I don't think it's going to get any easier to get two opposing groups to agree.

I don't either, but one group will have a majority. That is relevant for consensus. I'm not sure how relevant it is for bitcoin consensus changes in particular though - given that not all nodes are equal in a fork scenario.

I also agree that each camp will have their own software, which I also agree is healthy. For consensus changes, that isn't much different than one group running an old version and the other running a new version with a new opcode, right?

The only point I'm able to make is that people vote for politicians, laws, and perhaps bitcoin forks, based on alliances more than anything else. Before the OP_RETURN limit drama, there wasn't enough trust for any majority to form. I'm not saying a majority has formed, but it feels like trust has been built between groups of people where there was none before. I'd argue that will make consensus easier if we define consensus as a majority deciding to do something.

154 sats \ 1 reply \ @crrdlx 18h

Some time back, a new school was being built in the town I was living in. The principal didn't want to decide on colors. So he got up a "color committee." They met and debated ad nauseum. Everyone has a favorite color and apparently designing decor stuff is a real passion to people (and they're all experts too because they picked out the couch at home and it looks good). They met a lot. In the end, they reached a "decision." The decision was to go with FOUR color THEMES, navy, aqua, maroon, and the ever popular mauve. Each quadrant had its own color, I guess so you knew where you were? Over time, the colored student chairs moved and migrated to all points N, S, E, W. Today it looks like colored sprinkles on ice cream. I'm not a big fan of committees. If only the principal would have made a decision.

Not sure this has anything to do with bitcoin wars, we have no principal, but seems bike sheddy.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 11h

Cool story!

I'd argue that if they only voted on binary things, one after the other, they could have come to agreement.

e.g. If they voted for one side of the color wheel vs the other, then one quarter of the color wheel vs the other, then one eighth, then one color vs another.

65 sats \ 10 replies \ @optimism 10 May

people that support bitcoin core and people that don't.

Luckily, this is policy, and there is an actual maintained alternative. So you don't have to "support". Vote with the software you run. If people actively run the policies they feel most comfortable with, then the whole thing becomes kind of a non-issue.

119 sats \ 7 replies \ @028559d218 22h

And if people 'vote with the software'.... then what does that accomplish exactly?

323 sats \ 6 replies \ @optimism 13h

When we choose what software implementation we run, we place our support behind a particular development team. This can influence a metric of success of that implementation - peers in the wild is probably the best we have - and affects the distribution of developer influence within the entirety of the ecosystem.

"Open source often naturally revolves around a meritocracy", per the bitcoin/bitcoin contribution guidelines. Therefore it only makes sense to assign merit where we feel it belongs, by running the software that we individually feel serves us best. You have the freedom to choose your implementation, so choose.

Here's an approximation of maintaining projects for active reachable nodes from the latest bitnodes api snapshot as of writing:

    4 utreexod
    5 bcoin
    8 ckcoind
   23 btcd
   24 other
 1821 Knots
19625 Core

It's only a rough approximation, for example I am not sure what futurebit and dojo change in the source, if anything, so i grouped them under core.

script source

Now let's hypothesize that Knots grows further. It means more eyes and more effort spent on that repo and maybe even more funding if such a trend would persist. And although I personally don't like this hypothetical trend that's going on where sentiment over Core deteriorates and Knots grows because of the actions taken on Core, all is still good: feature, not bug.

133 sats \ 5 replies \ @028559d218 4h

Running Knots doesn't change what gets into blocks. It doesn't change miner incentives. It doesn't change fee rates, or what sat/vb has to be paid to get into blocks.

It doesn't increase or decrease utxo bloat. It doesn't increase, or decrease, storage space required to run a node either. It literally changes nothing... except make fee estimation harder for the node, plus slow block propagation and make compact blocks less accurate / less representative of the types of transactions people are paying for.

Running Knots is like "no masturbate Monday" for ideological purposes. It may make you feel good, you may give yourself a 'gold star' at the end of the day for your 'good deed' of 'not touching it...'

But does it actually change what happens in the world? No. Does it change what goes on 'outside'? No.

If it makes you feel better then great run it... but it has precisely zero effect on the real world and zero effect on the fee incentives or content of Bitcoin blocks.

50 sats \ 4 replies \ @optimism 4h

I'm not advocating running Knots, was merely formulating a hypothetical. I don't run knots even though having the additional configurability isn't a bad thing, imho.

What I'm proposing is that if you care, run something else, or configure core differently while you still can. Or write your own client. There is no rule in Bitcoin that says you have to run Bitcoin Core. You can run whatever you want. There are no kings, no heroes; just you and your sats. How you manage these is up to you and up to you alone.

So let's calm down on the emotions. I didn't write this to hear your opinion about Knots or what effects you think it has or hasn't, I wrote this because you asked what it accomplished, and my answer was "shift merit/recognition away from core". Which I honestly think is a shame, but it's a logical reaction to increased intolerance on the repo.

100 sats \ 3 replies \ @028559d218 3h

That, respectfully, doesn't make any sense. if knots usage has few if any upsides, and easily identifiable, clear downsides... then the downsides outweigh the upsides and knots shouldn't be run by most people.

now people have the right to run whatever, and the more nodes that get used in general the better... but it is false equivalence to say that running knots is the technical equivalent of running core. it isn't.

there is some growing body of influencers out there advocating that people 'run knots' without explaining any of the downsides, any of the reason 'not to' filling in the blanks with baseless conspiracy and this doesn't 'help bitcoin' i think this much is clear.

identifying risks and managing upside vs downside in the software is what developers do... but infleuncers don't [as they're] advocating using incomplete information and i see our job (as non-technical plebs) to call this out

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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 11 May

Definitely technical support is the same. I mostly meant moral support. It’s like picking to a sports team.

43 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 11 May

Yeah - the source code is 99.9% the same too as Knots is literally a continuous re-fork of Core - as is Libre Relay fwiw.

I think you're right about the picking teams / moral support observation. However, I really don't like that this is apparently so.

33 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 12h

I think everyone is missing the point, it's not technical, it's territorial. Projecting technical debate onto this issue is naivete.

The only solution is to salt the earth.

Whether you're liberal or conservative, Core is just another example of a decayed institution that has outlived it's usefulness.

Tapping the sign: #966918

100 sats \ 5 replies \ @SimpleStacker 10 May

I'm not as confident in the hypothesis that evolution eradicates all counterproductive behavior. There could be all sorts of prisoners dilemma type dynamics wherein certain things that are individually rational are harmful to the group.

Prior to reading this, my hypothesis of bike-shedding is that it simply reflects a lack of leadership. All it takes for the group to stop talking about the bike shed is a leader who puts his foot down and says, "This is what we're gonna do, next topic." Only problem with Bitcoin is that there's no real leader, by design. That being said, Bitcoin Core is not Bitcoin... if the core devs believe in something strong enough they should just go and do it. Bitcoin will survive.

30 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b OP 10 May

I'm not as confident in the hypothesis that evolution eradicates all counterproductive behavior. There could be all sorts of prisoners dilemma type dynamics wherein certain things that are individually rational are harmful to the group.

I think my point is that evolution does the best job that it can eradicating net counterproductive behavior at both the individual and group level (which it can't do perfectly) over time frames that are relevant for survival. Meaning, that when we see inefficient behavior at the individual level, the behavior is probably serving the group. When we see inefficient group behavior, it's probably the result of individual(s) serving themselves.

My sense is that, at least in social species, when evolution optimizes for gene survival, it optimizes for both individual survival and group survival. The group can't survive with out individuals, so they need to be fit. Yet, most genes of any individual will be common among a group, so individuals can occasionally be sacrificed to make the group more fit.

The result, survival, requires, I think, net productive individuals and net productive groups when iterated long enough. So any group behavior or individual behavior we see should be part of some net productive process.

Maybe that's just super optimistic though lol.

30 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b OP 10 May

There could be all sorts of prisoners dilemma type dynamics wherein certain things that are individually rational are harmful to the group.

Does this mean the gene market is inefficient? :)

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 5h

Heh, the two debates are indeed quite related. There's a common joke among economists that goes: "Two economists are walking along the street when one spots a $100 bill lying on the ground. He says, 'Look, a $100 bill on the ground!' To which the other replies, 'Nonsense, if there was a $100 on the ground, someone would've picked it up already.'"

The joke is meant to highlight that economists sometimes take the notion of efficient markets too far, believing that the markets are so efficient there's never any room for easy gains (because if there was, someone would've done it). I think a similar notion can happen in evolutionary biology/sociology, where it's assumed that every possible development must have some evolutionary advantage

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 4h

I take your point. I suspect evolution is more efficient than markets, but I couldn’t say why exactly.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @crrdlx 18h

I'm with you on the hmm? regarding evolution. The theory, when boiled down, simply says: (1) Have good genes so you can survive to adulthood, (2) breed and pass on those good genes, and (3) occasionally have a random genetic mutation that either helps or hurts #1 and #2. I sometimes wonder, how do evolutionists explain homosexuality? Evolution would literally weed out the same-sex attraction gene (assuming it's genetic, I don't know) and thereby weed out homosexuality Not trying to pick culture wars here, just (a) don't know how evolutionists reconcile that, and (b) illustrate evolutionary theory seems to have limits and that there are likely other things going on.

Regarding lack of leadership, see my little school color story somewhere in this thread.

142 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 10 May

Related: the idea that tumult and fighting is not a failure of the process, it IS the process working the only way it realistically can. The trick is to figure out when that crosses over to pathology.

I wonder how many of these different camps - or bike shedders - are really trying to get at the truth, vs score points against the hated enemy? Is that knowable? From everything I've taken in, it seems like bcashers really did (and do) believe the truth of their pursuits. Like, they thought in a principled fashion that it was existentially important.

I'm glad that war was fought bc it solidified values. About this current one I don't know.

27 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 10 May

I've been watching it pretty closely, both in person at bitcoin++ and online, and it's definitely solidifying values. It was surprising enough to me that I concluded it wasn't a coincidence.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @coinhome 10 May

This is a powerful reflection on an often-maligned part of group dynamics. Bike shedding may feel like noise, but as you point out, it plays a vital social role -building trust, testing alliances, and ultimately smoothing the path toward meaningful consensus. What looks like distraction might actually be the groundwork for progress.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 10 May

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @fake123 5h

Following the OP_RETURN drama, we now have roughly two factions aligned on something arbitrary rather than three factions: people that support bitcoin core and people that don't.

https://nitter.poast.org/LukeDashjr/status/1921576536890581014

Things do seem to be aligning that way all of a sudden. War is coming...

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 20h

IMHO this captcha issue is much more important than the OP_RETURN drama (that in fact should be datacarriersize drama):

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