I don't understand

"Bitcoin Core typically has around 100–200 active contributors per year, with dozens contributing regularly each month. Over the project’s lifetime, more than 800 individuals have contributed code to the Bitcoin Core repository"

If the above is close to reality then it is beyond me how those calling for decentralization of bitcoin support and use Bitcoin Knots that is maintained and worked on by 1 Developer!!!

Absolutely crazy and against all things bitcoin in my opinion 🤣

Imagine an app that zapped you 1 sat for every single step you walked

Something Big is Happening

#bitcoin

You Are Not Facebook

I think relays will fail every time they try to do any notes filtration beyond blocking straight out spams/bots and notes with invalid signature

Also any DVM like solutions that might achieve some progress will fail

Every time I first explained NOSTR to someone in IT they come up with the same fuds like:

Big (with higher tone B) platforms have cables running under the ocean between continent, Data centers on every region and sub-region for faster delivery, etc...

my point against that is the same point I have against DVM like solutions, that is, you can't compete with an army of departments full of seniors, unlimited resources and literally a bunch of universities being used as their labs, you have to do stuff differently and in a cheaper, cheaper is the sexiest part for any NOSTR project.

the point is maybe we just need bare notes filtration/curation on the fly done in the client, lets say a client fetches 1000 bare notes and filters them based on several factors like the linguistical characteristics, sentiment, topics, entities or others, I mean there is a ton of factors to play with from notes content and pubkey only and a ton of open source libraries to deal with such problems, and that's very NOSTR like where the algo is semi agnostic

an extra work based on engagements (zaps, replies, etc.... counts) might be carried out on notes that passed the first filter and that's another huge field to play with.

I'm currently playing with such model on my local client and its not bad at all

to summarize maybe all we is just need some nip51 enhancements or maybe a new encrypted version of that for privacy, forget about your social graphs it centralize on big node by design and we are not Facebook and it scares normies

That's just one type of spam, it's always been possible to record data in different ways and some of those are more damaging to the network than others.

Yes the p2tr method blew up and drove fees higher for awhile, but the hype has died because it holds very little value. Removing op_return filters might cause another surge, but it will die too because storing jpegs on the Blockchain is a stupid use case. It's still consensus valid though, and I want my node to be aligned with consensus even if I find how other people use it distasteful. That's just the nature of a permissionless network, people will use it in ways you don't like.

Now if anyone wants to talk about changing consensus to prevent these uses, then I would be willing to listen and even fight for it, but no one seems to want to do that right now. This is the consensus we are stuck with for better or worse. People wil find ways to achieve their goals of data storage no matter what the nodes try to filter, so we might as well channel it into the least damaging method.

There may even be some data storage use cases that enhance scaling and increase the value of the monetary use case of Bitcoin, but even if not the monetary use case of Bitcoin is by far the most valuable and will outcompete spam in the long run. I just don't think there's anything to be afraid of from the spammers. Let the fee markets decide what is the best use of blockspace. Trying to get nodes to collectively control the blockchain is some statist-type regulatory bullshit that gets in the way of the free market.

I don’t know why I bought an umbrel server, I never use it. If you are considering buying one, don’t.

Dude. How much talking are you going to do on this subject? Truly, no one cares. BTC will go on being "digital gold" and not Peer to Peer Electronic Cash. It was hijacked back then and many bought in.

Fool me once, shame on you. Don't get fooled again, if you do, then shame on you.

And we wonder why the new user retention on #nostr is so low 🤪😅😂

#bitcoin #memes

If they wanna change it for the normies, DON’T.

No normie wants a #bitcoin worth fractions of cents of a dollar 😝

LONG LIVE #SATS 🤙⚡️

#satsStandard #bitcoin #memes

Clarification of my thoughts and a brief explanation of how I get to where I am currently for anyone interested:

Miners and nodes were originally pretty much the same thing.

They aren't now.

What happens when the incentives of miners and the incentives of nodes become misaligned?

Miners want to get revenue from any source imaginable - stuffing spam into blocks is potentially lucrative.

Nodes of course do not have any immediate incentive to relay this stuff and certainly don't benefit from storing it or competing with it and paying higher transaction fees as a result.

The theme coming from

@darosior

is that Core must do what is incentive compatible for *miners* - i.e pay attention to what it is spammers want to store in the chain and quickly or preemptively adapt Bitcoin Core as quickly as possible to relay this to prevent any large miner soliciting it out-of-band and developing a competitive edge against miners who are "stuck" with the transactions being relayed around the network.

His concern compounds with the idea that if Core fails to do this, it will be unadopted and lose market share to an implementation that does.

However we have seen significant migration away from Core, for perhaps the first time ever, to Knots, which takes a different approach - it concerns itself with the incentives of people running those nodes who, as mentioned, do not wish to be relaying junk data around the network and storing it for free.

So if we are concerning ourselves with the incentive compatibility of Bitcoin Core, why is the incentive the actual users of that software to not participate in spam not a part of the discussion when it is so clearly relevant? Knots has jumped to about 10% of the listening nodes over the course of May from less than 2% before that.

This, I believe, is where the rift between Core and those angry with Core formed because Core's response to this is generally to say that nodes are being short-sighted. Their desire to reject spam is going to undermine more subtle things in the longer term. This was expressed initially in a crude and insulting manner which further deepened the rift but - no matter how much we might want to dismiss them as genius devs somehow missing the forest for the tress - are they correct?

More simply - are nodes doing themselves a disservice by opting out of the relaying of spam in the hopes that at the very least, they aren't participating in the hypershitcoinization of Bitcoin?

How bad are the tradeoffs for nodes if they do this?

1. If Core is "incentive incompatible" (at least with regard to miners/spammers who both clearly want to use Bitcoin to store non-Bitcoin stuff) is there going to be un-adoption of Core?

So far the only un-adoption we have seen is a (from my perspective) a few thousand nodes switching from Core to Knots - this isn't really fakeable like some suggest with AWS because you'd have need to have spun up Core nodes far in advance of this battle in order to send this signal by having them switch.

The "incentive compatible" alternative is Libre Relay - this of course does the opposite of what Knots and its updated filters permit - it preferentially peers with fellow trash-enjoying nodes in what is (to my mind) a misguided effort to fight what they call censorship. Of course I fundamentally believe that censorship resistance doesn't come in the shape of nodes relaying what is against their own interest.

Libre Relay is nowhere near as widely adopted as Knots. So Core, if wanting to maintain marketshare must take more into consideration what has actually happened to Core as a result of its incentive incompatible design (from the perspective of *nodes* rather than *miners*).

They must convince us that Knots users are making a mistake in philosophy, not just more immediate concerns around practicalities and risks of running something that isn't Core. Those are valid of course but let's assume Core and Knots are of equivalent standard and reliability and just focus on differences in approach and design philosophy here as its what is relevant to this discussion.

2. If we filter spam, fee estimation will get worse.

It can get better actually, assuming there is one decently sized miner on the network respecting those filters. There is of course - most of the DATUM miners on OCEAN use Knots with fairly close to default policy so this can prevent you from *overpaying* fees.

The worsening of fee estimation in the other context - accidentally underpaying because there's so much unconfirmed spam that you just aren't aware of - is much easier to correct for. Simple RBF will suffice.

I don't think it's anything anyone can really care about due to the unpredictable nature of the blockchain anyway. You have no idea if you'll be in the next block or not. The extent to which you do is the extent to which we "know" what *should* be in the next block which is basically just an artifact of centralization and a mistaken celebration of that fact.

You don't know who will find the next block, what will be in it, how long it will take, or how many other people are going to jump in "the" queue after you broadcast your transaction. Core's heuristic around fees work well without knowledge of other people's mempools, this is by design. Thus, I have widely asserted that concerns around fee estimation are nonsense with the above reasoning and I have yet to have anyone dunk on me with some superior understanding.

3. Block Propagation will be slower if we filter spam. Mining will centralize in general.

Slower block propagation sucks for small miners trying to be part of the big club as Antoine points out. The big boys will have a private intra-relay network - a walled garden in which you must belong to not be at a disadvantage with necessarily slower verification times.

Firstly - if you filter something that still generally makes its way around the network, you'll cache it and your verification speed will be just as quick as if you didn't filter so this is a non-argument. I genuinely think most people, including Core devs are just unaware of `blockreconstructionextratxn` so they believe there to be an issue that there just isn't.

But what if the filters are so effective that the private club has to solicit this stuff out-of-band and it never existed in the first place to the filtering nodes?

Then I say we are screwed. These miners control the blockchain at that point. We have concerns orders of magnitude more significant. They can reorg the chain, make double spends and generally wreak havoc. The fact that they haven't is not something we can rely on hence the need to actually decentralize mining not just screw around and make a gesture of concern in relaxing spam filters in the hopes that it doesn't get slightly worse.

We are at this point already so I have no idea why we are discussing inconsequential factors such as spam mitigation vs enthusiastic relaying as though it has any relevance here. Foundry can already 51% attack the network.

---------

This is roughly how I end up at my position - being a vocal advocate for putting the incentives of those running nodes over anyone else in the ecosystem. I do not consider spammers to be "Bitcoiners" but even I did, their needs would be always placed further down the food chain than those of nodes. Just as they were with those who wanted huge blocks for permanently cheap transactions.

The rate at which I am having to revise and reevaluate my position has rapidly decreased compared to a few weeks ago where admittedly I was making far more technical inaccuracies than now.

Everything I read from Greg Maxwell or other long standing and respected developers in the space goes along familiar lines at this point and fails to justify this new, laissez-faire approach to spam attacks that carries a heavy burden of proof versus adhering (as Knots does) to Bitcoin's historical precedent where folks none other than Greg himself would propose extreme counter measures to spam should some new protocol for shitcoining-on-bitcoin suddenly hit escape velocity and start creating a genuine problem for Bitcoin nodes.

I did? Personal mempool rules (filters) do nothing to stop miners from adding whatever txs they want up until the block limit because they mine them.

It's not spam as they pay for more blockspace. Higher fees will be welcomed by smaller/solo miners, also everyone working on L2s/L3s.

I wonder if that's a good thing, what do you say?

Nothing said in the video contradicts what he said - miners can also choose whatever node implementation they like to communicate with and if the mine a block, their node gets to decide on the filters.

This block then becomes part of the chain and every filtering node out there has to store it and accept it as valid, regardless of what the owner believes is spam.

When a miner starts making their own blocks with DATUM