Privacy definitely. Censoring transactions no.
Discussion
Protecting the chain from spam is not censorship. If you think so, you are falling for the narrative of the shitcoiners.
Core developers want Bitcoin to be the new Ethereum.
On the other hand, the two issues are linked, as core developers are more concerned with on-chain drawings than privacy.
What is spam? Who decides? If some cock wants to pay a miner a million sat fee to put a jpeg on the block chain, is that spam? It's subjective. Personally I don't want that but who am I to stop a miner making money. The protocol still works. Unfortunately if people don't use Bitcoin the mempool is going to be empty anyway
i'm so tired of the same arguments from both sides.
filtering spam is perfectly fine unless it has net negative effects. and in this case it has. it's also true that spam is completely subjective, yet somehow we "all" recognize it when we see it.
we had a window of opportunity very early on into the ordinals/inscription craze to act decisively. not with policy but with a consensus change. that's long gone, it only lasted for a few weeks. the entire world learned that core is impotent and maxis are impotent when it comes to fighting parasitic affinity scam shitcoin protocols.
What’s the net negative from filtering?
direct submission / centralized mempool alternative schemes gaining traction. i told people what i think about this when the noise was about baremultisig.
tldr if you disable spam vectors in consensus that is perfectly incentive compatible, and has no negative effects on miner decentralization. it just going to cause disproportionate collateral damage to bitcoin's utility as programmable money compared to how much it would hinder scammers.
in some cases it's perfectly fine, in others it's foolish.
That’s not a result of filtering. If it was, it would mean that filters work as intended, and that’s a tough pill to swallow for the other side. The real reason is mining centralisation which is by no stretch of the imagination the fault of filters, and node runners shouldn’t be punished for it by twisting their arm when deciding on their relay policy.
boring ass pedantic arguments don't change the fact that doing anything that incentivizes direct submission is a horrible idea and will harm bitcoin. you simply do not do that as a responsible developer.
A distorted system *itself* creates incentives for rational actors to destroy long-term value. You either try to fix the system to prevent such behaviour, or see it crumble under its own weight. The only question is when, not if. I think we have enough evidence for such systems in the real world to know that I’m not wrong.
to fix the incentive misalignment you need to make spam consensus invalid. then there is no problem.
one example is baremultisig which nobody uses for non-spam purposes. so making creating new such outputs (not spending them) invalid by consensus would be perfectly fine.
To fix the incentive misalignment you need to reduce mining centralisation.
Your nuclear solution will probably work once until a new data scheme finds a way around your change, if not earlier, provided that you need at least 6 months of preparation and farming consensus for the activation.
it's no coincidence that we are where we are.
The fee market competion for transaction finality will be the best, most neutral, longterm uncorruptible filter.
Standardness filters set by a group or groups (even honest, well meaning humans) can be influenced/corrupted.
+
Where is the line? Who decides on the parameters of the filters? Protecting bitcoin by being really really smart about filters is not a neutral sustainable approach.
Non financial uses will be priced out or they will compete - long term - and be able to afford the fees because they provide real sustainable value
The Monkey JPEGers and most (all?) non-money data storage bros will run out of cash. I will out work them and will out bid them in the fee market.
🌍🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
Individual node runners decide on the parameters of the filters. They bear the cost of running and maintaining their machines at no compensation, so they should have the final word on what to filter and what to relay. The “fee market competition” is showing that so far spam is outcompeting monetary transactions by overwhelming majority.
Individual node runners will seek guidance by those with tech expertise + motivation to set filters.
Should I dial it to 80 bytes or 83? How about 90? IDK *let me ask around*
Point is that this type of *filtering* on a long-time horizon can be corrupted/influenced, especially when compared to the level playing-field offered by a neutral agnostic fee market.
Yes and all of these arguments are still *very* weak justifications for removing the configurability of the filters or blowing them out completely. The “neutral agnostic fee market” only works well in a non-distorted system, that unfortunately has gone off the rails thanks to how centralised mining has become.
Anything that is not a monetary settlement / transaction.
"Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer cash system" and not "Bitcoin: a digital photo album"
Also, the blockchain can mine empty blocks, by design. So yeah, counterarguments are based on wanting to earn money on jpgs and co.
Following your logic up to version 25 of Core, we all did censorship. For nearly 14 years our nodes “censored” the same kind of spam that today is referred as “inscriptions”. Only in 2023 this suddenly became “censorship” when Core devs silently redefined the purpose of the datacareier filter so they don’t have to fix it, and practically erase a new “industry” that was created around an exploit of the code. I suspect at this point they were paid or coerced to do it. The damage that has been done to the protocol as a result is evident from the post here. 98% spam txs vs only 2% monetary txs. They basically turned Bitcoin in a crappier version of Ethereum.
Lol. And running knots changes what?
It brings us back to the roots of being a monetary network, not a shitcoin casino.
most definitely not.
If you say so
the only thing that could bring us back to the ideological "roots" if somehow we got rid of all the luddites and custody apologists. most of whom are big fans of knots.
> all the luddites and custody apologists. most of whom are big fans of knots.
Not my experience.
maybe you should poll your knots friends on any scalability related soft fork proposal and check the results.
Reducing spam on chain is one way to scale bitcoin and the pictures above show that pretty well.
This wouldn't be a problem if all those knots retards would just use bitcoin as p2p electronic cash and start transacting and stop ideology larping.
the filter was always wrong in the first place. it was always able to be bypassed. every consensus valid transaction should get confirmed. if you hate inscriptions so much, make them invalid in consensus.
