Nostr Web Client

Here is my normie friendly analogy of the Core V Knots. Situation. Let me know how off I am.

Miners are ultimately incentivized to mine the most expensive transactions. Beyond that, whether they follow laws or moral principles is secondary (and I doubt morals play a big role here).

Storing data in OP_RETURN is costly. If someone pays to put data there → it will be mined.

Here’s how I understand the current debate: imagine email. Right now, people are stuffing messages into the To:, Cc:, and Bcc: fields, because the email body is too small in Bitcoin.

Core’s proposal is like saying: “Let’s expand the body of the email — the most expensive part, but also the part that can be pruned later — from 80 bytes to 100K. That way, if you really want to share a message, put it in the proper body instead of hiding it in the addressing fields.”

But the key is: if you want to use that field, you have to pay the real cost.

That’s the best analogy I can come up with. Does this explain the situation clearly, or am I missing something?

marcan0 3mo ago

Close! But the change is less to make people pay more for their shitty jpegs and more to do with how the mining pools receive the transactions in the first place.

Mempools are designed to broadcast new transactions out across the entire network so anyone who wants to mine can freely grab the highest paying transactions and mine them. This function is fundamental for long term mining decentralization.

If transactions only get sent to one or two parties (mining pools) to get mined, those miners will have a continuous competitive advantage and outcompete all other distributed miners.

To make matters worse, when miners accept transactions directly, they can also get paid under the table. This can make it hard for all bitcoin senders to accurately predict fees needed to get their transaction in the next block (very big problem if you’re running an L2 like lightning).

So this op_return filter (that has been running on 100% of nodes) was getting in the way of the inscription enjoyers. They couldn’t get their large op_return transactions through mempools, so centralizing infrastructure was built by mining pools and people began going direct.

Nobody wants to see JPEGs on chain, but bitcoin falls apart completely if mempools become obsolete. We want all transactions that MIGHT be in a block to be permissionlessly available for the bitaxe miners of the world, L2 operators, and average joes that need their transaction mined quickly.

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