I mean the whole point of taproot and by extension segwit which was meant to lay the ground work was to make it more expressive. If we’re saying that we should be deciding which cases expressiveness should be “allowed” which is a really scary prospect to me.
The protocol should be value neutral. As long as it operates decentralized and w/ an efficient market w/ accurate price discovery for blockspace then everything is operating as expected.
That's the thing. Nothing is value neutral. Just as the "protocol" (laws of physics) allow anyone to burn a forest, that doesn't mean that arson should be encouraged or we should sit impassively while arsonists destroy everything.
The question here might be: is bitcoin an accounting system for humanity or is it a data dumpster where it's OK to write garbage as long as someone mines it? Yes, the "protocol" allows that kind of behavior, but I believe it should be culturally shunned, not encouraged.
Part of the mistake was segwit and taproot in the first place. The people abusing the protocol are taking advantage of the segwit fee discount, which enhances the ability to abuse bitcoin. Bitcoiners were regarding core devs as gods for a long time instead of taking responsibility in their own hands, and now we are seeing the results of that mindset.
In a podcast Casey Rodarmor used the analogy of a bus that let's anyone ride as long as they pay a fare. Even if we use that analogy ordinals are like filling up the bus with beach balls instead of passengers. Even if you're paying the fare people who want to use it for actual transportation would be completely justified in banning that type of behavior.
No. Eventually the beach balls will have to pay a higher and higher fee. If ordinals are useless than it will become less and less worthwhile to pay for. The protocol designers from the start expected blocks to fill up which would drive up fees which would support the network.
You’re making the same argument big blockers made 5 years ago. There’s functionally no difference from saying “but what if there’s only room for 20 people on the bus then only rich people could ride it”. People even made bus/transport visualizations to make these points!
The point of the segwit discount and how inscriptions use it, is that the beach balls are actually paying a lower fare for the same amount of space than actual passengers. The danger with inscriptions is not that they might be displacing “useful” transactions, but that they are polluting the blockchain and now all full nodes will have to spend more resources (cpu, hard drive) to validate and store those transactions. In other words, they are destroying the commons.
I think it’s intellectually consistent to say segwit and taproot were mistakes. I don’t agree but I respect the position.
There’s near universal agreement from devs that there’s no way to prevent data we don’t like w/o prevention “useful” use cases, which is another way of saying that actually the protocol needs to be value neutral in terms of content of data. The way that we filter for usefulness is the market, block size limits, and limited supply of currency all of which are reasons why bitcoin is probably a better platform to have experiments like NFTs than alternatives. The reason is if they have no value then as fees go up but people are less willing to pay them their use will go down. The same could be true for more complex spending transactions of any kind. If my business doesn’t want to pay the fees for a more complex locking script that might provide more security at the cost of block space, then we’ll opt for simple multisig.
I agree there is no way to completely prevent data we don't like, but segwit and taproot have enabled the inscriptions' abuse like hand in glove. In two ways:
1) inscriptions benefit from the segwit fee discount so they pay less fees for the same amount of bytes than other types of transactions and
2) having a limited OP_RETURN size and a limited amount of data per transaction on segwit means that inscriptions would have to be split among several transactions, therefore increasing the fees they have to pay for the same amount of data.
Without the segwit discount and without taproot the same inscriptions would be paying several times the fees they are paying right now.
I don't care that there might be "near universal agreement from devs", like there was near universal agreement from "experts" during the "pandemic". That is an appeal to authority. Devs aren't gods and they don't represent bitcoiners.
Limiting data on witnesses makes no sense and would break many use cases of bitcoin including those that are “purely monetary”. I’m not appealing to authority as an opt out. I’m making the point that
(a) this is not as simple as “just get rid of things I don’t like” and
(b) you would need someone to implement the type of limit you describe and if everyone that could says that’s a bad/dangerous idea, that’s a problem.
The difference about the pandemic is that experts that disagreed were silenced so it wasn’t universal agreement.
Lift the cap on OP_RETURN and no more witness discount. If it’s not just about the discount then you’re really just asking to censor data you don’t like.
By the way, do you know why there’s a witness discount?
One reason was to encourage migration to segwit. That was desirable. It came with tradeoffs but probably still worth it.
Second reason is because the witness doesn’t need to be persisted by all nodes. So this is actually better for those that don’t want to persist inscription data on their node.
I wonder what would happen if the nodes stopped saving and verifying the segwit transaction signatures. Can those UTXOs be spent by anyone? I still haven’t found a convincing answer to that question. But that’s another story.
Utxos haven’t been spent yet so they haven’t been signed. You can verify by verifying all of the blocks.
I would be pleased if the segwit discount was removed. About the OP_RETURN cap, I’d rather keep it unless there is a justification for increasing (not removing) it. You mentioned the “expresiveness”. I definitely don’t want to censor data, but I believe that transactions should be as concise as possible rather than expressive/verbose. The bitcoin blockchain is, first and foremost, an accounting ledger, not a blank canvas to paint or write novels. I am OK with short strings of text, such as the Times’ headline in the genesis block or the miners writing their name on the blocks they mine. It’s not about the contents, but about the length/size.
At some point what is concise will become a subjective value. The way we make that objective is by scarce block size and the free market. Costs encourage users to be as concise as possible.
Yes and no. The protocol is opinionated: whether to keep, alter or remove OP_RETURN, the segwit discount, and so on alter the conditions of the “free market”, i.e. the playing field that the protocol enables. Even the block size limit is opinionated. For example, with an unlimited OP_RETURN, it would be cheaper to make an inscription using it, because you wouldn’t have to split it among several transactions.
Great point. What you’re describing is a change to the protocol, which by definition would not be how it works today. But yes, removing OP_RETURN limits (which I believe is just policy anyway) and the segwit discount would make the market more free. Discriminating against data (a la current segwit discount and OP_RETURN limits does) is would not.
