I believe talent should be rewarded and we cant rely on altruism to secure such an important project. Although I can see bad incentives with "employed" devs but that's not the only way to pay them.
I'm not convinced the data limit will have a real impact on spam, but regardless I don't see full blocks making it more expensive to run a node. Many believe we need consistent full blocks at some point to secure the network anyway.
This response got way too long, so I apologize in advance. Generally, I see where you are coming from, and I am happy to change my opinions on this, but this is where I’m at right now:
The way I see it, the important project is secured by the value that the network provides to its developers. Put another way, if you believe in Bitcoin, you buy some bitcoin. If you believe in it enough to contribute to the codebase, you are just protecting your investment. What stronger incentive could there be besides securing your savings account? The incentives are already aligned, why mess with them? By funding developers, corporate entities, sovereigns, and bad actors could influence what gets merged in Core.
I do concede that in a free market, entities can pay developers to contribute and there may be nothing I can do about it. But I am still against it, and I think Bitcoin is better off if developers do not accept money from outside influences. I also could be wrong about my opinion - maybe we should reward the developers we think do a good job. In fact, I like zapping devs on nostr when I can. I also think that maybe I’m thinking too far ahead and too cautiously - maybe I should wait to steer the ship once I get a better view of the incoming iceberg.
I suppose what puts a bad taste in my mouth is what I see happening with things like lobbying - corporate entities influencing legislation for their own profit, at the expense of the people, and I don’t want that to happen to Bitcoin. As I’m sure you know, there are many perverted incentives in society today that I would like to stop (e.g. 70% of FDA funds come from pharmaceutical companies), but I have limited power in such cases.
As for spam on chain, I also hope that whatever happens doesn’t increase spam 🙏🏼. But I may differ in opinion in few ways. Here are my thoughts:
1. I suppose I could do the math to get a better idea of the exact impact, but generally, the larger the blockchain grows in size, the more expensive it becomes to run a node. If the rate of growth of the blockchain outpaces the deflationary effects of Moore’s Law on storing the blockchain, then it becomes relatively more expensive to run and removes potential nodes from running.
2. I don’t think that blocks need to be full necessarily in order to secure the network. True, mining becomes more profitable with higher fees, but we should incentivize miners to focus on finding cheap energy, not making less efficient miners profitable.
3. Spam raises the bid to get transactions in a block and therefore increases fees. Unnecessarily higher fees deters users from making cash transactions and drives them to more centralized alternatives.
> By funding developers, corporate entities, sovereigns, and bad actors could influence what gets merged in Core.
Sounds like Saylor's message. It presumes that perpetually employed people will looks for things to do and propose changes that aren't needed. But this leaves out the multitude of non consensus work that is done to improve security, efficiency, privacy, etc. If you believe those things are important, you might want the most talented people to do that work. You attract talent by compensating it directly. I know there are veterans who have worked on bitcoin for a long time who have lots of bitcoin, but there are often events that have a chilling effect on developers or they get burned out. So we need fresh talent to build on the shoulders of giants. These folks probably aren't millionaires.
> I suppose what puts a bad taste in my mouth is what I see happening with things like lobbying - corporate entities influencing legislation for their own profit, at the expense of the people
A fair concern that I share. But the UASF gave me confidence that as a node runner, no one can put a gun to my head to run code I don't agree with.
> the larger the blockchain grows in size, the more expensive it becomes to run a node
I believe the argument here is that shifting arbitrary data from witness info (inscriptions) to op_return (removing the data carrier size filter) removes the witness discount, making them pay more but it also has the potential to reduce the size of blocks that have a lot of that data. The largest block contained an inscription ~3.95 mb. The largest block with only op_return data would be 1mb.
> I don’t think that blocks need to be full necessarily in order to secure the network. True, mining becomes more profitable with higher fees, but we should incentivize miners to focus on finding cheap energy, not making less efficient miners profitable.
Eventually the subsidy will be gone and energy can only get so much cheaper. Even energy with negligible operating cost has a large upfront cost which needs to be recouped. I don't see another way to incentivize miners besides transaction fees.
> Spam raises the bid to get transactions in a block and therefore increases fees.
The current spam in mempools is largely <1 sat/vbyte, but I see your point.
