Not concerned at all. I'd be more worried a government mandate to only use custodial wallets or wallets with a multi-sig where a licensed broker was required to be a key holder
Also look up Liana wallet. Pretty decent vaults, but CTV would definitely improve on that
Those are more extreme, thus harder to mandate. And they don't affect the rest of the bitcoin UTXOs.
- If someone in some dictatorship is forced to use a custodian there, it doesn't affect others, and that guy can leave his country.
- Mandating a multi-sig would force the government to have lots of policies in place to be able to sign (or not) for every spend. A policy nightmare.
Whereas if we have vaults that can be mandated, you risk having siloed UTXOs on the network. It's also much easier to just have some kind of vault where the government gives itself a 72 hours to clawback a spend if they realize you're sending it to a Unacceptable Fringe Opinion Holder.
I see vaults as much more dangerous than what the governments can actually enforce right now with the protocol as it is.
James O'Bierne makes the point that the most dangerous scenario is thus: the state gives all custodial services 72 hrs notice that they must start enforcing tax laws or surveillance or multisig spending conditions. The actual wording is irrelevent. The real attack is that there is not enough on-chain throughput for all custodial service users to exit to self-custody in time.
It's like a fishing trawler dragging a net across the entire seafloor. The sea creatures simply cannot escape in time so most of them get caught in the net.
CTV solves this problem the same way it solves mining pool payouts. Put any number of payouts in a single tiny transaction on-chain. Users can unroll it later, but crucially, they can escape the custodial system on short notice.
Yes, I remember that argument that he made. But I'm not in favor of a consensus to help people who decided to trust their bitcoins with custodial services.
Your argument about self-custodial mining feels much more aligned with the bitcoin spirit.
> I'm not in favor of a consensus to help people who decided to trust their bitcoins with custodial services.
Where do you think new bitcoiners come from? They come from custodial systems. This line of thinking is like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
A consensus change is a very serious thing. Unknown unknowns. I certainly wouldn't support it just to lessen the impact of bad practices.
"It doesn't feel right" is not a technical objection. It has no relevance to the debate.
Oh, we come at this from very different perspectives.
I don't feel that supporting the current protocol consensus needs any argumentation at all.
On the other hand, wanting to change the consensus requires incredibly good and solid arguments which cover all the angles.
#btc #bitcoin #convenants #CTV
That's exactly what I'm doing. I'm not stopping until it's activated. We need CTV to fix mining. We need to fix mining to save bitcoin. That's all there is to it.
But even the current mining pool issue. How big of an issue is it?
It's mostly for mid-range miners, not really the small one, nor the big ones. If a pool defrauded a miner even once (not dispensing the reward), wouldn't that miner simply dump that pool and change to a different one? There are already pools in many different jurisdictions.
Is that issue worth a consensus change?
It's the biggest problem facing bitcoin today. Mining centralization is a systemic risk. The thing about systemic risks is that everyone loves to ignore them right up until it blows up in their face.
How many people were concerned about banking centralization leading up to the 2008 mortgage crisis? Just a couple pipsqueaks on the internet and that weird quant from The Big Short. They were fucking right all along, just nobody gave a shit. And then all of a sudden everybody gave a shit when it blew up and the problem became impossible to ignore.
Mining pools today are like mortgage brokers in 2007. The time to act is now. If you disagree, that's fine. Bitcoin is permissionless. Feel free to fork yourself off the network. We are moving forward with or without you.
This is you right now. Don't be that dog.
Miner centralization (1) and not having to trust a mining pool to dispense the reward (2) are not the same thing.
With all due respect, it seems like I wouldn't be the one forking off the network.
Incorrect. They are one and the same.
If you oppose a soft fork and the majority does not actively reject soft forking blocks then you would be the one forking off of the network.
Fix mining through provisioning greater value for miners .. I guess Satoshi wanted miners to be greedy - not driven by ethics !
💯 throughput becomes a bigger and bigger issue every day!
Each day we get closer to the next emergency where throughput matters.
How would a user actually execute this, assuming CTV was live and they got a 72 hour notice and were paying attention? Curious to hear this described in detail
Essentially we would be transaction batching... think all of us moving together at once hence the we could unroll later while congestion dies down....
Roll up with a preference committed template, move together, unfurl after the delayed settlement period....
It's like we're in a limbo liminal space for a hot second while throughput chills
It could be a hot second or a hot year depending on the scale of the exodus.
To be honest, I don't think this is the strongest argument for CTV. The hard part is not designing something that works, the hard part is getting custodians to adopt it. Can you imagine Coinbase putting significant resources into a system for users to mass exit? The ETFs are legally (and quite exceptionally!) forbidden from offering in-kind redemption. Corporate bitcoin vehicles will just bend the knee. There isn't even a presumption that MSTR holders can ever redeem the bitcoin underpinning that asset.
I expect congestion will eventually motivate custodians to level up to CTV fanouts, unless some disaster happens to precipitate its development.
Good bitcoin custodians might be motivated to build and deploy something. In an emergency they would contact their users and instruct them how to perform a withdrawal transaction. The hard part here will be getting all their users on a non-custodial wallet. It can be done. The lightning community is a shining example of how to build guerilla educational communities. I would start by chatting with D++.
In the coinbase playground I designed the best possible UX for pool withdrawals. It adheres to standard mempool policy rules so you can just broadcast it to the network and you're done. It fits max 319 outputs, carries the minimum accepted fee, and has an anchor output so that anyone can fee bump it. Users don't need to do anything and it will eventually confirm. They have the option to accelerate confirmation and don't need to store any offchain data.
I made this to be a straight-forward upgrade for Ocean payouts. You could modify the design and replace a few of those outputs with more CTV transactions. This lets you build a tree of arbitrary depth and breadth. You'd have to be careful about resource starvation at the deepest leaves of the tree since they will confirm last. You could do something as simple as paying higher fees in transactions closer to the root of the tree. This also lets you stratify your payouts in order of priority. If the user pays a higher fee their money becomes spendable sooner. If they don't pay extra they wait longer.
This is a really ergonomic and simple design because it externalizes the transaction data to the mempool. This is probably fine for most people. It will look like the inscription craze all over again. The mempool will fill up and fees will be persistently high for an extended period. Eventually it will clear.
Custodians should be prepared to back up user unroll transactions and provide them upon request. They probably won't need the backups but it would be negligent to delete this data.
Interestingly, these users will be forced HODLers for the duration of the on-chain congestion. Good. They will learn a valuable lesson and come out of the experience wealthier than they went in.
The ordinals community also crushed it with guerilla education communities. I think there was like a 24/7 discord chat going for a couple weeks right when ordinals first kicked off. They were teaching people how to run a node, sync the ord wallet, and mint jpgs.
In an emergency scenario I would also reach out to those folks for help/advice/visibility. I'm not sure who was leading the charge but I bet Casey could point me in the right direction.
There may be steps we can take to strengthen the argument. https://x.com/btchashpool/status/1929612667578183939
