Ugh. I wish I could enjoy it more. It just makes me depressed, but maybe that’s because I don’t buy the inevitability position. We’re going to have to work for the future we want. With plenty of opportunity to mess it up.
Nothing like technical controversy in bitcoin to tickle even many bitcoiners’ authoritarian funny bone. Humans are tribal.
We don’t like challenges to our tribes even at the expense of our principles and, like Jonathan Haidt’s rationalizing rider on the emotional elephant, we can always come up with ways to reconcile even the most contradictory positions.
I think it’s intellectually consistent to say segwit and taproot were mistakes. I don’t agree but I respect the position.
There’s near universal agreement from devs that there’s no way to prevent data we don’t like w/o prevention “useful” use cases, which is another way of saying that actually the protocol needs to be value neutral in terms of content of data. The way that we filter for usefulness is the market, block size limits, and limited supply of currency all of which are reasons why bitcoin is probably a better platform to have experiments like NFTs than alternatives. The reason is if they have no value then as fees go up but people are less willing to pay them their use will go down. The same could be true for more complex spending transactions of any kind. If my business doesn’t want to pay the fees for a more complex locking script that might provide more security at the cost of block space, then we’ll opt for simple multisig.
No. Eventually the beach balls will have to pay a higher and higher fee. If ordinals are useless than it will become less and less worthwhile to pay for. The protocol designers from the start expected blocks to fill up which would drive up fees which would support the network.
You’re making the same argument big blockers made 5 years ago. There’s functionally no difference from saying “but what if there’s only room for 20 people on the bus then only rich people could ride it”. People even made bus/transport visualizations to make these points!
I mean the whole point of taproot and by extension segwit which was meant to lay the ground work was to make it more expressive. If we’re saying that we should be deciding which cases expressiveness should be “allowed” which is a really scary prospect to me.
The protocol should be value neutral. As long as it operates decentralized and w/ an efficient market w/ accurate price discovery for blockspace then everything is operating as expected.
Yep! Built on the same protocol. Sphinx Chat was effectively the first podcasting 2.0 app.
Sphinx Chat (which uses the lightning network’s TLV field as a messaging rail) has supported this for a while now. Different use cases compared to Nostr in terms of protocol, but having payment as layer one of a chat protocol has some real killer applications.
The sats are still ordered the same way since one of the characteristics of coin joins is they’re still basically just normal transactions.
It’s not a guarantee it’s just as I said, moving physical parts can wear out more easily.
https://www.tomshardware.com/features/ssd-vs-hdd-hard-drive-difference
Read/write time is faster for ssd I believe and also might have a longer shelf life because no physical moving pieces to wear out but otherwise either should be fine as you say.
Right. That’s my point. The block limit is set and hasn’t been increased since segwit. Inscriptions/ordinals aren’t and cant change that. They are just using the limit that the whole network of nodes advocated for with segwit.
Interestingly there is not even a standard raspberry pi! They keep getting better all the time (old model 3s basically are strongly discouraged as of a couple years ago for most node running software) which means they should be able to keep up.
Then bitcoin was/is already broken. Has nothing to do with inscriptions.
Block limit hasn’t changed since segwit. Filling up blocks with more data (that is paid for) has always been the goal (which is why developing scaling solutions has been so important). The nature of that content is irrelevant.
Fair point. There is a purpose which is essentially censorship resistant data and value transfer. The protocol however does not care about the nature/purpose of that data and value though.
There’s a reason why the reaction from the vast majority of core devs on the mailing list to ordinals/inscriptions was that the data cap for OP_RETURN should just be lifted.
“Purpose” is subjective and is irrelevant. If the protocol has to care about the content of transactions then we’ve already lost. The only way that it can be “abused” is causing centralization (MEV, large blocks) or if miners can’t maximize fee revenue. All else is irrelevant. To suggest otherwise is asking for censorship.
“Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly to the aristocratic. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends to act more and more exclusively in the interest of the ruling class, whether that class be hereditary royalty or oligarchs of financial empires or entrenched bureaucracy.”
- Politics as Repeat Phenomenon, (Bene Geserit training manual)
From Frank Herbert’s “Children of Dune”
Its soundtrack was the soundtrack for my work the past week. Great both for the nerd/tech angle as well as understanding what’s wrong with authoritarian regimes