been seeing folks claim “this is the first time fees are more than subsidy, etc” so i decided to check:

it’s not.

None of my examples broke the consensus rules.

There is a fair point here and I agree to the extent of the nature of transactions being unable to stop, & the open market for clearing them. But I still think it isn’t so simple, regarding the bloat in data that has nothing to do with the transactions themselves. #Bitcoin isn’t cloud storage, it’s a censorship resistant *monetary* network.

If someone was able to write, and openly paid for a transaction, that was openly mined, that had a mathematical exploit such that this single transaction took 10 minutes to compute, this would follow all of your same rules/heuristics without violation, but would be a disaster for decentralization and could turn into an ongoing attack that could have a horrible impact on the ability to run a node and potentially permanently damage the ability to sync any new nodes onto the network save fee a few major entities going forward.

Now, I’m NOT saying this hypothetical is that severe or even comparable to the current situation. In the big picture I do not think this incident is a major concern. But I simply want to point out there is a hole in your line of thinking, because we cannot extract the purpose of the network from the context of what is being confirmed. Bitcoin isn’t merely an open market, it is an engineering feat as well. And if we don’t think like engineers we end up sacrificing the system in the name of the philosophy, while failing to acknowledge their interdependence.

It's not about whether it's "in their right" or not. The content of the chain is not arbitrary or something that is divine as long as its natural and pays a fee. Ultimately this is software and an open, adversarial network that needs to be robust. DoS and spam are the ultimate issue of all open networks.

If someone figured out a way to make 1,000,000 unspendable UTXOs in a single transaction or just a handful of blocks are were happily willing to pay those fees while creating a huge, immediate jump in the amount of RAM every node had to have to stay in sync, despite not a single one of them having any monetary use or relation whatsoever, would you consider that "valid" and perfectly fine? If you did, then I would argue that you and I disagree on both the purpose and engineering concerns of the network.

Bitcoin is like a giant, trustless clock, that has no alternative. To stamp a bunch of bullshit images and shitcoins into it is like grabbing a precious time keeping device and using it to hammer a nail. Its dumb, doesn't even work very well, and is directly at odds with why the device is so valuable in the first place. This is *not* about who is willing to pay a fee, this is about the purpose of the network and whether the bloat of data is at odds with the very fundamental value that #Bitcoin provides. This is about the tragedy of the commons putting costs on those who maintain the network, by people who don't even give a shit about the value that the network provides.

Guy, maybe I need to spend more time on the technical side of things to understand your argument. How is the UTXO set stored in ram? And if UTXO bloat is a problem of ram storage instead of dedicated SSD storage, then isn’t that a huge issue which needs to be solved in order to increase the number of UTXOs anyway?

It seems like your main argument is that it’s a stupid way to use Bitcoin and creates bloat, which I definitely agree with, but I’m confused about how that relates to the issues people are voicing with the fee market. And if these transactions are uniquely causing excessive ram consumption, at what point is my 4gb ram Raspberry Pi no longer going to be able to sync?

probably counterparty

Is this an attack?

Maybe bitcoin should just become a verb

As in “hold on, I’ll bitcoin you some sats on Nostr”

🎯 I don’t care about on-chain fees. If you’re for payments, use LN. If i put my extras self-custody, i can even set 1 sat/vB and just wait.

haven’t had this much fun on the internet in a long time

magical that i can bitcoin instantly to people on nostr while fees to get in the next block keep climbing.

we still got tons of work to do, but damn, it’s nice to see the progress 😁

I think it’s possible.

I listened to your podcast Guy, and I understand your perspective, but I’m in the camp that a valid Bitcoin transaction is a valid Bitcoin transaction. If people want to make transactions which seem silly to us non-shitcoiners, that is well within their right. And it’s probably a great net benefit for security and scaling.

Yes if you go to proper lengths to hide metadata like a Signal than sure, but pretty much everywhere else is just as bad or worse than nostr. At least once we have auth for DMs this won’t be completely wide open.

seeing people post about how the mempool is “clogged,” fees are “crazy high,” can’t believe the backlog of transactions, etc makes me feel like people haven’t fully grasped the endgame yet.

300k pending txs is nothing. 200 s/vb is unfairly cheap. we are just getting started

Stomach flu suuuuuuuuucks