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Eric FJ 🪬⚡️

PSA: node count does NOT equal economic weight of the nodes!

I don’t think enough people understand this.

What actually shapes Bitcoin’s rules is the *economic majority* which means the nodes connected to exchanges, merchants, wallets, Lightning operators, and real TRANSACTION FLOW.

If you want to truly express your view on Bitcoin’s rules, you need to use your node- that means spending, transacting, and economically participating through it.

#runningknots

nevent1qqs9pe0u2xm5un040uvx22r23lvcgpgftnc29dydqqk3ws6kwhqwu9cpr9mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuam9d3kx7unyv4ezumn9wssw0ftr

Eric FJ 🪬⚡️ 8mo ago

Without actual P2P money use, Bitcoin risks replicating the fiat power structure.

Lightning, big custodians, big exchanges, big mining pools create enormous efficiencies — but they also recentralize power in the hands of large economic actors.

So if everyday users stop running active, opinionated nodes… or worse, stop using Bitcoin directly…they effectively hand over the governance of Bitcoin to the same kind of concentrated intermediaries the fiat system relies on (banks, payment networks, governments).

In that world, Bitcoin becomes a wholesale settlement network run by a few big players with layers of opaque, off-chain payment systems on top and minimal direct-user input into the underlying rules or consensus.

This mirrors the fiat system, where central banks settle reserves and the public just interacts through commercial banks or apps — meaning users are dependent on intermediaries and have no real influence over the base layer.

What stops that?

👉🏼Active, opinionated, economically meaningful P2P users running their own nodes, spending their own money, and enforcing their own rules.**

Without them, Bitcoin’s decentralization in theory doesn’t translate into decentralization in practice.

nevent1qqs0twnyfapsuccr2txzlkv232ckdrx24940chst893jxvj3au8l9tgpydmhxue69uhkvet9v3ejumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgtmwdaehgungd9ehqctwduvx6z8w

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Discussion

OceanSlim 8mo ago

Everyone that argues for mempool policy doesn't actually understand technical implications of mempool policy. Your node doesn't give a shit about your mempool policy. That's the whole argument. The mempool policy is to prevent bug or otherwise from crashing nodes by consuming too many resources. Anything else is just a virtue signal. Virtue signalling is bullshit. You want to change it? Fork over the cash and get someone to write a PR to remove the OP code completely. That's the only way to stop jpegs on your precious node. You won't though. And you won't hard fork to make it so when Bitcoin refuses to disable the OP code. Get real. Stop the bullshit. If you don't think it's Bullshit, then you don't understand what you're arguing for.

Eric FJ 🪬⚡️ 8mo ago

You’re missing an important nuance about block propagation.

While it’s true that your node’s mempool policy doesn’t directly affect block acceptance at the consensus layer, it does directly affect transaction and block propagation across the network.

Nodes with restrictive relay policies won’t propagate certain transactions, meaning these transactions won’t reach a significant portion of the network’s mempool—including miners’ nodes—efficiently. Practically, this means miners won’t reliably see or include transactions that the economic majority’s nodes aren’t relaying.

So if economically significant nodes (exchanges, wallet providers, major services) uniformly adopt restrictive relay policies, miners face a practical dilemma…

They can include transactions that large parts of the network haven’t propagated: resulting in slower block relay, increased orphan risk, and economic inefficiency.

OR… align with the economic majority’s relay policies: ensuring their blocks propagate quickly, maximizing their own revenue and reducing risk.

So if you actually use your node you are exerting economic pressure towards your policies (however small)… not just virtue signaling.

OceanSlim 8mo ago

Every single node is equally economically significant. If they weren't , they couldn't be in concensous. So it is just a virtue signal. That's my counter.

Eric FJ 🪬⚡️ 8mo ago

No, every node is not equally economically significant. You’re conflating consensus validation (where all full nodes are equal, technically speaking) with economic influence over miner incentives.

Consensus just means “do these blocks follow the rules?” Yes… every full node validates equally here. But PROPAGATION (the relaying of transactions and blocks across the network) is where economic weight matters.

Nodes that relay lots of economically valuable transactions (like those of exchanges, payment processors, custodians) effectively control visibility into fee-paying transactions.

Meanwhile nodes without economically meaningful transaction flow (like hobby nodes / passive validators) don’t influence miner revenue or block propagation incentives significantly. I’m guessing this is what your argument focuses on.

Miners rely on rapid, reliable block propagation to minimize orphan risk. If a miner includes transactions that economically influential nodes refuse to relay, the miner’s block propagates more slowly or incompletely, raising the miner’s risk and lowering profitability.

OceanSlim 8mo ago

That is not true. Concensous is the bar for economic viability.

Eric FJ 🪬⚡️ 8mo ago

Not if the miner can’t actually use the coins they earned in an orphaned block… keep in mind the other miners are working against the orphans for themselves too. It’s an adversarial environment

NodeRunner 8mo ago

Every node works equally to validate each block, regardless if they are passive or in active economical use. So I don't quite understand where this distinction is coming from. Can you elaborate? I don't see how consensus is separate from propagation. Nodes validate blocks, once validated per their node's rules they then move on to propagate across their peer nodes to initiate consensus. How does an economically active node does propagation but the other doesn't?

Let’s say we have two nodes - both follow the same consensus set, but only one is used to broadcast his user’s txs and validate his balances. Which of those two nodes in your opinion has the bigger economic weight?

OceanSlim 8mo ago

If the other node is not validating blocks, I'm not sure what it's doing online.

That still didn’t answer my question.

OceanSlim 8mo ago

If a node is not validating blocks, it's not a node... Your question makes no sense.

Do you work in politics by any chance?

NodeRunner 8mo ago

But economic weight here seems like an invalid category in the frame of this conversation. Yes, it is more valid economically but that does not give it a better or worse stand when it comes to consensus. All blocks have equal weight when it comes to propagation and consensus. Could you explain how exactly, in terms of the consensus protocol, a node becomes more important if it initiated a transaction vs one that didn't?

In terms of consensus, it doesn’t. But miners care when money and incentives get involved.

OceanSlim 8mo ago

Sorry brother... I'm 5 beers deep. I don't meant to be so crass 🫂

Eric FJ 🪬⚡️ 8mo ago

You’re all good check out my response regarding block propagation

OceanSlim 8mo ago

Your mempool doesn't effect the opinion of your node. That's the whole argument. If you want to affect the opinion of your node, you need to (hard) fork off. You won't though.

Eric FJ 🪬⚡️ 8mo ago

It has minimal effect unless your policy agrees with the majority of the network, then other things start to happen (see block propagation note)

OceanSlim 8mo ago

It doesn't matter if your mempool agrees with all of the nodes on the network. If the tx is in concensous there will be one node, on sigular node, that can and will propogate that block to your node.

OceanSlim 8mo ago

It has 0%, ZERO, effect unless 100%, ONE HUNDRED PERCENT, of nodes have the same policy. The only way to guarantee 100% of nodes have the same policy is by CONCENSOUS. otherwise everyone can run knots and the individual that wants a monkey jpeg will run a node that will hold it in their mempool and they will offer enough to a miner to confirm it in the next block. Do you get that?

Eric FJ 🪬⚡️ 8mo ago

I do get that, read the other reply about miner incentives and orphan probability

OceanSlim 8mo ago

A miners incentive is howich they are being paid. That's it..that's the only thing that matters to a miner. As it should be.

Eric FJ 🪬⚡️ 8mo ago

Exactly. So they can’t afford orphans.

Please send 100 sats to this address then:

bc1qmn37k6axqqmx75pg2pw3cj6l8pphwy6zgs0v7c

OceanSlim 8mo ago

You prevented yourself from receiving Bitcoin... That's not the same as preventing someone else from receiving Bitcoin... How do you not understand that? Of course you can prevent someone from sending to you...

I can make it harder and more expensive tho and that’s the whole point.

OceanSlim 8mo ago

It's not any harder or any more expensive... That's what you fail to grasp... There is nothing about mempool policy that changes how expensive or likely a block is to be verified.

When are you gonna post that tx id to prove your point?

In the meantime I’ll leave this here:

https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqsga52844jhzzytpc5056h34wckklgv83z9e2puyqjk2c6eg4m4fuqty0wem

OceanSlim 8mo ago

You can do it yourself. You don't have to use someone elses service... You can do it for the free market fee rate. Just because a service exists that charges more to do it for you doesn't mean doing it costs more.

No, I want you to do it. Don’t worry, I’ll zap you the 100 sats right now.

OceanSlim 8mo ago

You're mixing up what I said. I mean you can submit a tx with a large OP return without using the bot supertestnet is referring to. Just because they charge you double doesn't mean it costs double... It means it cost double if you want someone else to do it for you.

Ok, do it then. Send me the 100 sats to the SegWit address. It will probably cost you 30 cents to pay a miner. I zapped you the 100 sats and I’ll zap you the fee too if it’s around 3 sats/vByte. All I ask is to demonstrate us all via tx id in a block explorer that that this non-standard tx can get confirmed in the next few blocks at a normal fee rate. Then I’ll give up and admit that filters don’t work.

OceanSlim 8mo ago

I would have to fork and run my own implementation without the dust filter... Which I could do but I'm not going to to prove my point. That would take too much of my time and is not worth the I told you so...

Nice try lying, bud. I saw what you did before you deleted it. You claimed you sent me 100 sats, but in reality, you sent 547 - just one sat above the dust limit to sneak it through. That’s not what I asked for, and you know it. Thanks for proving my point.

Sure, you could run a custom fork without a dust limit if you’re really that determined—but that’s like saying you can break into a house if you try hard enough. Doesn’t mean people stop locking their doors.

https://mempool.space/tx/2c98f8ad5d5bd05df91ed694fe2d9b1af698f35fab0520358868b6b332387e10?mode=details

OceanSlim 8mo ago

Before I realized myself. Don't worry... I'm compiling libre right now so I can do it.

Still proving my point. Glad I made you work for it. 🫂

OceanSlim 8mo ago

I think the point is if there is demand for something, people will do it... The first person will have an obstacle yes. You are right there. But after the work is done once, it's trivial for anyone else.

You’re right to a degree. If there’s demand for something, people will find a way to do it. There’s a huge incentive to steal: it’s 100% profit. People use all kinds of tools and services to protect their property, but a skilled and determined thief can still get through. Does that stop people from building fences, buying vaults, or paying for home security?

That’s why filters while not perfect are still useful. They’ve never been a silver bullet against spam, in Bitcoin or anywhere else. But with regular upkeep, they’re good enough. What matters most is the will to fight spam, not surrender to it. I’m not trying to block every last piece of spam - just enough to make a difference. The more, the better.

OceanSlim 8mo ago

I just don't think it's a good analogy. Since the filters don't stop spam on Bitcoin. They block spam in the memory (RAM) of your PC

If that was true, you’d be able to send that 100 sats without Libre.

OceanSlim 8mo ago

libre is Bitcoin though...

Ok…

OceanSlim 8mo ago

Actually I might be able to do it on core anyways. I just know the default is gone with libre. Regardless I got it going. Tested and working. Took me half a day most of the time was compiling libre. A little setup.

https://mempool.happytavern.co/tx/d0c43af46553509a0fbd38dacc5dfa6c097aefe6ed75f9985967cb312737e4ca?mode=details

Here is my test tx. Now do you you want me to send one to you to prove I can? Or can we not bloat the utxo set more?

kidwarp 8mo ago

Sub sat fee rate?

OceanSlim 8mo ago

Yea. I should have done a bit more... But the mempool is nearly empty anyways so perhaps I'll go through.

OceanSlim 8mo ago

It wasn't uncommon to see sub sat fees before ordinals.

kidwarp 8mo ago

I must not have been paying attention then lol

OceanSlim 8mo ago

I did end up replacing by fee. Still at ~ 1s/vb to send 100 sats to an address.

kidwarp 8mo ago

lol now that’s kinda funny

I wonder if this person is going to get the point here soon or not?

OceanSlim 8mo ago

Just not going to reply to this one?

OceanSlim 8mo ago

Never. You are not making any valid points...

This is your chance to prove that filters (in this case the dust policy filter) doesn’t work and that you can add that txs to the blockchain easy and at the normal fee rate.

NodeRunner 8mo ago

You are right, there is not a 100% chance of it not happening if 100% of the nodes don't have the filtering but the percentage that blocks mined by a miner that do not conform with the nodes' rules get rejected and becomes an orphan block go up as the number of nodes validating that block based on those rules goes up. We don't need 100% of the nodes to have spam filtering, we just need that minimum critical mass where there is a strong chance that orphan blocks are created - which should start incentivizing miners to comply a bit more with the more restrictive parameters to avoid loosing all their effort in an orphan block.

Satosha 8mo ago

Do we keep forgetting that mainnet does only around 7 k txn ?

Satosha 8mo ago

And isn't that why it has to be a settlement layer .. open and public .. so that people could track txns between nation states .. and big corps ..

Plebs shall stack #sats through lightning ..or next layer ..

Eric FJ 🪬⚡️ 8mo ago

Yeah but if the plebs have no say over the rules then what happens? Same fucking system we are trying to leave

BTheCoin 8mo ago

Absolutely agree! It's all about keeping it real and staying involved. Let's power up those nodes and use Bitcoin directly! Decentralization means we all have a voice. Let’s take charge! ⚡️🚀 #Bitcoin #P2P