You can grab all of my details at https://shorter.me/-hESL
the concept of streaming 4k video over the internet was viewed by many to be impossible, at a particular point in time.
it's important to remain cognisant of our ideals and goals, as new innovations may re-shape what is possible, through time.
Most people don't know that we need adequate levels of CO2 in our bodies, to help us burn our oxygen.
I'd be getting nervous, if supplies start running short, and my surname is Mr Bacon....
i generally favour optimisim, however it seems like the more likely best-case outcome for Bitcoin is that the world gets to operate on a sound money standard, albeit that the average Joe will interact with the asset through some semi-to-non custodial mechanism.
all 8 billion people being able to participate, without permission, is a definite win. as too is the lack of friction, across borders.
a small minority no longer being able to self finance, by way of currency debasement, is also a wonderful victory.
self custody for all should remain firmly within our sights, however if only the aspects above come to pass, the battle will still have been worth it. by a large margin.
I've been operating on the idea that using the base chain will eventually become somewhat similar to buying a home. ie it's something the average person will do once, twice, or perhaps three times, across the entirety of their lifespan.
perhaps i'm seeing the world through orange tinted glasses, but it's possible that even this becomes unreachable, for the average everyday person.
needs a sprinkle of faraday....
due to channel force closures?
I believe there is a cyclical ebb and flow to centralisation, and decentralisation.
it's well and good to build and benefit from decentralised technologies, such as Bitcoin, but it would be remiss to overlook the fact that in many cases, such implementations depend upon the fruits of a lengthy period of centralisation...
increasing block size is usually framed as a negative on the basis that it increases the cost of running a node, which in turn hurts decentralisation.
another way to consider it, is that it's actually stealing from the miners...
Liquid -> Lightning via Bolt is an interesting concept...
VJLAcFS1Pyu1LCKF5V4QYi9i5XC1N2Wj57Wvrx6SYyBvEdtJVVM3YqYc9bfz3K585XyGdkG3wnTpgwBc
i mean nodes as in users. a la UASF...
Miners determine which of the valid transactions in their mempool are selected for inclusion in a block.
Aside from the need for transactions to be valid, there are no consensus rules around transaction selection, miners are able to use whatever selection method they wish.
So how do block templates compare? Let's examine what happened prior to block 821498 (mined within the last hour).
The block mined by Antpool had a max total bid of 7.73789496 BTC. You can find this using bitcoin-cli getblockstats
My local instance of bitcoin core running the default policy rules + FullRBF had a max total bid of 7.71806816 BTC, lower than the mined block by 0.01982680 BTC.
The block templates provided by nostr:npub18d4r6wanxkyrdfjdrjqzj2ukua5cas669ew2g5w7lf4a8te7awzqey6lt3
had a max total bid of 7.7334687 BTC, lower than the mined block by 0.00442626 BTC.
The block template provided by ocean npub1qtvl2em0llpnnllffhat8zltugwwz97x79gfmxfz4qk52n6zpk3qq87dze
had a max total bid of 6.6127135 BTC, lower than the mined block by 0.43183364 BTC
Filtering policy and sorting method vary by pool, but mining is highly competitive. For how long can mining pools who do not maximise fee revenue survive?
The rate of my data logging (every few seconds) means it's inevitable that I don't capture the latest templates, so that accounts for a small part of the delta. You can see on the mempool block audit page that the expected mempool space template for the mempool block is 7.737 BTC , slightly higher than the 7.7335 BTC template I captured.
An additional source of the delta is that there were some transactions (in blue) which AntPool included which were not in
@mempool
's mempool and likely not in mine or oceans (I didn't save the block template so can't check).
These 6 transactions pay a total of 4,072,619 sats in fees. Plus there is a transaction that was included which had a marginal fee rate, paying a 73,828 sats.
A total of 4,146,447 sats
To create space to include these transactions 45 transactions were dropped, each paying 89,833 sats.
A total of 4,042,485 sats
Including these transactions resulted in a net increase for the in band fees of 103,962 sats (0.00103962 BTC)
Check the block audit at https://mempool.space/block/000000000000000000028bdf4456e7e2519b0ba4b6d52cea0cc18c726f60a578
How long would any of them survive if nodes started rejecting blocks containing jpegs...
making value judgements is an important aspect of maturity.
'leaving it to the free market' and discerning more / less valuable uses of scarse resources are not mutually exclusive positions...
custodial solutions could expand, as they're not constrained by transaction fees, yes.
projects like fedimint and e-cash are somewhat more interesting than straight up custodial LN, as they at least attempt to offer the end user some degree of privacy / safeguards against being rug-pulled.
the unfortunate reality is, however, that custodial solutions will always be a less preferred option, vs non-custodial.
in a high fee environment, users can be priced out of transacting on the base chain, as they cannot afford the transaction fees.
they may try to onboard to layer 2 (LN), only to discover that they are still subject to layer 1 transaction fees, for the purposes of opening, splicing/balancing and closing channels. (they must also hold sufficient balance to broadcast a recent state transaction, should their channel counterparty attempt to force-close / cheat them).
as fees rise considerably, if a user cannot afford to transact using non-custodial layer 1, there is a strong possiblity that they will also be unable to afford non-custodial layer 2.
those who can afford the fees will benefit from increased transaction throughput (on layer 2), however layer 2 does not solve the problem of high fees, and thus scales the overall userbase only marginally.
hard to know what to make of that. he's clearly uncomfortable, but he's also not denying he was there.
seemed like the question came out of left field, which would be enough to make most people uncomfortable.
have the body language people covered this clip yet?
