Removing OP_return limits seems like a huge mistake

[tvbcof]

...

Seems to me that people who wish to leverage the Bitcoin blockchain for various pet data projects would/could/should just peg out to a dedicated sidechain.  Unlike in earlier days (back before the earth stopped cooling) such technologies have been developed, and are working pretty well as best I can see.

Seems to me that a dedicated  sidechain would be a better choice than the Bitcoin blockchain since it wouldn't be being spammed by BTC transactions and there is a lot of unrelated cruft which could be left behind.

At first blush, somehow 'needing' to crud up the BTC blockchain seems more like an attack than a legitimate solution to a real problem.  Where is my thinking wrong here?

Sidechain and other L2 already exist far before Ordinals created. But almost no one use it despite both Liquid network and Rootstock have smart contract capability and developer behind it promote it support NFT/token. I also have seen Ordinals supporters say they only want to use Ordinals since their arbitrary data guaranteed to be immutable.

They couldn't figure out how to make their sidechain(s) 'immutable'?  Yeah, right.

It certainly seems that there is something rotten in Denmark.

It also looks like there is a compelling reason to get back to running some full nodes and building out some mining capacity.  For most of the time over the last 14 years, I did not see a real need to do so.

If these 'core' people can convince me that Bitcoin has been, or will be, taken over by bankster creeps and it's time to take it out back and shoot it in the head (which would not be impossible), that's one thing.  If, however, some contingent of 'core' were flipped by the powers that be and induced to introduce toxins into the codebase (or are doing it for their own gain), that's quite another.

Maybe there is an effort at another BCH-style fork to take some profits off one side?

[gmaxwell]

Sidechain and other L2 already exist far before Ordinals created. But almost no one use it despite both Liquid network and Rootstock have smart contract capability and developer behind it promote it support NFT/token. I also have seen Ordinals supporters say they only want to use Ordinals since their arbitrary data guaranteed to be immutable.

I think I adequately explained why the NFT bullshit doesn't use alternatives (I mean forget sidechains, they could just spin up another blockchain or use bcash or whatever).  If it wasn't clear you can ask questions.

Of course, there is also always the potential for collateral motivations but if you pick through them the most likely sound like ones trying to divide up the Bitcoin community, or trying to prove out points of control or that transaction censorship works. ... but you don't need alternative motivations to explain the shitcoining, it's just that even when one is sufficient others can be true too.


and, yet again,  nft shitcoining stuff is mostly orthogonal to opreturn. If it wanted to use outputs it would just be using fake outputs.

and it's only because the core devs didn't act when they should have acted!

I think that's debatable at best, but if they had it would have been a huge drama fire-- and the failure of the community to manage that drama fire is a huge pressure to NOT do it.  So here again we see a huge drama fire and this one is over a real nothing burger.  You're not sending a message that they *can* act.  If you want to send that message you should help douse dramafires.  

I care about this opreturn issue because:

1. The block propagation problem needs to get fixed and this is one of the (nearly) required steps.  (I say nearly because the alternative is some massive rocket science improvement in block propagation that the project is not healthy enough to undertake, and which still won't do as good a job as fixing relay to relay everything that gets mined).

2. That people are bashing the shit out of bitcoin core over a PR that wasn't even initiated by a regular contributor, that rightfully should have been done a year ago but likely got delayed because of not wanting to deal with drama. ... so people leaving core out to dry is resulting in them not putting out their best effort.  The bitcoin project feeling free to make controversial changes which they believe are correct would have been an absolute prerequisite to them doing something about the NFT-shitcoin spam. (I don't believe they would have for fact specific reasons, but it would have at least required feeling able to do so).

3. The influencers who are outright lying to the public[1] should not gain a win from this and validate their manipulation techniques.


[1] Like saying "core did this" and "core ignored the community" basically the moment a project outsider made a PR.  Like telling people that they're taking away the choice, without mentioning that there is another PR that keeps the option or mentioning that since miners don't enforce the limit, that it is ineffectual at blocking spam (See also: 3183bd6ceebc2d39c0a3cfa0d06eb84d1161eaac1c26605e2eab62bfe48c1420 ).  Like lying to people and saying that core contributors want NFT garbage when the tech people hate that stuff, have expressly said they don't like it.  In reality the change is popularly supported among those in the know because this filter no longer works (see also my see also above) and it causes collateral harm, and the NFT garbage encodes their data a different and unrelated way.   And so on.  All these things are just outright lies and inexcusable omissions and they are poisoning public discussion.  And the people making them are just getting away with it.

  

[jaybny]

...

i get your sound logic.. but these terrible anti-pattern protocols hurt to look at.. simply from a comp sci perspective - making these immutable on chain is a crime against humanity (jk)

https://x.com/mononautical/status/1919758548310823213

https://x.com/mononautical/status/1919758548310823213

[tvbcof]

I think I adequately explained why the NFT bullshit doesn't use alternatives (I mean forget sidechains, they could just spin up another blockchain or use bcash or whatever).  If it wasn't clear you can ask questions.

...

From my perspective (going back a long ways) real sidechains such as liquid ARE 'bitcoin'.  What they peg out is protected by all of the proof of work of Bitcoin proper.  They can also leverage a lot from basic operations within Bitcoin proper without fucking it up so much.  I always viewed sidechains (even before they were developed) as the escape valve for entities who wanted so leverage real Bitcoin (instead of some shitcoin), but enhance it's capabilities.

So, I don't think it exactly appropriate to say 'forget sidechains'.  (Sidechains in my mind are basically a viable shitcoin PLUS some credibility via a BTC peg.)

Now it must be said that I basically ignored Bitcoin developments since the blocksize wars a decade ago and have not been very interested or in-the-loop.  As back then, I feel OK as long as blocksize growth is _predictable_.  As I understand things this OP_RETURN change does _not_ in and of itself increase growth rates (though it looks like a stepping-stone to me).  It mostly just makes it more practical to buy 10 minutes +/- of the Bitcoin world's time in one transaction.  Same thing could be done, I guess, with the existing OP_RETURN or via other more objectionable methods, but it would be a little bit more of a pain-in-the-ass perhaps?

I don't see a technical reason to give the spammers what they want on a silver platter in part because with the sensible rates which have been more-or-less preserved since the infamous 1MB commit, we really don't need ultimate efficiency in mempool or pruning.  (Moore's law is BS, but hardware capabilities are improving.)

As with 10 years ago, I would argue that it is worthwhile to educate people that if shitcoiners attack and transactions are delayed for hours/days, it's doesn't mean that the sky is falling.  The spammers will get tired of spending millions/day in order to choke things up.  Just set on-chain transaction expectations accordingly and use other (much better) sidechain options for day-to-day transactions.

On out-of-band miner buying, seems to me that two could play at that game.  The 'two' could be legitimate/efficient sidechain operators who could only have to cover the difference between the natural block reward and the extra which the spammers are offering in order to keep their business model operative.

[NickofTime]

A bit late to the party. I don't know if removing the filter was a mistake, this only time will tell. A few things on my mind:

Motivation: this was not properly addressed. From this discussion alone it seems that the choice of imposing no limit on OP_RETURN was for the benefit of the network. This is not what happened. This is not why the pull request was made. I refer you to a post by Peter Todd himself on stacker.news

For the record, this pull-req wasn't my idea. I was asked to open it by an active Core dev because entities like Citrea are using unprunable outputs instead of OP_Return, due to the size limits. And yes, that's the thing that has changed since.

https://stacker.news/items/971277?commentId=971434

Was this really for the benefit of the network or for the benefit of Citrea? Why did this anonymous developer go through Todd for the PR? Am I the only one seeing red flags here?

[gmaxwell]

From my perspective (going back a long ways) real sidechains such as liquid ARE 'bitcoin'.

I didn't mean that in the sense of anything negative, I mean you don't need to wonder about anything that complicated. The NFT/shitcoin stuff could just use some other much cheaper chain or whatever.  They don't because reasons that I discussed upthread-- sidechains wouldn't help those reasons, they'd hurt. The value to the shitcoiner is that it's expensive to make their tokens.

Motivation: this was not properly addressed. From this discussion alone it seems that the choice of imposing no limit on OP_RETURN was for the benefit of the network. This is not what happened. This is not why the pull request was made. I refer you to a post by Peter Todd himself on stacker.news

For the record, this pull-req wasn't my idea. I was asked to open it by an active Core dev because entities like Citrea are using unprunable outputs instead of OP_Return, due to the size limits. And yes, that's the thing that has changed since.

https://stacker.news/items/971277?commentId=971434

Was this really for the benefit of the network or for the benefit of Citrea? Why did this anonymous developer go through Todd for the PR? Am I the only one seeing red flags here?

I'm glad you asked that-- I hadn't seen any of that discussion and I totally get why you find it concerning.

You're missing context:  Petertodd's pull request points to this mailing list post: https://groups.google.com/g/bitcoindev/c/d6ZO7gXGYbQ/m/mJyek28lDAAJ  So no anonymity.  And why Petertodd?  Because it's simply a reintroduction of a pull request he made previously:  https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/28130   Petertodd just copy and pasted his older change-- kind of the obvious thing to do when someone has submitted a change before that you think should be made now is to ask them to resubmit it.

(also jesus man, can Petertodd not manage to say anything without somehow causing drama? )

As far as citrea: they already make "fake address" outputs.  I don't see how the change *benefits* them, it would however make their traffic less harmful to Bitcoin which seemingly they'd prefer.  Though apparently these transactions only happen when their channels fail or something it's an exceptional and not frequent case for them so not terribly important.

And if I could be so bold to make a totally wild ass guess, I'd guess that Antoine Poinsot looked into citrea saw it producing fake outputs, asked them to stop and got pointed to the op_return limit... but I dunno the history there.  I do know that in the past I've done similar things may times:  found some user doing something apparently dumb, asked them to change for the benefit of the network, learned of the reason for their behavior, then went to go get it fixed.

And you can see from the fact that it's been proposed before that citrea is not the driver of this.  Maybe from Petertodd's perspective it's what triggered someone to ask him to try again.  But the reason that people support it (including petertodd) isn't limited to or even related to that triggering event.

And FWIW.  I learned about this whole thing via drama on reddit where people were posting saying Coredevs wanted to turn bitcoin into NFTs/Shitcoins, which is pretty ridiculous.  I'd personally never heard of citria and commented in support of this change before even learning what it was... because it's pretty obviously the right thing to do, and I think that's probably true for many other people.  I don't know enough about it to give an opinion on it. I understand it's supposed to be a payment channel thing, which is good, but a lot of the recent ones of those have a shitcoin.  I haven't checked if it does, 'cause a good change is a good change even if a piece of shit likes it.  (and you *have* to adopt that perspective, or otherwise enemies can harm you by liking things that are good for you )

So from my perspective this is a change that is massively overdue.  And the thing that has changed over time that matters is that now large miners are reliably accepting unlimited opreturn via direct submission, have been doing it for a long time, and are clearly not going to stop.  That differences changes the filter from net-neutral or somewhat net positive to net-harmful.
 

[d5000]

There are two PRs, one which leaves a setting but unlimits it by default.

Thanks for the info. Imo that makes sense ...

I'm not really that opinionated on leaving a useless option in, though because of the character of the response I do lean towards removing it: Removing it is simpler, results in less complexity.

I wonder if there are stats about the usage of the datacarriersize parameter. It should be possible to estimate it at least. If it is popular then in my opinion it isn't useless. I think even if it is technically useless because miners would normally mine these transactions anyway, people could simply "feel better" if they can keep out some things from their mempools (even if their nodes would broadcast happily PEPEs and other JPEGs created with Stampchain). It's however debatable if these nodes should be called "full" nodes.

Perhaps less good reasons, conceding to an attack driven by misinformation or collateral concerns creates ongoing risk.

I think I understand your reasoning here, but I think perhaps a concession can also be helpful sometimes to calm the waters. I'll try to read a bit about how the block propagation problem and the OP_RETURN limits are connected, as this is still a "hole" for my understanding of the whole context.

Sadly I somewhat agree with this, which is what I've warned about before; and it's only because the core devs didn't act when they should have acted!

No, that's not what I meant.
A "patch" like the one Luke-jr proposed is just the kind of code I don't want to see in Bitcoin Core, ever. It is a hardcoded "filter" which would only target a specific format of Ordinals inscriptions, and they could come up all the time with new versions which also would have to be patched, this is what @gmaxwell probably refers to as a "whack-a-mole" game.

I guess if the Ordinals wave would have begun, and Core "patched" it let's say in March or April 2023, then the Ordinals folks would have massively switched to Stampchain (which was already around in early to mid 2023) for NFTs and existing protocols like Counterparty (not a harmful method, but could have created a similar spam wave) for tokens -- take into account that the big majority of the "spam wave" was due to BRC-20 tokens which doen't need the "extended Taproot witness size" to work. Stampchain later even created a token protocol (SRC-20), and we can really happy that that one never really took off, it would have caused even more stress to the UTXO set.

But I still don't see how encouraging people to inject arbitrary data of any size and without limit into bitcoin blockchain which would be treating it like cloud storage is a good idea.

First, OP_RETURN data must also respect the general size limit for transactions even if the standard setting is set to "unlimited". As the maximum limit is 400k WU, this puts OP_RETURN (where afaik 4 WU are "consumed" by each byte) still not on better terms than the Taproot witness method (where up to 400 kB are considered "standard").

And second, why should the least harmful method to store data be the most limited one? As you can see it would still be more limited than the Taproot method, but at least it would be on similar terms with Stampchain which nowadays is at advantage regarding OP_RETURN.

And like I always say bitcoin is not a cloud storage, so we should make it harder for them to use it as such not easier (ie. removing OP_RETURN limit).

What exactly becomes easier if the OP_RETURN limit is lifted? There are lots of tools to use the Taproot exploit now, and also lots of tools to use Stampchain. It's not hard at all to use these methods. Nothing of this becomes easier if the OP_RETURN limit is lifted.

Again, it's only to put the least harmful method, OP_RETURN, on similar terms to the more harmful methods like Stampchain.

[NickofTime]

From my perspective (going back a long ways) real sidechains such as liquid ARE 'bitcoin'.

I didn't mean that in the sense of anything negative, I mean you don't need to wonder about anything that complicated. The NFT/shitcoin stuff could just use some other much cheaper chain or whatever.  They don't because reasons that I discussed upthread-- sidechains wouldn't help those reasons, they'd hurt. The value to the shitcoiner is that it's expensive to make their tokens.

Motivation: this was not properly addressed. From this discussion alone it seems that the choice of imposing no limit on OP_RETURN was for the benefit of the network. This is not what happened. This is not why the pull request was made. I refer you to a post by Peter Todd himself on stacker.news

For the record, this pull-req wasn't my idea. I was asked to open it by an active Core dev because entities like Citrea are using unprunable outputs instead of OP_Return, due to the size limits. And yes, that's the thing that has changed since.

https://stacker.news/items/971277?commentId=971434

Was this really for the benefit of the network or for the benefit of Citrea? Why did this anonymous developer go through Todd for the PR? Am I the only one seeing red flags here?

I'm glad you asked that-- I hadn't seen any of that discussion and I totally get why you find it concerning.

You're missing context:  Petertodd's pull request points to this mailing list post: https://groups.google.com/g/bitcoindev/c/d6ZO7gXGYbQ/m/mJyek28lDAAJ  So no anonymity.  And why Petertodd?  Because it's simply a reintroduction of a pull request he made previously:  https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/28130   Petertodd just copy and pasted his older change-- kind of the obvious thing to do when someone has submitted a change before that you think should be made now is to ask them to resubmit it.

(also jesus man, can Petertodd not manage to say anything without somehow causing drama? )

As far as citrea: they already make "fake address" outputs.  I don't see how the change *benefits* them, it would however make their traffic less harmful to Bitcoin which seemingly they'd prefer.  Though apparently these transactions only happen when their channels fail or something it's an exceptional and not frequent case for them so not terribly important.

And you can see from the fact that it's been proposed before that citrea is not the driver of this.  Maybe from Petertodd's perspective it's what triggered someone to ask him to try again.  But the reason that people support it (including petertodd) isn't limited to or even related to that triggering event.

And FWIW.  I learned about this whole thing via drama on reddit where people were posting saying Coredevs wanted to turn bitcoin into NFTs/Shitcoins, which is pretty ridiculous.  I'd personally never heard of citria and commented in support of this change before even learning what it was... because it's pretty obviously the right thing to do, and I think that's probably true for many other people.  I don't know enough about it to give an opinion on it. I understand it's supposed to be a payment channel thing, which is good, but a lot of the recent ones of those have a shitcoin.  I haven't checked if it does, 'cause a good change is a good change even if a piece of shit likes it.  (and you *have* to adopt that perspective, or otherwise enemies can harm you by liking things that are good for you )

So from my perspective this is a change that is massively overdue.  And the thing that has changed over time that matters is that now large miners are reliably accepting unlimited opreturn via direct submission, have been doing it for a long time, and are clearly not going to stop.  That differences changes the filter from net-neutral or somewhat net positive to net-harmful.
 

Thanks. Your posts are informative as always. I will continue to use Core then and will advise others to do the same.

[lonko]

@gmaxwell, wouldn’t it be more reasonable to just increase the OP_RETURN limit by 5x or 10x rather than making it unlimited? I get the need to unblock legit use cases, but completely removing the cap still feels like opening the door to potential abuse. A higher-but-bounded limit could be a safer compromise that avoids pushing harmful patterns into unprunable outputs.

[gmaxwell]

@gmaxwell, wouldn’t it be more reasonable to just increase the OP_RETURN limit by 5x or 10x rather than making it unlimited? I get the need to unblock legit use cases, but completely removing the cap still feels like opening the door to potential abuse. A higher-but-bounded limit could be a safer compromise that avoids pushing harmful patterns into unprunable outputs.

I don't think it makes sense because miners are already not limiting it at all (well except in so far as transaction sizes are limited) and have refused requests to limit it... much of the reason to remove it comes from a disconnect between default node and miner behavior, so setting some other limit preserves that inconsistency.   I think there is even an extent that the extremely angry filtering faction has poisoned the well, so much so that when miners have unintentionally removed anti-dos filters that no one wants to violate and only expose vulnerabilities it's been a little challenging to get passed being dismissed as a "pro-censorship" crank.

If someone only cared about that citrea thing then sure, then it could be set to whatever it needed-- but as I said I don't think for most people in support the motivation really cares about that particular user.

My opinion on this might be different e.g. if miners were like "oh if the default were 800 bytes we would just not change it" -- but the fact his miners are even letting users bypass transaction size limits of hundreds of KB.

I don't regard this as a bad thing-- bitcoin's premise is that miners are income maximizing, it's part of where the censorship resistance comes from... and it's an expected part of the transition from fees not mattering to fees being important.

I don't expect that they'd allow stuff that was unambiguously causing harm still, but as you're aware there is a lot of dispute over the NFT/shitcoin stuff being legitimate or spam... and to the extent that large miners might make a decision I consider an error, I'm happy that it's in the direction of including instead of excluding!

Opinions might differ from mine, if I haven't convinced you that a 5x or 10x increase wouldn't be better, feel free to attempt to sell people.

[Wind_FURY]

I knew there were people trying to turn Bitcoin into a general purpose Ethereum-style shitcoin thing for years, but I always assumed cool heads would prevail and common sense would reject those things. Well it turns out this one now is picking some traction. They basically want to allow non-Bitcoin things into Bitcoin. I don't see what the benefits of doing this is. It will just bloat the blockchain. The point of Bitcoin is to move money from A to B, everything else is bloat.

Although you're right that dick pics and fart sounds could make it more expensive to run a full node, I probably will disagree that there's absolutely no benefit if the transactions that you don't like happen in Bitcoin will happen in Bitcoin. Because sometimes when I check the mempool, I see this,



 👀

The core benefit is incentives for the miners through fees.

[ABCbits]

Sidechain and other L2 already exist far before Ordinals created. But almost no one use it despite both Liquid network and Rootstock have smart contract capability and developer behind it promote it support NFT/token. I also have seen Ordinals supporters say they only want to use Ordinals since their arbitrary data guaranteed to be immutable.

I think I adequately explained why the NFT bullshit doesn't use alternatives (I mean forget sidechains, they could just spin up another blockchain or use bcash or whatever).  If it wasn't clear you can ask questions.

Of course, there is also always the potential for collateral motivations but if you pick through them the most likely sound like ones trying to divide up the Bitcoin community, or trying to prove out points of control or that transaction censorship works. ... but you don't need alternative motivations to explain the shitcoining, it's just that even when one is sufficient others can be true too.


and, yet again,  nft shitcoining stuff is mostly orthogonal to opreturn. If it wanted to use outputs it would just be using fake outputs.

I've seen your post and it's clear enough. I was just mentioning justification of Ordinals supporter (which IMO is ridiculous) and the fact Sidechain/L2 isn't popular option for NFT/token (and in general).

I guess if the Ordinals wave would have begun, and Core "patched" it let's say in March or April 2023, then the Ordinals folks would have massively switched to Stampchain (which was already around in early to mid 2023) for NFTs and existing protocols like Counterparty (not a harmful method, but could have created a similar spam wave) for tokens -- take into account that the big majority of the "spam wave" was due to BRC-20 tokens which doen't need the "extended Taproot witness size" to work. Stampchain later even created a token protocol (SRC-20), and we can really happy that that one never really took off, it would have caused even more stress to the UTXO set.

I was about to say OmniLayer also exist, but it's class A&B TX are considered more harmful and almost no one use it back in 2023.

[Ambatman]

Edited

Okay let me see if I understand what you have stated so far

1. The focus on OP RETURN, rather than Taproot, stems from its role as a prunable and miner-aligned mechanism for embedding data.

2. Using Taproot to close the door is more risky and delicate than working on OP_RETURN

3. Citrea’s need for larger OP RETURN data is one of many use cases driving the debate. A company that wants Bitcoin to test the territory Ethereum is manning.

4. The proposal could benefit miners and indirectly solve the issue of fees not been enough to encourage miners.

5. Placing an higher limit wouldn't change much since it won't stop miners from bypassing the limit and cause inconsistency with nodes 

6. Removing the OP RETURN limit could reduce reliance on less efficient data-embedding methods like Taproot Inscriptions, relying on  its prunable nature.

7. A way but doesn't solve the issue of fake UTXO bloat especially to users that would prefer the functionality and privacy of TapRoot.

8. Removing the OP RETURN Limit Reinforces Bitcoin’s Censorship Resistance by Trusting Miner Incentives.

9. Formalizes embedding data on the blockchain.

 

[OgNasty]

Core developers are taking payments to submit pull requests. That is the state of development for Bitcoin at the moment. I have a feeling as time goes by we’re going to discover more and more bad behavior. People are tired of the way things have been going. There’s too much money behind Bitcoin for developers to be so easily paid for.

[tvbcof]

From my perspective (going back a long ways) real sidechains such as liquid ARE 'bitcoin'.

I didn't mean that in the sense of anything negative, I mean you don't need to wonder about anything that complicated. The NFT/shitcoin stuff could just use some other much cheaper chain or whatever.  They don't because reasons that I discussed upthread-- sidechains wouldn't help those reasons, they'd hurt. The value to the shitcoiner is that it's expensive to make their tokens.
...

Yeah, OK.  In a upthread search for what you mention, and other research and consideration, I'm now feeling neutral if not slightly favorable to the action.  I find some of the details and actions (e.g., methods of limiting discussion) objectionable, and I've a lingering feeling that there are things on the horizon which remain among 'insiders', but it continues to be the case that I have more confidence in most of the 'insiders' than in most of other of the players to further my interests.  For things like this, I usually favor pragmatism over idealism.

I disagree with taking controls away from the 'little people' (those who cannot patch and compile code to get what they have, rightly or wrongly, chosen to do.)  One argument could be that it gives favored and/or paying efforts such as Citrea more business confidence.  I don't believe that it is probably a good trade-off for the 'ethos' of freedom of choice, especially insofar as there is still a hope that Bitcoin gains some strength from the efforts of the non-commercial/enthusiast userbase.

From an elitist point of view, the herd probably can be guided in the 'wrong' direction, but I don't like the looks of mitigating this 'threat' for the comfort of the business world.  Especially in service to players to prefer to pilfer value from Bitcoin on the cheap vs. peg out one-to-one as real sidechains do.  (Yes, I see an argument that a cheapskate doing things in a less destructive way, and soaking up some demand at the consumer level, is preferable to some other options so it is not irrational to gently guide things in that direction.  Lots of them are working on/with interesting technology with helps with Bitcoin's shortcomings after all.)

A big benefit of a spat such as this is to incentivize small-scale support (nodes and miners.)  Certainly that seems to be happening where I'm at.

Ultimately I see the best defense against spammer-class miscreants (who don't get bored and wander off on their own) as giving the Bitcoin community some ability to fuck with them and degrade their performance expectations.  If an element of capricious unknown complicates development, and especially discourages 'serious' commercial use by well capitalized entities, that isn't to me necessarily a bad thing (even though it would probably work against me financially.)

Good luck with things.  I'll finally, after 15 years, get off my ass and build out some capability so I can help you or fight you as seems right at the time.  After a 180-degree shift back in the early days, I've always favored massive transaction fees (at variance with most of the community) which is one of the reasons for my warming to your efforts.

[gmaxwell]

Core developers are taking payments to submit pull requests. That is the state of development for Bitcoin at the moment. I have a feeling as time goes by we’re going to discover more and more bad behavior. People are tired of the way things have been going. There’s too much money behind Bitcoin for developers to be so easily paid for.

A fact you might have already known if you'd like, you know, actually read the links in the discussion above:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/28130#issuecomment-1656714337

There is no bad behavior in that, it's a fine example of how even if you don't know how to code yourself you can still get changes made to run yourself or share with others.

The worst behavior around bitcoin core is the hesitance to forcefully tell people who act like you to go fuck themselves.

[takuma sato]

Obviously removing OP_return limits is a bad idea, but I don’t think Blockstream left the community many other options. After backstabbing miners by not living up to promises made in the New York agreement and instead crippling Bitcoin, toxic maxis thought they were untouchable. It seems chasing away those who wanted to grow the Bitcoin ecosystem bought them a few years, but they’re seemingly now being overwhelmed with people sick of their idiotic approach to scaling Bitcoin. Is removing OP_return limits a bad idea? Yes. Is this exactly what core developers deserve? Also yes. Until they actively push to raise the blocksize limit to 2mb and fulfill their 2017 obligation that was made in a compromise to get segwit activated, I cannot respect the Blockstream team or anything they do.

That solves nothing. If you double the blocksize, so what, you make it cheaper to send transactions, and you also allow further spam and make it more difficult to maintain nodes. You also start a clusterfuck of hardfork drama again. And we don't even have anywhere near full blocks. People are not using BTC massively for transactions, they use it as a store of value. One of the worst things for store of value is these hardfork dramas, remember the price crashing when that was going on back then on the various attempts at forking the chain. If there is demand for transactions, then the fees will go up, and those that pay more will have a priority. The demand for transactions will organically eventually arrive in the future as physical cash is removed. If fees are too high for small transactions, then LN was supposed to fix this. If not, then oh well, what can you do. What I don't understand is just allowing further spam because "people will find alternatives to spam".
I think those that argued BTC should just stay with legacy addresses without no layers of complexity were probably right. Trying to make Bitcoin cheaper has brought all these new exploitable angles.

[BayAreaCoins]

There is no bad behavior in that, it's a fine example of how even if you don't know how to code yourself you can still get changes made to run yourself or share with others.

I am a good example of not knowing how to code and still being able to make changes (without hurting anyone or changing any existing rules (not gentlemen agreements)).

This is an example of money being used to influence individuals to make code changes in a $1.8 trillion dollar network that affects others directly.  It feels like a slippery slope... Paying for code is fine, but paying for propaganda and influence with the code is ehhhhh.....

If paying off Bitcoin Developers is now fundamentally acceptable for people that do not code, I will beat the $100 per hour rate that Peter was paid for ANY assistance in supporting Bitcoin Testnet being a free market for testing.

The worst behavior around bitcoin core is the hesitance to forcefully tell people who act like you to go fuck themselves.

I know the feeling.  That last email you sent on the mailing list about Bitcoin Testnet inspired those exact thoughts as well.


Regardless if OP_Return is a mistake or not... it should not be merged in with this much noise going on IMO.  

This all feels sketchy and probably needs to slow down.

OPnet.org can do everything Citrea.xyz wants to do with no BIP(?)

[achow101]

OPnet.org can do everything Citrea.xyz wants to do

Citrea can already do everything they want to do with no changes made to Bitcoin Core or anyone else.

The thing that kicked off all of this drama is that a Core dev read Citrea's whitepaper, saw the construction that they were going to use, and said "wow that's dumb, you can do better if the OP_RETURN limit was higher". The whole point is that the current construction would insert 2 unspendable outputs into the UTXO set and they were doing this in order to work around the OP_RETURN limit. And the discussion started with the thought that if the limit were lifted, Citrea could be convinced to just use a single OP_RETURN instead.

with no BIP(?)

There isn't a BIP; this isn't a BIP-able change.

[BayAreaCoins]

OPnet.org can do everything Citrea.xyz wants to do

Citrea can already do everything they want to do with no changes made to Bitcoin Core or anyone else.

The thing that kicked off all of this drama is that a Core dev read Citrea's whitepaper, saw the construction that they were going to use, and said "wow that's dumb, you can do better if the OP_RETURN limit was higher". The whole point is that the current construction would insert 2 unspendable outputs into the UTXO set and they were doing this in order to work around the OP_RETURN limit. And the discussion started with the thought that if the limit were lifted, Citrea could be convinced to just use a single OP_RETURN instead.

Are you sure that Bitcoin Core contributor(s) didn't write or help write Citrea's whitepaper? "Put it on paper and we will get it pushed live" type of deal.  Because it is absolutely giving that vibe.

Do you or anyone you know have a financial interest in Citrea?

There isn't a BIP; this isn't a BIP-able change.

Ah, duh.  Gotcha.


I have a front row seat for Testnet... I saw some REALLY weird things go on with v3 to push out a rushed/sloppy v4 for the block rewards.  Then to find out Citrea is using v4 and users need 10 whole TBTC to help test their product... it just feels "weird".  Lopp attacking a network to assist a private company to enable them to hopefully have plenty of coins in the network to test their startup and then these changes to Bitcoin itself... Eh... Am I tripping or...?

It's pretty smart, needless to say.

I'm seeing all types of unusual shit from yall, like GMaxwell suggesting a premined Testnet that sells to pay devs (which maybe fine, but needs to be talked about).



Also, I'm a supporter of removing OP_return.



Fuck em, ram that code down their throat...  

Let's see how it goes.