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No this is just wrong. Bitcoin would be nothing if it doesn't enforce two of the three features you mentioned... Regardless whether or not money was involved.

If it didn't enforced total ordering (no double spending) it wouldn't be a useful data base at all, and if it didn't use proof of work it wouldn't have been any different than a database using permissioned BFT.

The 21 limit is the only value judgement, but arguably it was necessary for bootstrapping meme-wise. But the other two aren't value judgements they are the bare minimum features to justify the existence of this system at all

Super Testnet 0mo ago 💬 1

(1) Justifying the existence of a system sounds like a value judgment

(2) There are useful databases that allow for reprdering data. The stated motivation for doublespend prevention is not because it is "technically necessary" (I dont think it is) but rather to prevent fraud, which is itself a form of "morality policing"

(3) The stated motivation for proof of work is to incentivize honesty, not to ensure the system is different from other BFT databases. Other BFT systems are permissioned. But one of the big problems with a permissioned monetary system is not technical but rather moral: dishonest parties might gain control of the system and use their power to allow some people to doublespend, i.e. to enable fraud. Having a pernissionless Proof of Work model incentivizes them to be honest instead. The choice to forego the permissioned route was not technically necessary (orher such systems ARE permissioned). It was a choice explicitly based on morality.

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Nuh 0mo ago

You are stretching the definition so hard they are no longer useful or intelligible. Almost everywhere in distributed systems the word "honest" and "dishonest" merely means that you aren't trying to fake something, may it be the state, the history or Sybil etc.. These are not moral judgements, no one is calling the cheaters bad Christians or sinners or pedos or whatever nonsense knotzis are saying, in fact they are usually called adversaries. Moreover no one following the spec is ever called dishonest, people usually just focus on the spec being weak.

Even if none of the 3 things you listed are not necessary to have Bitcoin, which would be an absurd statement, that doesn't make them moral judgements... That at most make them objective specification of the goal, by specification I mean narrowing.

Now if Knotzis drop the morality bullshit and discuss narrowing the definition of Bitcoin from what is to what they want it to be, fine they are welcome, but they know they can't actually make any technical specification that is implementable so they argue nonsense instead.

I actually want them to fork to see if they ever manage to define a consensus narrower than Bitcoin current consensus that doesn't leak left and right while remaining usable.

I am also not sure why are you invested in calling things that are so technical that you can write them as code morality... Who benefits from that muddling? There is a centuries of mortality discourse that basically prove that morality is the domain of the hand wavy subjectiv stuff ... How can that be consensus software??