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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 5h \ on: Ten reasons why I enjoy teaching at NorthLight #9 BooksAndArticles
As a kid, when I asked my parents why there was Father's day and Mother's day but not Son's day or Daughter's day, they answered "every day is Children's day". lol
Yasssss! Thank you. You just gave me an idea I was struggling to formulate re all the OP_RETURN drama and your deregulation point applies nicely. Maybe that's a much better framing to bring the point across? Thanks!!!
Right, I dug a little deeper and the original publication cited was more interesting though, it calls for merchants to accept "more than one payment method":
If you have a supermarket, shop, petrol station, hotel, restaurant, café, market stall or other point of sale establishment, it is a good idea to accept multiple means of payment, so that your customers can always pay. This makes your point of sale more resilient to disruptions in the payment system.
It's perhaps not a stretch to narrate on top of this? The only limit is what we don't try.
It's funny because I was in NL not too long ago and 70 EUR for an adult to survive on for 3 days, especially when including food and transportation costs, is on the low end under normal circumstances, so I don't see how that is sufficient if there are actual problems that could make prices go up.
I just looked it up and the minimum wage is
14.40 so perhaps, if you're planning for a 72 hour blackout, 72*14.40 rounds down nicely to 1000, which sounds more reasonable as an emergency stash. However, I don't know if holding large amounts of cash is still legal there, I've had some friends that live there complain about that.You call tweets like the ones you linked
subtle? haha.The only thing that's really happening is a (relatively limited) crisis in confidence in Bitcoin Core maintainers. This isn't new, and that it's over a relatively rational policy change also isn't new. It can be blown out of proportions even more but it also pleases me to see Nicolas Dorier on nearly every thread trying to explain people that they're misleading themselves.
If I were a maintainer of bitcoin/bitcoin, the only learning point from this would be to not mark controversial settings that people want to use, even if it makes no sense to use it to super smart rational people like gmax, as deprecated. Note that one of the maintainers tried to do this in #32714, but for some reason it was closed by the author with no reason given on GitHub. I'm too lazy to check IRC logs.
That's it, that's the signal. The rest is politics and noise.
The only one that doesn't belong in your list is Jimmy's. It's a fair point that if you change policies for field
.vout[].scriptPubkey for something that cannot be spent by an input (and you coded it well) that you won't affect policies for field .vin[].scriptSig. So keep Jimmy.The point about not installing v30.0 without review is also a good one though and made multiple times. You should not install ANY version without careful review, so nothing changed.
As for Mechanic & Luke making a coup; wake me up when Antpool runs Knots. 😂
Unfollow these fools though.
You must not be on Twitter or listened much to the 'podcast' space the last few years
I just mute morons and don't let any algo show me nonsense at all. So yeah I don't see that - and yes I deleted my 3rd incarnation of tweeter account a while back and I'm not going back. I try to listen to optech's recap whenever I find time and remember that I want to listen to it, but even with the arguably best curated bitcoin newsletter I sometimes shut it off: I don't have time for annoying people yapping in my ear while I'm working.
[list of moronic stuff]
Yeah that's not evidence, that's gossiping. Fuck that. Turn off the algo, it's wasting your time.
"Why does Bitcoin Core Hate Bitcoin???"
These peeps already sound like BCH shitcoiners, so the fork is looming. hah!
However... after Tapro[o]t and Segwit I am honestly a little concerned
Why? Also if you name them both at once, then what is the exact concern? What, in your opinion, went wrong with BOTH Taproot and Segwit?
Our "community" needs better 'education' on these other implementations... and how they positively effect the quality of the software as well as censorship resistance.
They are less quality than Bitcoin Core and have had less eyes on them, which is why everyone runs Bitcoin Core. But if shit hits the fan you can spin up a btcd node (it's easy) and use that (I'm not sure if the new libbitcoin is fully functional yet, I will try to remember to spend some time testing that again somewhere this month.)
Just to be clear... the Knots people are looking for/dreaming of a total takeover. They don't want to 'co-exist' with Core.
lmao. This is so dumb. Are you sure you aren't following some false flag psyop from a bunch of BSVtards?
Alright let take these on bit by bit.
I used to watch Matt Kratter almost every day... wake up, get a coffee and watch.
I had to search who this Matt Kratter is... a trader? What was he talking about every day? Not code and protocols I hope?
they're "all corrupt" and "bought off"
Were any receipts brought? As in direct evidence? I've personally not seen any. All I hear is accusations based on hasty generalization and appeal to motive (such as: they get grant payments and they have power and don't do what I want, therefore they must be corrupt), kind of pathetic imho.
And I felt like the overall presentation by Core members + M[u]rch was extremely thorough, sober, technically logical and reasonable.
I have great respect for all maintainers of Bitcoin Core (incl BIP maintainers (and yes, Luke too)) and frequent contributors, they are all talented and I've not seen much malice over the years. Not every proposal is the right proposal though, and no one is infallible; and they all know it. It's impossible to get a PR merged in Bitcoin Core if you think you're "the GOAT" and you're unable to listen to people, fix mistakes or improve things based on their comments, or if you're simply impatient. The collaboration makes it great software; not the individuals.
I don't necessarily understand everything or even agree... but the presentation was very very thorough.
What did you disagree with? I couldn't find your disagreement in the comments but I may have overlooked it?
But looking back... doesn't it just seem so obvious?
It's a tradeoff. I ran my main economic node off a Raspberry Pi 2 and later a little more modern armv8 board with a fast disk interface, for many years; I've always been a small blocker because I liked the abiity to do these kinds of things small scale. The only reason I don't run my node on a small board anymore is because I travel too much: I now run it in a datacenter because that's easier to manage when abroad.
My non-technical understanding of this... is that Knots isn't another "implementation".
Knots is basically a set of patches on top of Bitcoin Core, which Luke publishes and reapplies every time there's a Bitcoin Core release, so yeah, it's 99.99% the same implementation. He's been doing that for many years, starting from the real early days where he was the maintainer for the Bitcoin Gentoo Linux package. Over time, Luke has added increasing amounts of patches to Knots, mostly whenever he disagreed with Core consensus (or vice versa), and I think that that's fine: Luke's repo, Luke's rules.
"Implementations" would be other blockchains
Not really, that's what the dude you showed me the video from imho got wrong. Those are not Bitcoin but simply hard forks from people that didn't want to follow Bitcoin's consensus rules anymore and failed to get developer alignment to their cause: in both cases these were minority forks initiated by the minority themselves, not by any action on Bitcoin Core. They were made for the sole reason to change consensus in a disruptive way; and at least in one of the cases, to consolidate power to a scammer.
Instead, "implementations" of the Bitcoin protocol and consensus rules are for example btcd and libbitcoin. Those are written from scratch to implement functional nodes.
Twitter is so noisy and influencer-oriented it's hard to get any valuable information typically. So I understand that people cannot work in that environment.
imho Twitter is a crap platform if you're a serious person; always has been. The only way to use it safely is in chronological echo-chamber (following) mode and that's dangerous too when you're not following a diverse enough set of people. Nostr is a bit better if you're using a plain, algo-less client, but let's be honest: it's not really diverse enough. There's more diversity (of topics and opinions) on SN than on the entire nostr network.
It's hard to find that balance and it shows the challenges of "decentralized" software development where eventually somewhere somehow decisions have to be made.
I'd argue decisions don't really have to be made as long as Bitcoin Core does what they do: fully compatible softforks. That's why the key property here isn't
decentralization but the much nicer feature on top: permissionless. As long as Bitcoin is permissionless, you too can patch whatever you want (or use Luke's or Peter's published patches) and make it just how you like it. This is why ultimately, Luke can publish whatever tf he wants, and people can run whatever they want. But ...Many of the pro-filter voices on Twitter for example... could not explain the difference between mempool policy and consensus.
... having the option to run whatever tf you want, including software that is nasty, doesn't mean you should just run whatever someone else tells you you should run. It means you should do your own research, and run what you, after careful consideration, think is best. For most people this unfortunately means they are in desperate need for immediate tech skills and critical thinking development.
There is no difference between noobs following some trader on youtube that preaches "Luke's dysfunctional tweet content" for likes and followers, and therefore are convinced that Knots is the only way one will be admitted to heaven, and noobs following Udi that wanted some likes and followers, and therefore were convinced that the safest way to hold your coin is to put it all in FTX custody. It's in both cases the blind herd being led by the one eyed Shepard. In the latter case, off a cliff. In the former case, hopefully that won't happen; I still don't expect that Luke will push a minority fork, but I can't be 100% certain of this. Maybe some follower retard will though.
Increasing the block size is "logically" delusional.
The segwit implementation chose to 4x the blockspace, so it's literally happened on the chain you're holding your sats on. It could imho (and I'm not alone in that opinion) have been engineered to just keep it 1x with a slightly differently implemented mechanism for size calculation. So yeah... this actually happened and whatevs, it's consensus now.
No decentralized chain can contain every transaction for every coffee or every candy bar for 8 billion people across the entire Earth for hundreds of years... it's impossible.
Correct. Also I don't care about anyone's coffee and I don't want to validate coffee purchases. I just want to validate that my coins aren't counterfeit, and I want to help others to make sure their coins aren't counterfeit. Preferably their 1M sat utxos, perferably not their 500 sat utxos: they can just do small txs on LN so that it doesn't bother everyone.
And then one could ask: but do you want to validate jpegs? And my answer is no. But there is no way to prevent it as it's a tradeoff of having a permissionless system; to truly address it other than by dealing with high fees, permissionless properties must be weakened. And since that property is the greatest good for me, I am personally not willing to compromise. And that's all there is to it, imho.
How do you know if your node or the equipment is running well?
Personally I use
prometheus and grafana for this, because I have a lot more to monitor than just my nodes, but it's maybe easier to look into something more plug-and-play, like RTL.I'm not sure if I agree with "low drama". The development community has been under stress for a while, but thus far it hasn't caused irreversible bad decisions, at least not in Bitcoin Core.
Historical perspective: I felt similarly in the "blocksize wars" era1, the effect of which still resonates sometimes in narratives today2. The opinion of developers doesn't matter much for those that remain on the status quo side - after all, nothing changes - but it matters a lot if you're on the "alt" side3 and people will chose a losing side, which can be disastrous, to them. However, you can't stop anyone that wants to fork off, so therefore you can only "let them".
In more recent times, we saw for example a particular rage quit where some of the things that were said, especially about people that were just trying to establish what consensus was or voice their opinion about the proposals made, were coming close to character assassination. All because the process of extending script, from idea to activation is a bit fuzzy and it goes super slow.
Deteriorated personal relations between developers (and especially groups of them) could become a significant obstacle if you consider an ideology like "there should be only Core"4. If that truly is going to remain the main direction (it has been implicitly and sometimes explicitly since the start), then even though I recently accepted Murch's proposal to "agree to disagree"5 regarding banning people from the bitcoin github org, and let it go for the time being, I may have to come back to that and try to convince some key people to the current moderation rules to loosen them.
I think that if you extend the scope beyond the protocol as it is today, not all is guaranteed to be great. If the conservative, properly engineered Bitcoin protocol we have today is to remain that way and it's source of truth remain Bitcoin Core, then as bitcoiners, we must find a way where the polarization that is all too common in western societies at large is overcome in favor of consensus. For consensus you have to communicate though and I hope that a smallest denominator (=consensus rules) can remain common to everyone that is validating them right now, and those that enthusiastically validate them in the future.
Footnotes
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Leaving the hyperbole at the door, do we really believe that Gavin or Mike were actual bad guys? And vice versa, do bcashers really believe gmax or sipa are evil? It's what current statements on twitter/nostr and sometimes even here on SN would make one believe, especially newcomers! ↩
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which is why I quipped about the XEC (=Bitcoin ABC) guys in my original comment: they've found themselves on the losing side of a contentious fork twice but when I spoke to a few of them not too long ago, they were full of what almost looked like religious energy, similar to some of the filter champions, convinced that their way is the only right way. ↩
FYI, I get this on the embed:
Video unavailable The uploader has not made this video available in your country (MX)
Back when I worked in Europe, I observed the "rather sip coffee all day than work" and found it appalling. But to my surprise when later I worked in the US, there were many people that were sipping coffee all day there too; this was when my personal American dream shattered, and I learned that nationalist identity is bs.
Since I admitted that to myself, I've found awesome people because I was looking for them. From Seoul to Moscow, from Amsterdam to Seattle, from Santo Domingo to Lima. Yes, there are also Germans that are super awesome hard workers between 4 week vacays.
Had a sysadmin day today, which I enjoyed way too much but it's all looking good now... so I'm now planning to spend some time on analyzing
Blixt the rest of the week because I feel it can use NWC functionality on top of the currently offered lnaddr solution (that depends on opening a channel with a specific node, afaict.)True. But the consensus rules are relaxed for a reason, especially post-satoshi as we've learned that you can only make validation more strict, but not less strict, when you want to honor forward compatibility - which has been the modus operandi since basically forever.
You cannot put that genie back in the bottle without becoming a hardforking shitcoin.