I say we should allow protocol upgrades every 10 years. That should give us sufficient time to research and debate. In the meantime we just fix bugs and improve performance and privacy.

If you have to ask, you don’t understand the second order impacts on plebs. My tor node is incredibly slow now. I can’t run it all the time and it’s not a fast computer. I sync the node when I need to broadcast a transaction. In my last sync I waited weeks.

The mistake was just increasing the block size to 4MB and giving it a discount. That wasn’t necessary for Lightning was it?

Not only did the Segwit devs increase the block size, but, in their wisdom, actually gave spam a discount!

Yes, the spammers were clearly prepared to spend the money. With the discount, we reduced their fees so now the spammers make even more profit. 🫡

“This worst-case was well understood.”

That virtually all of the block size increase would be filled with spam? I guess if you put spam on sale, you sell more spam, right?

After spending a couple weeks recently to sync a node over Tor, I would argue it wasn’t worth it. We still have high fees and now we struggle to sync our nodes privately. I noticed how you didn’t mention the impact on our Tor nodes. 😔

In second thought, maybe it’s a good thing that the devs slowed down our nodes. Fewer impulsive purchases! Maybe bitcoiners buy fewer useless lambos because they come to their senses waiting for their nodes to sync. 🤔

Idea!💡Maybe since fees are still high, we should increase the blocksize further and give the spammers a bigger discount? Surely if it worked so well the last time, maybe we should do it again? We can never have too much efficiency, amirite? 🤨

I never once heard a mea culpa or any accountability for what seems to be the biggest f’up in core’s history. No post mortem, just gaslighting that everything is “fine” and how the devs “understood” the risks. This ossification talk is probably just a symptom of the lost trust.

Thank you for the detailed response.

I’m still unconvinced that covenants offer a complete solution to the scaling problem.

You will never know whether the amount you have in a shared UTXO will be “trapped” by proportionally excessive fees, or how long you will have to wait to retrieve it at reasonable expense, or how much you will receive when you do.

I believe that changes to the core protocol carry high risk and therefore should not be partial fixes or merely helpful in some circumstances.

We need to ask ourselves:

1) Can the issue be solved in any other way, other than a change to the core protocol? Have we waited long enough for other solutions to emerge?

2) If we must change the core protocol, what is the most limited change we can make that actually solves the problem?

This is why I would wish for developers to be patient and continue researching the problem until a complete solution is found. It’s also possible that we may all be happy with other solutions that emerge.

I still don’t understand how covenants improve the situation for low value amounts.

If I have $10 in my own UTXO or $10 in a shared UTXO, it will still cost me roughly the same amount in fees to transfer it on the L1 chain.

Why does having more keys per UTXO make anything cheaper if it costs you the same amount in transaction fees?

It doesn’t seem to matter if the covenant encodes a future payment to you if the payment amount is small and fees are high and rising over time. You’re still going to pay a significant amount in fees.

I don’t agree that block space is practically unbounded. Sure we could increase it, but it’s like making more roads to decrease traffic. It just encourages more people to buy cars and fill the roads. Building more roads gives a temporary benefit but eventually the traffic is back to the original level or even worse.

If we lower the economic cost of blockspace, people will just fill it with lower value data (like spam JPEGs) and we’ll reduce decentralization.

Yes, I want more people to have their own keys, but how will this work in practice when fees on the main L1 are high?

People say that covenants are the solution but I haven’t found anyone who can explain how covenants solve this problem when fees are high and growing.

We can’t just make changes to the core protocol if it doesn’t solve the problem, even if it helps in the short term. Bitcoin is for 1000 years. The risk of software changes is too high to just delay the problem for a few years.

If true, this is definitely reason to question the new opcodes.

Any software change to the core protocol risks introducing bugs or disrupting the social and financial incentives that underpin the network.

We should make no changes to the core protocol if the problem can be solved elsewhere. nostr:note13me5vlja74qv508yjw2m50ssetngjvljn7d2qqqdqsujcl7pz4aq066fu4

Can you please explain now covenants would solve the problem?

I specifically have concerns around how they would work in practice if the fees are high and the amounts of bitcoin in the shared UTXO are low.

This is how I’m imagine it:

We’ll have many interoperable ecash federations using Lightning to clear bitcoin between each other.

Federated ecash would be perfect for everyday transactions. Anonymous, very small transaction fees.

I’m not aware of any reason why this model cannot scale to billions of transactions per day.

The federations would be geographically distributed with trusted but anonymous federation managers so they’re difficult for governments to attack and suppress.

The issue I have with covenant proposals is that I don’t understand if they can work for small everyday amounts in an environment with rising fees.

For example, if it costs $10 in fees to make a bitcoin transaction, can I get access to $5 in a shared covenant UTXO?

Covenants don’t seem to be a perfect solution because they don’t consider the cost of making the transaction.

To me, the future looks like Fedimint, Liquid, etc where we have geographically distributed federations managing ecash, etc.

Those federations would allow for massive transaction density.

💯

People are upset with high fees and I understand because I’m upset with high fees too.

I just value greater decentralization over lower fees. We can’t allow governments to capture the network.

I’m not opposed to smart changes to bitcoin but we need to be strategic and think long term. We can’t be rushing out changes because someone is panicking over the current thing.

We might discuss and consider the change for 10, 20 years or more before finally reaching consensus. That’s ok because we’re building bitcoin for the next 1000 years.

We need to ask ourselves:

1) Can the issue be solved in any other way, other than a change to the core protocol? Have we waited long enough for other solutions to emerge?

2) If we must change the core protocol, what is the most limited change we can make that actually solves the problem?

Bitcoin protects the world’s money and is our hope for the future. We can’t mess it up.

Reminded me about this post below 👇

Seems like nostr might be ideal for enabling an ecash federation to post proof of identity but hide within a larger group of similarly trusted nyms.

nostr:note1c785z9qs2u093jh3th0jurvchhq7h2n0a7enslp8kp4ysyzpwfuqst2uxg

Yep, it’s not about right or left. It’s about those that want to control what others do, and those that don’t.

Do ya feel like a citizen or a farm animal? You can’t wander off pasture and escape your endless milking 🐮.

Takes a lot of advance planning to escape the farm animal treatment.

Trying to stack the last sats under 70k?

Socialism always runs out of other people’s money.

Adding powerful scripting increases the risk that the bitcoin network will be used for non-standard transactions that worsen centralizing MEV. We can see ETH already struggling with the problem. Why do we want to bring that disaster to bitcoin?

It’s not on me to prove that GSR is dangerous. It’s on Rusty to prove it’s safe.

Rusty says he has no idea how the new codes will be used. He also said, in his podcast with Livera👇, that he even believes they could be abused, he just doesn’t know how.

Obviously this proposal is not safe. It’s pure negligence to not consider the 2nd order effects to the overall bitcoin network.

More details:

nostr:note12najfx7g8x2s6zzcn6qvc6dtaxuyjlhq7kfkt5vyphzxmrc7wk4qxgxqh8

The main impediment is actually the limited blocksize. You can increase transactions per second by making bitcoin more centralized. That’s not a good tradeoff to make if you want bitcoin to replace central banks.

You appear to have a myopic view. It seems you think the change is “safe” if it doesn’t impact CPU and memory usage. You’re not considering the centralizing effects of MEV. You also said you don’t care of how this can be abused.

To you, bitcoin appears to be an intellectual pursuit. Just another open source project. To us, it’s our hope for the future.

nostr:note12najfx7g8x2s6zzcn6qvc6dtaxuyjlhq7kfkt5vyphzxmrc7wk4qxgxqh8