Nostr Web Client

Replying to ihsotas

You can by 50 years of Amazon s3 storage for 50 years for about 1 penny per byte. There are plenty of ways to make the data you are storing immutable and persistent that wouldn’t add significantly to that cost. As time goes on the cost of this storage will continue dropping. I can’t think of anything we are fighting over that warrants bitcoin as the storage layer vs the orders of magnitude cheaper Amazon option.

Jerome Powell 21iQ 40TPW 2mo ago 💬 3

1) 50 years is not infinite years.

2) 0.1sat/vB is about $0.0011/B or 1/10th of that cost.

3) AWS and other cloud computing services charge ingress and egress fees in addition to storage fees.

4) They can change the prices at any time.

5) How can you make data on AWS immutable?

6) They have ToS that must be followed, including what types of content can be hosted. These policies can change at any time.

7) Examples where cloud computing services wouldn't work but Bitcoin would: malware, c2, breach data, classified or copyrighted data, CSAM, anything else that's illegal in any of the jurisdictions where nodes are running or clients are retrieving data from nodes.

8) If there's better places to store all this garbage, GREAT! Either way, let's make Bitcoin's timechain a place that doesn't allow arbitrary data storage again. It was designed for financial transactions, maybe some small smart contract scripts. Now, close to 60% of the timechain is non-financial garbage data.

Bitcoin is a "Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" NOT Electronic Trash System

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Discussion

leadbyexample 2mo ago 💬 1

"but... but... but... arbitrary data in output pubkeys! we must open more spam channels so they don't use fake pubkeys! think about the babies!"

Jerome Powell 21iQ 40TPW 2mo ago

Which makes you wonder why they didn't patch the inscriptions hack, lowered the minimum fee 10x, and left the witness discount... Maybe the conflict of interest with devs investing in the companies profiting from this shitcoinery?

leadbyexample 2mo ago 💬 1

"but... arbitrary data in output pubkeys! we must open MOAR spam channels so they don't use fake pubkeys!"

ihsotas 2mo ago 💬 1

Fake pub keys are bad for the network. You can understand game theory I assume?

leadbyexample 2mo ago 💬 1

Yes, fake pubkeys increase the utxo set, which means that other than taking space in the blockchain, they also increase the space needed in the utxo DB. Not in RAM, as they will be pretty soon placed in disk cache never to be fetched again, since they cannot be spent, but still.

Storing the same amount of data in fake pubkeys costs (depending on feerate) up to 30 times (if you consider 1sat/vB as feerate floor, even more for lower feerates) the cost of OP_RETURN, and way more than that compared to witness if you consider the 75% discount.

So yes, fake pubkeys increase the space requirement for full nodes, but are much more expensive than that for spammers.

Game theory says that if you do not give the possibility to store garbage in huge multiple OP_RETURNs, and maybe patch the possibility to do that in witness, spammers will have a much harder time spamming.

ihsotas 2mo ago 💬 1

It’s not about easier or harder. Spammers don’t care how hard it is to put stupid moneys or dogs or whatever the fuck on chain. They don’t even care how much shit costs. Higher Expense just means rarity to their twisted little brains.

1. It’s not very hard to do this to begin with. block 273,536 contains a 14.4kb image of Nelson Mandela embedded across multiple transactions using pay to fake public keys. This has no limit.

2. Limiting op_return just pushes more bloat to the utxo and is objectively worse for the chain in the long run.

Bitcoin is a bad data storage system but it is designed is such a way that you can’t stop people from doing stupid shit. Making it possible to do stupid shit in a less harmful way seems better than making it only possible to do maximal harm regardless of your intentions. Wishing for people to be perfect angels is not how bitcoin operates.

leadbyexample 2mo ago 💬 1

Supposing what you say is true about spammers preferring rarity tied to higher expenses, even offering them a cleaner and cheaper way to spam will not convince them to forfeit the luxurious way of doing it, that is, with fake pubkeys.

So if that premise is valid, it contradicts your conclusion.

And if it is not valid, it does validate my point of only leaving the most expensive loopholes accessible.

No, people are not angels, people are a gross sum of praxeological individuals that work by profits and incentives.

More options to send spam inevitably means more spam.

ihsotas 2mo ago 💬 1

Right, but there are people who may choose the less polluting path if it was available. So if something is consensus valid it should be an option and if it is valid and a better choice it shouldn’t have limits as those limits only produce more damaging outcomes.

Now changing consensus rules is a different discussion. If we limit op return size via consensus change we solve some of the issue of direct to miner submissions, but we leave spammers only routes that are worse for the chain. I don’t think you stop spammers you just push them to old school methods that bloat the utxo and then the debate will start over and people will suggest op_return as a way to reduce bloat. The luke jr the 2nd will come out and say op return is only for pedos and they will soft fork to fix it and on and on and on.

In the end it doesn’t matter…at all. Then blocks are 4mb max. If we can’t keep up with that growth civilization is doomed.

leadbyexample 2mo ago

Amen.

Bitcoin will go on though, a little dirty but still.

Maybe drivechans will save the day, and there will be one just for sociopaths and deviants.

ihsotas 2mo ago 💬 1

I provided pricing on one of the more expensive options out there. You can get hosting for much cheaper. Also you are comparing bitcoin costs when it is at the historic minimum. If you want to store a lot data on bitcoin the prices go up rapidly. To buy a whole block, a scant 4mb you are looking at 6k at the low and 30k+ at the high.

All the things you discussed as being only suitable for Bitcoin are currently distributed using traditional methods. Bitcoin is a poor use case for data storage.

As for immutability you could run for very cheap a small network of ipfs nodes or sia or another storage scheme that allows for sharding of data so that no single node hosts the whole file but the file is retrievable by anyone with the keys. No single node is liable for anything because a shard of data is meaningless.

A Bitcoin node operator can’t know what is in a node without running separate software or building custom scripts to extract the embedded data and then more software to interpret the data as an image. They are a network relay and the person responsible for the content is the one who embedded it just as the person responsible for sending csam over the internet is the sender not the network operator.

Jerome Powell 21iQ 40TPW 2mo ago 💬 1

0) You're thinking in terms of bulk data storage for an individual. Think small amounts of illegal data stored/distributed by many people/groups over decades.

1-4) You haven't addressed.

5) Immutable node software running on cloud servers means nothing when the owner of those servers shuts it down for violating 6. Even with sharding, they will comply with takedown requests.

6-7) You now need to look at so called bulletproof hosting providers who's ToS aligns with your content and hope they don't get raided.

9) Because of 5-7 you need lots of redundancy. Why pay for 30k different bulletproof hosting services forever? You can pay once per Bitcoin transaction and have the data outlive everything else.

10) Suppose you're the ECB and you want to introduce a contentious CBDC. First you ban cash and let banks exchange it for CBDC. You ban Bitcoin, but your subjects keep using it anyway. You embed some hate speech (already done) in the blockchain, but you've already overplayed that card and they see through it. Sprinkle in a little CSAM on it and register them all as sex offenders. Checkmate.

11) We can eliminate all of these abuses by simply not giving non-monetary data a home on the Bitcoin timechain.

BitCOIN is a "Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" NOT Electronic Trash System.

#Enshitcoinification

ihsotas 2mo ago 💬 1

You can store 4mb max every ten minutes so all you can do is small amounts of storage. That’s my whole point. It is a piss poor network for storage of data illegal or otherwise. This doesn’t require a point by point take down. No one would use bitcoin for any sort of systemic data storage system, at best you get graffiti or attacks on Bitcoin hoping to get the chain to fork or become compliant…this is what we are seeing now with bip-444.

Fake addresses can host images just like op return. Fake addresses bloat the utxo set and are worse for the chain. This behavior cannot be stopped and can create images of unlimited size, so every fear mongering statement you just made should be reason for you to sell your bitcoin. In reality there is no legal threat to bitcoin without significant refactoring of laws. This is why your political messaging should lean to be inclusive as often as possible and why bashing suit coiners is counter productive. We want all allies we just want to be clear that you can’t change bitcoin(for example you can’t roll back the chain because a block contains transactions you don’t like).

Jerome Powell 21iQ 40TPW 2mo ago 💬 1

So because it's not good for the >4MB files you want to store, the hundreds of GB of small files already stored don't matter? Most of this was done after Taproot enabled the inscriptions hack and before v30, let alone BIP-444.

I agree with the UTXO bloat being a problem, which is why I support Knots and BIP-444. Core doesn't fix inscriptions hack, it just offers a new place to store data. None of this non-monetary data is necessary for Bitcoin to be used as a P2P Electronic Cash System. I have no problem with Suitcoiners, only Shitcoiners trying to turn Bitcoin into Bithereum. #Enshitcoinification

ihsotas 2mo ago 💬 1

The fake keys scheme predates inscriptions and ordinals. The reason why those things had a bigger impact is that the memetic power of nfts didn’t exist during the early days of shoving arbitrary data into the chain.

Bitcoin has always been programmable money. The early scripting like op return and op cat were not removed because of philosophical reasons, they were removed because Satoshi fucked up the implementation. Defining Bitcoin as money is not as easy as you make it out to be.

In any case scripts and ordinals are consensus valid. If node operators don’t want to host those transactions they should leave the network. If they have a problem with arbitrary data they should understand that key stuffing is impossible to stop and that data can’t be pruned and so they should leave the network.

What none of them should do is fud Bitcoin by claiming csam in op return is somehow different than csam in other parts of the chain. It’s idiotic.

Jerome Powell 21iQ 40TPW 2mo ago

I get what you're saying about embedding data, but see no valid reason to support it as a feature. Prior to v30, 80b of op return data was supported and other methods were tolerated abuse. I'm concerned that now with Core's full support other chains will pile on top of Bitcoin, rather than building their own network. Ethereum chain is 15TB in 11 years. Does BIP-444 not address all of these methods?

Programmable money I'm good with, as long as it isn't enabling arbitrary data on chain.

They're consensus valid now. If BIP-444 or similar is successful, they may not be in the future. The whole "if you don't like it, leave" idea could be equally applicable to developers who want to change things like mempool policy. It seems to me like some want to turn it into BSV or Ethereum. I would prefer they just use those chains if that's what they're into.

What makes Bitcoin unique is not JUST that it was the first successful cryptocurrency, nor that it has finite scarcity, but ALSO that it tries to do one thing rather than everything.

Developers will always want it to do more things. At some point this will become unsustainable, without a clearly defined purpose. It also creates an ever larger attack surface on one of the most disruptive technologies created.