Agree with him. There is an odd obsession around the idea that everyone has to own and use bitcoin at all cost. Why?

Someone paying $389 to move $1.94.

547,000 sats to move 2730 sats.

Why?

Because this has nothing to do with Bitcoin and doesn't make any sense from the network's perspective.

People who take comfort that behaviour will remain predictable thanks to economically rational decision making need to know it goes both ways when you start taking in external factors.

You have to do it with miners too.

If a miner can make more money in ways that have nothing to do with bitcoin then you can no longer rely on simple assumptions like "miners will do X because if they don't then they will make less than a miner who does"

The simple example I've used many times is compliance.

If you have a choice between expensive legal battles and exclusion informed by government blacklists (i.e censorship) then it's economically rational to do what's economically irrational.

"You left $500 in TX fees on the table! Why?"

"Because our lawyers advised us that this would save us several million dollars."

We have a case-study of this exact scenario with Wasabi Wallet.

So if this is true, what does it have to do with spam? From a miner's perspective, spam is simply a free lunch.

What's the downside?

The issue is we've been standing on shaky ground when it comes to the assumptions we've made about the choices of miners. Myself included.

It turns out there are instances when economic rationality works *against* the interests of the wider network. It's obvious, but apparently we're all surprised that this it the case, or straight up in denial about it.

Spam is that exact scenario. Blocks are far larger than was ever supposed to be possible with the introduction of witness-discounted data. We see block after block at what was meant to be a theoretical maximum of just under 4MB.

There is no room for interpretation. This is simply harmful and the result of a nasty attack.

The entire basis on which the blocksize wars were fought was that encumbering nodes with way more data would lead to centralization. (Along with a host of other issues, like centralization of mining & pools).

The simple solution is that it needs to stop. Blocks cannot be stuffed with arbitrary data placed there by ambivalent miners.

The way this stops is as a natural extension of a bitcoin community that recognizes attacks and responds accordingly.

It means using node software that isn't designed to hurt its users which is already happening with migration away from Core to Knots. The most popular plug-n-play nodes have all begun offering this.

They did not this time last year.

It means miners choosing pools that at least give them the option of not participating in the attack -> currently well under 1% of the hashrate, 6 months ago not even an option. Hard for me to talk about because obviously I'm employed by the pool in question.

It means people who never mined doing it for the first time.

And mostly it means maintaining an understanding of what makes bitcoin bitcoin. That in itself has always been enough to evict crypto scammers to something other than Bitcoin. Those who wanted to turn it into "paypal 2.0" with the same disregard and contempt for nodes that the spam apologists display now forked themselves off to bcash and craigcoin.

The one thing that will *not* solve this problem is high transaction fees. This is an argument made by those who at least understand an attack when they see it, but are in denial about what surviving it actually involves.

Throughout the last few months the conversation has rapidly progressed and the tide has been turning.

I am under no illusions that this is an easy fix, but that is because of the nature of politics and how much larger the ecosystem is now.

But it's also just history repeating itself.

Bitcoin keeps having to fight the same battles again and again. Always in service of importance of being able to run *and use* a node, affordably and trivially, by complete noobs.

To maintain decentralization.

To resist the corrupting of what we have.

Bitcoin is money. Other features cannot come at the expense of that.

OP RETURN wars, bcash, segwit2x, shitcoins, coloredcoins, hostile BIPs, malicious devs....

We've done it a million times before. Every single time the "laser-eyed toxic maxis" win.

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Reddit

I don't do a lot of speculation either. Used to, but chasing after value gains to try and beat inflation suddenly seemed so childish once I learned about Bitcoin. But I still look at investments with two lenses, one from the idea of a nest egg, and the other looking for a way to create an income stream. Having capital in an account doesn't pay expenses. We need an income from that, and if we don't want to have to sell our assets, we need that income stream to come from our assets in other ways. I've been focused on building a dividend growth portfolio that I am hopeful will enable me to pay my expenses when I retire without having to sell any of my assets, Bitcoin or otherwise.

Besides, if we have an income stream, we can pay our expenses and continue to buy more sats.

Agreed, and the current community should be welcoming to that content. Bitcoin may be the Apex, but there is a whole world of financial opportunities out there. Real ones. Let's talk about them.

How can we make #nostr grow faster than centralized social media platforms, onboard more people here and open their eyes? In my opinion, besides censorship resistance and bitcoin, it is missing something. What could it be?

As a kid, I was led to believe that "stop, drop, and roll" would be a much more necessary life skill than it has ended up being.

He’s amazing. And he recently also took the orange pill!

I go to NYC several times per year for one reason or another. For work, for friends, etc.

Part of me likes it, but part of me gets fucking frustrated multiple times per day every time I am here. (Sorry, this is a Nostr Lyn post).

There are plenty of neat things in NYC that I can’t do at the same scale/quality elsewhere in the world due to the network effects around the city (broadway shows, financial district, etc), and yet after a day or two all I want to do is leave. It feels claustrophobic on multiple fronts.

People all have different vibes but for me, major cities are fun to visit but smaller secondary cities or suburbs around cities are so much smoother to live in. I can’t imagine living all the time in a major city.

The same applies to Cairo, to which I have been in far more total days than NYC. I like Cairo’s satellite cities but not Cairo itself other than going briefly.

Every time I am in a major city I am immediately reminded of the luxury of space, nature, quiet, parking spaces, and chillness of not being in a city. Everything I take for granted normally is now a luxury to fight for in a city.

Even politics are largely correlated to urbanization. If you live in rural or suburban areas, you likely drive around in your own car, you might have some land, etc. Your interaction with the local government exists in a moderate sense. The potential weakness is that you are more likely to always be around those who are similar to you, which minimizes your worldliness.

In contrast to all that, in major cities, everything is so tightly packed, and people rely on public transportation, and even a momentary lapse of government services (eg trash collection) becomes an acute catastrophe. But on the beneficial side, people are around those who are different than them more often, which breeds worldliness.

That’s why I tend to like the zone between rural and major cities. I like secondary cities or suburbs of major cities, because I get a bit of both worlds. The density and interconnectedness of major cities briefly, and the space and self-autonomy outside of them most of the time.

And yet I was born and raised in that sort of inbetween state, and so maybe it is just my upbringing.

What about you? Can anyone sell me the idea of NYC or other major cities that I am missing, especially in the remote work era? I see glimpses of how it could be attractive if you are used to it and know every detail of your neighborhood, but it really does feel limiting to me.