Great summary thanks
Discussion
Thanks. The real shocker detail to me is that if you follow the rabbit hole all the way down running knots increases the likelihood of storing arbitrary data.
Is that because the data would be stored elsewhere (like current state of things somewhat), and that is not prunable?
I haven't tried to follow too closely, figured I'd let dust settle.
Yep, current cheapest place is witness data because pool accelerators that bypass nodes charge a markup. Witness data is needed to know every economic transaction. Removing the accelerator markup makes op_return cheaper. Op_return can be pruned without losing any info about economic transactions.
Your post distilled down most of what I've gathered nicely. The noise then would seem to be mostly about process and other drama on GitHub.
Or maybe it's that default changes to core are as good as law (for now). Thus it is signaling that bitcoin wont resist spam and will make it cheaper and easier, even if the data is prunable...
I probably need to think about it more.
Yeah, core definitly fucked up the public relations on this and a lot of people are just opposed out of spite.
If you've never dealt with trying to filter data it is easy to think it should be easy to filter however you want. The reality is it is impossible if you have a determined adversary, this is why spam emails still get through after all these years.
We will never stop them but we can engage in harm reduction. Getting them to put their data into prunable fields instead of fields we can never prune reduces harm.
Since the block size is unchanged I don't see this affecting the ability of regular people to run full archival nodes. Note that the knots people aren't switching to pruned nodes, they just get a mempool filter that causes them to not have accurate mempools.
I get that no one node has a perfectly accurate picture of the entire global mempool. That doesn't make it smart to intentionally make your own mempool innacurate.
Yes, as someone who doesn't deeply understand the mechanics of this particular spam nor the general theory of spam mitigation, agree.
It's a bit more than bad PR because of blind reliance on core implementation by majority means they get to make this type of call. Silver lining might be that awareness raised over a lesser issue than one that may come in future, at which time we can hope for more diverse options and more educated users, and changes to core defaults won't be law necessarily 🤔
$2T USD total market value and we are still letting the devs talk directly to the users. No corporation that size would dream of doing something so stupid. Big companies use a translator for Dev <-> User communication for a reason.
I don't like the idea of some suits interfacing with node runners more than devs...
Conclusion is maybe there should be no such thing as "The devs"?
I'd be willing to take the job of translating between dev and human for the core team. I promise not to wear a suit.
You need more conflict of interest to gain interest from Opensats.
I hear Vitalik is having public relations issues too. I could apply for the same role for him and be one of those people with 2 full time do nothing jobs. That should be conflict of interest enough, slinging ETH got Loop in after all.
With a name like Bill Cypher, I think I might support that.