Me: The miners shouldn't mine spam
Them: Um, the miners obviously want the fees, they will follow their incentive
Me: The farmer shouldn't cut up the goose that lays the golden eggs
Them: Um, the farmer wants the golden eggs, he will follow his incentive
Same energy
They learned nothing about miners from the block size war
This goose metaphor is a steelman for why the block size limit shouldn't be increased, it doesn't support the conclusion that miners should censor Bitcoin transactions.
Bigger block sizes and spam
Two things that hurt miners in the long term but feel good for them in the short term
You know what else feels good short term? Cutting up the goose to get the golden egg a few hours early
Censorship hurts miners in both the short term and the long term.
If there are transactions that actually harm the network (such as those causing excessively long block validation times), those must be made invalid with a soft fork.
> If there are transactions that actually harm the network
Spam harms the network
Then why don't you fork the network to stop the harm?... People seem to be very confused and running Bitcoin Knots instead of Bitcoin Purifier, which actually enforces the censorship they intend - https://github.com/rot13maxi/bitcoin-purifier
bitcoin purifier would kick me off of bitcoin, harming me even more than the spam does
Not if your fork had 51% of the hashpower, the Bitcoin Pure chain would reorg the Bitcoin Core chain.
Some of the knotsis might be amenable to that but so far they only control 8.7% of the network
Let's see if that number continues to grow and then I'd like to more seriously propose reducing datacarrier limits at the consensus level
Me: everything besides my personal transactions is spam, don't care what is in the block, all looks the same to me, gimme the fees and I'll mine it AND store it on my bitchy small full node SSD.
Them: F They
what they definitely should not do is accept out of band txs.
- Spam-filled blocks lead to spam-filled nodes
- Spam-filled nodes aren't worth syncing
- Fewer node syncers leads to fewer node runners
- A network with few node runners is centralized
- A centralized cryptocurrency isn't worth using
- An unused cryptocurrency isn't worth mining
This line of argument misses the crucial point I made in this note:
which is that there is a huge difference between legislating *how much* resources are used by a particular behavior and legislating what they are used *for*. We have no choice but to, painfully, do the former, but not the latter. The latter is just ethically wrong considering bitcoin's permissionless ethos.
Why does permissionless makes it ethically wrong to discourage behavior X? Just because someone *can* do X does not mean X is good. If I think X is a bad choice then it seems perfectly fine for me to discourage it.
True, discourage is not "ethically unacceptable", that's going too far. But I think it's unwise. I am not going to try to assess whether every hash embedded in the chain is a "good or wise" usage of bitcoin transactions.
Yes and that is your choice. It would not be censorship if some of us do.
If the conversation is *only* about filtering at p2p level in your node: then it creates centralization pressure, and screws up your fee estimation, screws up compact blocks ... for zero benefit.
If it is *not* only for mempool filtering but a first step towards changing consensus, then it is advocating for something unethical.
> for zero benefit
I dispute this. When most users censor spam in their mempools, it pushes up the cost of getting spam mined. I think that reduces incidence of spam to an appreciable degree. This is a benefit and it comes with additional benefits, like reducing the centralization pressure spoken of in my slippery-slope post ("Spam-filled blocks lead to...a network [that]...is centralized.")
I want to weigh my proposed upsides against your proposed downsides, not just ignore them. Do my upsides outweigh the centralization pressure you speak of? I think so. At least up til now, it seems like the centralization pressure created by private mempool usage so far is marginal. The extra income accrued by those miners is tiny compared to their "regular" income. But the costs imposed on spammers is relatively massive: their costs double or sometimes even triple.
Similar considerations apply to fee estimation: very few fee estimation tools "only" look at what's in your mempool, and so far no one has complained that they couldn't get their transaction mined. If it eventually gets to that point I would support removing the filters but I see no evidence that it is a serious risk.
I am not familiar with your point about compact blocks. Can you elaborate or link to somewhere this point has been discussed at greater length?
I think the extra fees incurred, sure, exist, but it doesn't make sense that the difference would be significant, persistently. Why would a miner not just mine txs that are more profitable? It's not exactly hard to directly receive them on any public message channel, if not by direct bitcoin p2p gossip. It's not a meaningful friction.
Compact blocks are afaiu simply a caching mechanism; if you already have all the txs, you can verify a smaller version of the block, which points to txs you already have.
(Bip is 152.)
If you're locally filtering out likely-to-be-mined txs, that doesn't work, at least not as well.
nostr:nprofile1qqsgdp0taan9xwxadyc79nxl8svanu895yr8eyv0ytnss8p9tru047qpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduq3samnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3wwdc8ymmkdahhxapwdekqzrthwden5te0dehhxtnvdakqm9jn0c was explaining this on his podcast, I don't usually think about these things ... but it's an illustration of the general point, that a "my preference" kind of mempool is just damaging what the purpose of a mempool even is. Imo.
> it doesn't make sense that the difference would be significant, persistently. Why would a miner not just mine txs that are more profitable?
For the same reasons I gave above: mining spam harms the goose in the long term, and some miners want the goose to stay healthy so that it keeps producing golden eggs. True, some are more interested in short term profits and do not really think about the long term effects. But I prefer to remedy this through education and persuasion.
Are you asking miners to decide what is and isn't a valid bitcoin use case, outside of consensus? I don't think you should do that.
> Are you asking miners to decide what is and isn't a valid bitcoin use case, outside of consensus?
Yes, in this sense:
I think consensus rules and mempool filtering rules both restrict what bitcoin can be used for. The former creates absolute restrictions while the latter just imposes additional costs on those who bypass the filters. Both are useful, but both types of rules only make sense with some sort of consensus on what the blockchain is actually for. It's clearly not a place for invalid transactions; they are absolutely prohibited.
Spam is only "lightly" restricted (i.e. by mempool filters). It consists of data whose meaning is not yet defined at the protocol level, and it seems useful to retain the validity of such data because some of it might "get" a defined meaning within the protocol later. But using it now, without a meaning understood by bitcoin nodes, is an abuse of the system, in my opinion. And I welcome miners to vmbe part of the conversation about that, both to set stricter policies, and, if necessary, to turn some of them into consensus rules.
"...like reducing the centralization pressure spoken of in my slippery-slope post"
to what post is this referring to? where can i read this?
its extremely difficult, basically impossible
to decide policy by ethics in a community that is not homogeneous.
Fair point. I think permissionlessness is right up there with 21 million imo. Without it bitcoin is worthless.
"All the trust required to make it work..."
(Of course if you thought that at a protocol, algorithmic level, you could prevent non-financial usage, this argument wouldn't apply; bitcoin would remain permissionless in the way that matters. But imo this perspective is not just technically wrong, but incoherent)
An anti-spam ship for a Freedom Bitcoin.
