What's worse is that this position is internally inconsistent. The same folks complaining about empty block also fiercely advocate for self-custodial lightning which reduces on-chain fee rates. How do we expand access to self-custodial bitcoin while SIMULTANEOUSLY driving up fee rates and pricing people out of self custody?
Which is more important? Incentivizing hashrate deployment or incentivizing self-custody.
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
For people who don’t understand how the network works, yes… this can be inconsistent.
But if you are driving economic activity through Bitcoin, no matter the layer, you eventually drive settlement demand because built up imbalances need to be settled for risk management.
That takes A LOT of economic activity to matter though. Which is why I’m actually open to innovation here (especially in the thermodynamic clock / timechain space as it pertains to Nostr), because I don’t think monetary purism will get us a robust system. People need to be more open about what is “Bitcoin driven economic activity” outside of purely currency IMO. That’s where this discussion can go off the rails though.
You ignore the risk that increased fees pose to self-custody. If it takes car money to get your transactions mined no one will self-custody.
Most individual people won’t self custody (most already are not). It’s somewhat tragic, but denying that reality doesn’t steer towards practical solutions either.
So we need to build up systems where enough distributed entities have the “fuck you” power of self-custody / on chain movement. These distributed entities being incentivized to earn the capital of individual users is how we might realistically have a shot at more freedom at scale.
Merchants being a significant portion of these distributed entities seems like the right idea here instead of nation states IMO.
But I am talking my own book here. Home mining movement (particularly Datum) is also awesome, and another important piece of the balance.
Agreed, except I think you're missing a piece of the puzzle. Small pools will play a key role. Nobody seems to believe it's possible. Demand is apparent. All we need is good software. And someone to fund it... đź‘€
I am most bearish on the last point. I don't see anything that gives me hope.
What advantage/s do small pools have over larger ones?
You can trust the pool operator who shakes your hand. Not so with a large pool.
If you use ehash you can profit by selling your hashrate on the free market. You can also stack sats privately from anywhere in the world by buying ehash.
I believe there are even more amazing privacy tools in the coinbase. Imagine if every block included an untraceable and invisible coinjoin for 3.125 btc. Imagine you could earn a piece of those fees by pointing your water heater at a cypherpunk privacy pool.
The only way to defeat large pools is to out-compete them. They are non competitive on privacy. This is their weak point. Strike at the weak point. This is how we win.
I’ve really got to dig in on the emerging mining decentralization initiatives… seems exciting. I see no reason why small pools couldn’t play a role.
> Most individual people won’t self custody
I think you're wrong about this. We are technically capable of scaling onchain throughput to serve every human at reasonable fee rates.
If we fail to achieve this scale it will be due to a failure of social scaling. Wasted too much time on OP_RETURN and defeatist takes while the foxes raided the henhouse.
the fox is already in the henhouse btw
I hope I am wrong about it.
Technically you’re right. But my view of most people and their laziness / lack of technical aptitude is obviously a lot more cynical than yours lol!
Agreed the fox is already in. There’s blood everywhere. I’m pivoting my energy towards another angle of power distribution that I believe is more realistic.
Maybe that’s defeatist. In the meantime I’ll also support the efforts of people who share your view, despite my cynicism (looking into this small pools thing and probably going to contribute hash). If I’m proven wrong, then that’s a good thing.
Wait... I thought the maximum number of yearly transactions is a couple hundred million. How would that meet throughput of everyone?
Increase throughput. There are many possible designs. Some soft forks, some hard forks. I like Lopp's goldiblocks proposal. James O'Bierne talks about $1000 self-sovereign nodes being a perfectly reasonable goal. 1MB blocks are not the answer. That was just a number Satoshi picked with no rationale. Why should we be stuck with it forever?
Lopp sent me this presentation too in another discussion but I don’t understand how this is a robust solution:
nostr:nevent1qqstrmtk0xtd5jymyln660jl032ejs9k5yrv059mkk42dsf6y65yevqp0t4hz
What do you think about on chain fee rate futures? Information from a market like that would be immensely valuable to both miners and merchants
