The degree to which non-technical people weigh in on very technical topics in Bitcoin has always surprised me.

It's not like people go around getting pissy with brain surgeons about the merits of a new procedure, or start yelling at particle physicists about the proper way to aim a neutrino...

What makes these folks think that they have any idea about the tradeoffs inherent in complex crypto-systems?

I think more devs (especially the bitcoin core devs) would do well to simply ignore the noise, most of the time. Only give your valuable time to people who have shown the proof of work and bring intellectual honesty to the conversation.

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Your argument is flawed because comparing Bitcoin to niche technical fields like brain surgery or particle physics is a false analogy; Bitcoin is a socio-economic system with far broader implications, requiring expertise beyond just code, including economics, usability, and ethics. Dismissing non-technical input as "noise" is a form of gatekeeping that ignores valid concerns and the diverse perspectives crucial for Bitcoin's development, adoption, and governance, especially since its success hinges on wider public understanding and use, not just the approval of developers.

The tricky part is that your description requires educating the masses first, and it’s too late for that on this topic, which is the problem right now.

…” especially since its success hinges on wider public understanding and use, not just the approval of developers.”

it’s not that hard to learn about. Just ask chat gpt or another AI, can you tell me about Bitcoin? You get a succinct and organized response.

I’ve been teaching an intro to BTC class for a couple years now and it’s just not that easy for normies to grok from my experience. Now I could definitely be a shitty teacher so there’s that😂

hm. When I first heard about it from someone in computer science, it was literally one sentence more or less. ‘this can replace banks’. This was after being aware of the occupy wall st. and the 1% protests, the 2008 financial crisis… also some general zeitgeist about how ‘corporate sucks’ (maybe partially from the popular band Something Corporate), and I was like, yeah! Go Bitcoin! 🥳

Sometimes a fresh eye can bring new perspectives.

Only if a fresh eye has a PhD /s

I dont know.

PhDs seem quite political for me to get it.

PhDs could be a good thing, but I am not sure if it is pursued and executed correctly everywhere to shine as a proof that somebody is smart.

Most if not all successful billioners do not have a PhD. Those diplomas are done to create workers not thinkers

⚠️ Gaslighting Alert ⚠️

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Bitcoin is made of humans that perform socio-economico decisions. Some just say bullshit, but many other non-technical folks bring a lot of value to the conversation, with perspective that matter philosophically, or economically

If you're bringing those things without a proper understanding of reality, you're lacking the proof of work.

If you then turn around and make lots of noise with your opinions that have no basis in reality, you're being intellectually dishonest.

Noise is rich, consensus of the few is poor

By that same logic, technical people should refrain from discussing economic issues in Bitcoin. The current discussion has significant economic implications that many technical contributors either ignore or fail to understand. Take Peter Todd, for example - he has a *very* poor track record when it comes to understanding basic economics. If we follow your reasoning, he should be the last person to weigh in on those matters.

we just endured the pandemic where socalled experts fucked things up pretty bad

so i for one am enjoying hearing all sides of this debate

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this social interest is also part of a paradigm shift that bitcoin brings. No elite is in charge to determine how money works.

So agree with you someway, the core devs should ignore noise, but people should engage on every level of the conversation. The digital realm makes filtering out noise very efficient, and every coscience will find his spot to express herself and discuss.

Also, all this drama is positive cause it bring us the idea that bitcoin needs multiple implementations to protect people from central points of failures and to make the network stronger.

Bitcoin is for everyone.......its a big change and learning curve .....poeple on different stages of their bitcoin journey will come from limited perspectives.

Trust the experts! Stop having opinions anon! Have you BEEN there?!?

Bitcoin is MONEY.

Full stop.

If you want to store irrelevant data in YOUR database, send us your email and we’ll send you some trash.

Your desire of what Bitcoin should be conflicts with the reality of information theory. So no, there is no "full stop" - you can't stop information from being encoded and published.

True, go play with shitcoins then.

Bitcoin is for monetary transactions, not for VC scams.

Your desire of who should be able to use the system conflicts with the reality of its censorship resistance.

Have you noticed that you talk a lot but say nothing? If you go back and read what you write, you'll realize you're a shitcoiner, you just won't admit it. In short, your incentives are all wrong.

As for more of your nonsense: That's where you're wrong. Everyone can use bitcoin, even scammers like you.

" We are NOT here for number-go-up. We are NOT here for cool tech. We are here for economic freedom. We are NOT here for an expensive, inefficient, glorified database. We are here to change the world, and we only have one shot at this.

This could be a great opportunity to self-reflect, but it's clear you missed it. "

Used to think this oke was a decent actor…turns out he’s a bit of a poes

you can't replace the legacy financial system without replacing legacy financial instruments. it's impossible to do that without offchain smart contracts. this is also going to enable people to create pointless tokens and other things. there's nothing you can do about that. better start getting over it soon. pigeonholing all of defi into the "shitcoins" designation proves your ignorance.

there's nothing wrong with having a smart contracts ZK rollup on top of bitcoin. it's a good offchain scaling solution and it's the best way to keep useless tokens and NFTs out of the base layer. rollups are the most popular offchain scaling solution in the world right now and people even use them to make simple payments.

- do whatever you want in L2

- DEFI is a scam, you will learn it soon or later

- again, do whatever you want in L2, leave L1 without shitcoins and scams

SRSLY? Have you considered possibility of applying the theory mistakenly?

No one is saying you can 100% prevent spam.

Acting like anything short of perfect filtering is a failure is incredibly disingenuous. And you wonder why people say you’re a bad faith actor.

No you can’t stop it. But you can inconvenience and make it not worth it. We saw a slow down on inscriptions and now suddenly core devs want to remove a filter for them. Censoring opposition to it on github. The op_return limit is clearly working to proving otherwise. So why make a change unless its to stop that filtering

Bitcoin is "uncensorable" money.

There, fixed it for you.

JPGs with monkeys are money? Maybe for you, they are.

You're forgetting the original prompt: "Explain OP_RETURN like I'm 5."

If you understand how money works specifically how it can be used to centralize and monopolize industries—then the implications are pretty obvious. You don't need to be a core developer to have an informed opinion on something that's actually quite simple.

You just described technocracy and want to apply that to Bitcoin. Let’s never allow that to happen.

Let's not make anti-intellectualism happen either. When hard working developers with deep understanding are villified, it bodes ill for bitcoin.

No, you decided that was what I said.

I just said I'm surprised by how angry and aggressive people who don't fully understand a topic get and said that I think devs would be better off if they didn't pay attention.

I partially agree. In the sense that you are right when you say that non-technicals should not put a beak on complex topics. But it is also true that even if you are not a developer this does not mean that you have not studied the topic and have not understood it. In this case, even if you are not an insider, you can very well have your say. Bitcoin is for everyone, it's not just for developers

I agree with your point that it's for anyone. My point wasn't that Bitcoin isn't for everyone. It obviously is.

My point was that dev's shouldn't let themselves be held hostage by people who are vociferously spouting religious arguments.

Of course 👍

Do not overestimate the level of intelligence given by knowledge. Knowing things doesn't mean ability to intelligently put them together. In the last years there is too much talk about experts and most of the time those experts prediction are totally wrong

You don't go out much, do you... 😂

While I absolutely agree with you, honestly this part was funny to me

> it's not like people go around getting pissy with brain surgeons about the merits of a new procedure, or start yelling at particle physicists about the proper way to aim a neutrino...

we must not know the same people haha

Don't barricade yourself in an ivory tower, or you'll soon find yourself outside the door one day.

So Luke is not a dev and has no knowledge of Bircoin?

He did get his own bitcoin hacked which is worse than most hodlers have ever done 🤷‍♂️

false equivalence + straw-man.

Wrong. He uses Gentoo linux & doesn't believe in hardware signers. He doesn't understand tradeoffs & got materially screwed by his choices.

It's completely relevant.

false equivalence + straw-man.

Soneone doesn't understand the ***tradeoff*** of saturating their arguments as "false equivalence"

I wouldn't use your 1-man fork either.

And you can keep being gay

Trust the science bro

I agree. I’m a non technical human so I shut the fuck up about this this topic. Ignore the noise. Keep building. 🗽

The analogy regarding brain surgeons and particle physicists doesn’t quite fit. The difference in this case is that bitcoin has direct stakeholders, so while you can certainly ignore the stakeholders because they don’t/cant/wont do this/that, you can’t expect for the stakeholders to ignore you.

My point is that the stakeholder's opinions don't count for anything if they are not grounded in reality. It'd be like people yelling that the sky is yellow. Should we take them seriously and give them time? No, we shouldn't.

🤝 POV and opinions grounded in reality are important for productive dialogue. I see very unhelpful tit for tat drowning out the sensible conversations around this.

💯

This is thanks to this mindset that we have representative “democracy”

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Yea devs def need other newer perspectives.. critically

Horrible take

If they are in line to get that new procedure they will be getting “pissy” with the brain surgeon

This has the same energy as “the experts” telling us to take the “safe” and “effective” covid vaccine

What is surprising about stakeholders in a network making their opinions known about a controversial PR? It would be weird if they didn’t

You sound like you have never been involved in society or are oblivious to politics. People will get loud about changes that affect them whether they are “experts” or not.

Garbage level taken here.

Yes. Trust the experts and let yourself be ruled, peasant. Trust the science and take the jab. That attitude is antithetical to the Bitcoin ethos. We, who run the nodes, don't have enough proof-of-work? When the decentralization and at-home scale mining comes in full force (thanks to BitAxe and such) the argument will change to scale of mining. The goal post will always keep moving to try and form a small and centralized sphere of influence.

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Terrible analogy. If a neurosurgeon proposes performing a surgery on me that will leave me worse off than I was before, I don't need to understand the technical details of the surgery to know I don't want it.

The analogy says that you don’t have the knowledge for determining whether the brain surgery they want to perform on you is good or bad for you.

So basically.. trust us, we verify?

Idk. If you don’t have the knowledge, do you have a better option?

Bitcoin (code) grew from transparency.. miners (I.e asic boost) don’t got da same track record. 8 years later and now the same miners have become or funded new devs. If gatekeeping is the default, do you have many choices?

Bad take. Essentially saying only people who can code understand from economics ...

There are many stake holders in Bitcoin - hodlers, noder runners, miners, developers ...

Also huge number of technical people are raising the issue, which lets be honest is an attack on Bitcoin.

Again. Open discussion and intellectually honest questions welcome. Temper tantrums aren’t helpful for anyone.

Exactly.

This seems fair... Although, there probably is a difference between a surgical procedure and the political nature of working on software meant to be the global monetary system. Just as people have political opinions on government affairs. The opposite is an administrative state, and those are always abusive. The only opinions that literally matter for a surgery is the physician and patient. A bit different.

What individual devs pay attention to is their own choice. I agree with that. But expecting people to not have nontechnical opinions is ridiculous for something like Bitcoin because the thing isn't just technical.

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I USING CAPS BECAUSE IM YELLING THAT ANYTIME PEOPLE TRY TO CENSOR THINGS, THEY ARE 99.9999% OF THE TIME, THE ONES HIDING SOMETHING.

I DO NOT NEED TO BE BTC BRAIN SURGEON TO KNOW THIS.

Hmm I dunno, everyone these days goes on like they’re a medical expert, especially where something like vaccines are concerned.

To err is human.

So is to have uninformed opinions on everything and share them on the internet.

Your argument rests on a false assumption. The op_return war has profound implications beyond the technical. The technical in Bitcoin is inextricably linked with the economic. These technical “experts” are often ignorant about knock on effects of their changes. It’s important these effects are highlighted because everything in society is downstream of money, and bitcoin is money

This seems short sighted. Im absolutely sure that there are many in the community that could add great value in some of these discussions.

Im confident though that this opinion isn't shared by a majority.

Yeah and brain surgeons should also ignore feedback on their work 🤡

"You can't weigh in unless you understand the technical argument. "

Proof of work shouldn’t just be for mining blocks….it should be the entry fee for serious conversation too

Pushups?

🫏 🧢

You want a short example of a not so technical issue ? that concern every bitcoiners ?

external pressure on devs.

I remind you this is a part of bitcoin purpose to stay independent from any pressure. this is possible because of 3 entities : nodes, miners, devs.

Miners are many, nodes are many, devs are few.

it is a weakness.

they can be attack, anyway possible, physically, financially, fake news to push a part of them out of the project. GIThub which is microsoft or other google mail are used. So it is easy to control code or "private email exchange" by these company. What would you do if tomorrow git close the repos for a shitty reason ?

It is a serious security issue here.

And why ?

Because everyone know their name, their email, their company, their job.

They are not anonymous anymore, pressure and attacks are easier.

miners are discreet, nodes owner are anonymous.

But most of devs are not.

So if you think this is only a technical problem, try to solve this with a only technical speech.

And this drama have put some light on this too.

All this noise is not useless. even if sometimes it can be boring.

And to end, for a real technical issue, it should be on git.

why does it come here publicly ?

because the answer didn't fit the question (just a simple ban close it).

And why would they fit it more outside git ?

It is not a question of noise here, if the answers was clear enough it would had stayed on git.

Now it is outside because it is a different vision and 2 sides that are fighting with everyone watching.

So each camp argue to grab more support.

If all devs (i really mean all) would stay with intellectual honesty they would have listed each problem and each solutions and pro/cons, and take a decision between devs. But the different vision means what you really want to have on the blockchain, and the decision also concern miners and nodes, not only technical devs.

Without the ban it would have stayed in one place, git.

Instead content are on youtube, post on X, notes here, and we lost interesting answers in the noise.

So it is easy to say every watcher here, just watch and shut up.

If the subject is here, it is because they have been a previous failed by "devs" (i'm not targeting one but all).

IMO the only way to stop the fire is to be clear, on one place.

Listing questions and solutions and who are pro or cons and why.

somethings like this (but for each concern) :

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and you put link on post/notes/videos targeting it, while updating with new Q/A.

One place, more clear, less noise.

If this is true and bitcoin is too complex for the layman node runner to grasp and they should just blindly push all core updates through then we have fallen.

Failed experiment.

To be clear I don’t believe it’s too complex for a non-technical individual node runner to have an opinion.

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AI Education

I'm starting to feel Roger Ver and a point when he claimed Core had highjacked Bitcoin...

Luckily nobody is forced to upgrade to the latest "monkey jpg compatible" version of core, and that we have nostr:nprofile1qqs0m40g76hqmwqhhc9hrk3qfxxpsp5k3k9xgk24nsjf7v305u6xffcpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgtcwc656e to remove the crap with the #bitcoinKnots implementation.

In the end, it's the nodes that make up the network that determine what bitcoin is or isn't, or have you forgotten about the UASF already?🤔