I am an admittedly non-technical node runner who is technical-curious. Can someone help me understand what will happen if we don't make this change? What impact will doing nothing have on Bitcoin as a monetary network? I see all the back and forth, and I follow it. But when I try to mentally distill it down, I get to, "Well, someone is already doing the unintended thing, so we should make it easier to do the unintended thing over here that "may" be an improvement, or "may" just give them a way to do the unintended thing in a new way. Does doing this solve a serious problem for bitcoin as a distributed ledger and monetary network? I may be missing something (please advise) but this sounds like a philosophical and non technical discussion.
Discussion
Does it solve a serious problem:
In my opinion, no. I think project like those from Citrea want to use app-return to actually be good stewards though and not make toxic UTXOs, but then it just feels like we are relaxing rules to accommodate a single and explicit project. Feels off to me.
What impact will it have:
Quite possibly none at all, but there is a reason to think there could be minor improvement of a bad precedent set that caused more of unwanted activity. Which is why this is all so annoying, we’re trying to predict what people will do.
Seems like a philosophical argument:
In a lot of ways it is, or at least much of the real debate is. There are plenty of people who are making technical arguments, but I think they only make sense from each separate philosophical perspective. And there’s tons of technical argument going on that’s just dumb and not relevant.
Exactly. The arrogance of the core Devs blows my mind. It means they don't see Bitcoin as a purely financial ledger.
Thanks for the response Guy, this helps a lot.
I'll take a look at the Citrea project to understand more on that side. I start from the POV that everyone has good intentions. Up until I understand they don't. I defintely don't like the idea of making changes for a single project.
As to impact, in this case, the fuck around and find out approach may not be best. I tend towards wanting to understand a definite "in case of emergency, break glass" approach. THis infrastructure is too critical to try something only to end up going "oops". And considering how the taproot ended in an oops, I would hope we might learn from that. The other thing that gives me the heebie jeebies is removal of a node operator's ability to choose. I don't care if a dev feels it is not doing much. Then they can choose not to use it. There is no reason to take away my choice on that.
Do we have a technical solution, good. Should we apply the solution? There be dragons.
Again appreciate it. I needed this simplified context.