I agree that fixing transaction malleability and Lightning are genuine improvements for Bitcoin to scale in layers. 🤝
Why was solving transaction malleability coupled with an economic restructuring of Bitcoin’s blockspace?
If witness discount was not required to solve transaction malleability or enable Lightning, then why did we simultaneously increase the effective memory per block from Satoshi’s 1 MB design to an effective capacity approaching 4 MB, while assigning different prices to physically identical permanently stored bits?
Integrity comes from the Latin integritas: whole, untouched, complete. It shares its root with integer—that which preserves its identity. If Bitcoin’s fee market exists to discover the objective price of finite blockspace, how does introducing arbitrary protocol discounts for one class of permanent memory preserve that integrity, the integer? Every stored bit imposes the same physical burden on every node forever, yet the protocol now says those identical bits should compete under different economic rules.
1 bit ≠ 1 bit; where’s the integrity? Satoshi didn’t do this, we did.
Bitcoin’s fee market is the exchange rate between finite sats and finite bitspace. If we change the amount of writable memory per block and changed the pricing of identical physical memory, then we change the relationship the protocol measures. Where’s the integrity?
If those changes were not necessary for Lightning or transaction malleability, in what sense did Bitcoin preserve its integrity rather than sacrifice it?
Bitcoin sacrificed its integrity in a sly and roundabout way. We are all at fault, ALL OF US. Humility is having courage to restore the constants that we now understand should have never been changed.
