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Last Notes

2026-07-16 03:15:07 UTC

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The point of the question is not about if BIP-110 fixes all spam - no single change can prevent all spam, and BIP-110 certainly doesn’t stop all spam. What it does is disrupt some common existing spam patterns so spammers need to adapt and more importantly send a message to VCs that spam is not welcome. The point of the question is that there’s no rule change in the BIP that should impact anyone other than spammers. So if people are worried about a chain split they should adopt BIP-110 and the risk of a chain split is gone if enough people adopt it.

2026-07-16 03:10:11 UTC

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What specific consensus rule change in the BIP do you disagree with and why? I can’t see anything controversial in the BIP.

2026-07-16 03:08:06 UTC

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I’m ok with risking a chain split to send a message to spammers that they are not welcome. Real Bitcoiners will take short-term pain for the long-term success of Bitcoin. There’s nothing controversial in the BIP that miners (other than Marathon who has a side-business mining spam via Slipstream) should reject. If they want business as usual then miners should just adopt BIP-110 and all their blocks will be considered valid by all nodes. If they want to roll the dice on a chain split, the ball is in their court. We will know what they decide in a few weeks.

2026-07-16 02:55:38 UTC

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Code is not DNA. Code is fairly easy to review and understand the impact of the differences. Lots of people (including me) have reviewed Knots code compared to Core. It’s fine. If you have actual facts about some difference you dislike, then point to that specific code. Otherwise you’re just spreading FUD.

2026-07-16 02:51:29 UTC

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What are you taking about. Fees are based on the size of the transaction and the rate of sats per vbyte and a JPEG is much larger than a basic transaction. So a financial transaction might pay less in total but a higher rate to get confirmed quickly. Anyone who uses bitcoin for financial transactions experiences this for themselves. Also whose node is CPU constrained? Raw storage is more of an issue because that sticks around forever whereas CPU usage has peaks and troughs.
I’m starting to doubt your intentions at this point because just the mere act of starting to mitigate spam has a moral/ethical/legal benefit compared to welcoming it like core did with v30.
I’ve seen knotslies before. Anyone with half a brain knows that spam mitigation is an ongoing effort and there will always be people who find ways to embed spam, so we need to periodically prevent more spam attack vectors until most spammers give up and go elsewhere. Anyone expecting a perfect spam mitigation from a single change (or ever) is deluded. BIP-110 is minimal and that’s good because it reduces the risks of unintended consequences while sending a warning to spammers and their VC backers. If it was more aggressively mitigating spam there would be more risk of impacting financial use-cases, and plebs would be more reluctant to adopt it.
It might be a larp- you could be right about that. There are reasons why some miners might signal at the last minute, so we will know in a few weeks.

2026-07-16 02:27:04 UTC

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That Taycan is a beautiful car!

2026-07-15 23:30:12 UTC

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I think you’re missing the point. Making it more expensive and higher moral/ethical/legal risk to run a node leads to centralization of nodes and eventual capture of Bitcoin.
It’s not just about the scarcity of blockspace. Financial transactions already pay more than some of the spam that waits for days in mempool at sub-1-sat/vbyte fees waiting to fill spare capacity because the people sending money pay higher fees so it will confirm quickly, and the people storing monkey JPEGs are happy to wait.

2026-07-15 23:22:48 UTC

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I don’t trust Core or Luke long-term either. So alternative node implementations are super important. My perspective differs to yours in that I’m ok with Knots/BIP-110 for now (after painfully reviewing the Knots code that is annoyingly more different to Core than it needs to be) and can move elsewhere in a year based on what the best option is then. Worst case - I modify Core myself and run that. I decided not to sit on an old version of Core because the spammers keep spamming and bypassing the nodes, so when the v30 change sent a social signal that spam is welcome on Bitcoin, I decided it was time for true Bitcoiners to fight back. Since spammers bypass nodes, we need to start periodically tightening consensus rules to mitigate spam and send an immediate message to their VC backers that spam isn’t welcome. BIP-110 is far from perfect - ordinals already have a change that makes them BIP-110 compliant. That’s not the point. It’s to make spammers unwelcome, periodically disrupt their approach with tighter consensus rules and eventually reach a sweet spot where financial use cases and innovation are still supported, but spamming is so inconvenient that most spammers go elsewhere.
I’ve been listening to Rabbit Hole Recap for many years now and appreciate the info you and Marty have shared with the plebs. I hope that in the next few episodes you find a way to move to a more pragmatic stance where Bitcoiners can all get along, flip the bit to avoid any chain split and find a better long term solution than relying on Luke.

2026-07-15 15:21:15 UTC

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Over time we need to cautiously keep limiting the size and nature of data in a transaction via periodic consensus soft forks until we hit a sweet spot where financial transactions and innovation are supported and spamming is inconvenient.
Just sending a message to their VC backers that spam will not be tolerated is helpful even though spammers will evolve. VCs don’t want to invest too much in something that is rejected by the ecosystem, disrupted periodically and potentially completely shut down long term.

2026-07-15 15:14:42 UTC

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Your argument seems mathematically correct, but I think it either gets adopted by large miners or fails. Marathon has a focus on mining spam, but the other miners make very little from spam so have no compelling reason to reject BIP-110, and will fall in line if a couple of large miners signal for BIP-110 at the last minute.

2026-07-15 14:29:28 UTC

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Take 10 minutes to read the BIP. It’s quite easy to understand. You won’t see anything you disagree with - unless you’re a spammer. It’s kept simple to minimize the risk of unintended consequences. And buys us a year to develop more comprehensive spam mitigation, while sending an immediate message to the VCs funding spammers that their spam will not be tolerated.
https://bip110.org/

2026-07-15 04:15:34 UTC

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The OP_RETURN change was just a final straw for many people with Core - it’s not actually about OP_RETURN. Core has ignored the onslaught of ordinals spam for years. I like most of the Core devs I’ve met, and I don’t like Luke’s views in general. But I’m sick of Core ignoring and enabling spam. Because of Libre Relay and Slipstream, it seems to me that gradual periodic consensus restrictions via soft fork is the only way to get Bitcoin back to being money because node filters are insufficient these days. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it but most of the Bitcoin influencers are captured by David Bailey and his spam empire because they want to be invited back to speak at the massive Bitcoin conference each year. I think there’s a multi-faceted attack on Bitcoin right now from people who want to make money in the short-term and don’t care about the long-term success of Bitcoin, or do care about the long-term success but don’t think adversarially enough.

2026-07-15 03:07:53 UTC

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What’s the point of that? Almost every wallet apart from Nunchuk was already BIP-110 compliant because wallets are built for storing and sending money, so BIP-110 has no impact on them.

2026-07-14 16:32:13 UTC

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Getting legal clarity is definitely important. I think we should also work to minimize risks, and the active minimization of risks probably helps jurisdictions get more comfortable with the protocol.

2026-07-14 16:22:10 UTC

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I’ll have to try reticulum.

2026-07-13 05:16:00 UTC

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Nope - and nobody’s arguing about allowing 83 byte OP_RETURNs. BIP-110 allows that, just like Core v29.
There always has been and always will be some minor level of spamming. That’s not the problem. It’s the massive spam attack from ordinals and others over the past few years that’s the problem. Core v30 just made spamming easier. It’s time to fix this.
Please spend 10 minutes reading the BIP and you might realize that you actually support these common sense spam mitigations. It’s just a first step in the right direction that buys us a year to devise more robust solutions. That’s all.
https://bip110.org/

2026-07-13 04:27:55 UTC

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Pruning nodes is centralizing nodes. We need full nodes to bootstrap other nodes. If full nodes are only run by a handful of hardcore libertarian Bitcoiners and large institutions with legal teams to fight for their ability to run full nodes, then nodes are too centralized and too easily captured.
Pruned nodes keep the past couple of days of full blocks and also relay valid transactions and blocks so it’s not as clean a solution to potential legal risks as you might assume. Tightening consensus rules to make it more difficult to embed spam within a “valid” transaction prevents nodes from relaying or storing those transactions, so it’s more protection for node runners.

2026-07-13 04:16:16 UTC

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The censorship argument is a logical fallacy pushed by hardline libertarians, spammers and some Core devs who mean well but don’t think adversarially enough. It’s a propaganda tool that tugs on the heartstrings of many Bitcoiners.
Protecting the protocol from abuse by people who have no interest in protecting its monetary properties is not “censorship”. Limiting financial transactions based on a blacklist of UTXOs or IP address, or amount would be censorship.
Consensus rules already set limits. Why are all the existing limits not considered to be censorship? Why can’t I currently have a 10MB transaction - does that mean I’m being censored by Core or Nodes or Miners? Obviously it’s not censorship - it’s limiting the protocol to its intended purpose.
SegWit and Taproot resulted in unexpected consequences that made Ordinals and other spam possible - it would be unreasonable to say we should not change anything to fix that mistake. We should always be willing to fix mistakes and unintended consequences.

2026-07-13 04:04:20 UTC

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Tightening rules is a soft fork - not a hard fork. There can be a chain split if miners choose to ignore the soft fork. That’s not the same as a hard fork because a hard fork requires old nodes to upgrade whereas a soft fork doesn’t.
Consensus code would need to change - various implementations could change the code and node runners could choose to upgrade or not. Like how you can run Knots without BIP-110 if you choose to.
“According to @BitMEXResearch, the Bitcoin UTXO set expanded from 84 million to 169 million between December 2022 and September 2025 during the Ordinals period, an increase of roughly 85 million outputs, highlighting significant on-chain growth (source: @BitMEXResearch, Sep 8, 2025). According to @BitMEXResearch, BRC-20 tokens are identified as the key scaling problem driving this UTXO expansion in the Ordinals era (source: @BitMEXResearch, Sep 8, 2025). A larger UTXO set raises memory and storage requirements for full nodes, indicating increased resource load at the protocol level”
https://blockchain.news/flashnews/bitcoin-utxo-set-jumps-to-169m-in-ordinals-era-brc-20-flagged-as-key-scaling-issue-for-btc

2026-07-13 03:23:06 UTC

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You know how when you deposit a check at the bank, you don’t get to attach a giant poster or video for the bank to keep available to anyone who asks for it for eternity. Is that censoring your financial transactions, or is that just protecting a protocol by limiting it to the financial use cases it was intended for? Hint - it’s not censorship.

2026-07-12 02:44:14 UTC

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I read the read me. Seems like an interesting protocol. I didn’t dig into the code to check, but if you don’t already use Merkle Trees and Calendar servers like open timestamps does to reduce how often it needs to commit a hash to the blockchain, you might want to look into it because it will reduce the costs of getting hashes on blockchain and improves scalability.
Good luck!

2026-07-11 07:23:36 UTC

Just saw an interview between Isabel Foxen Duke and Peter Todd about spam.
It was like watching a couple of foxes talking about the futility of gates on the hen house, so I can’t recommend it. TLDR - it’s impossible to completely prevent all spam (which is true), so there’s no point trying to mitigate spam (which is the false propaganda spammers want plebs to believe).
FYI: Isabel did the marketing for Ordinals, and leads the strategy for MARA slipstream that bypasses node filters to mine spam the node runners refuse to relay.
Peter created Libre Relay that bypasses node filters to allow spam and anything that is technically allowed by “consensus rules” to be sent to miners for inclusion in the blockchain. He also created open timestamps that IMO is a useful tool to prove that (off blockchain) data has not been modified since the hash was generated and stored as a tiny 32 byte payload in OP_RETURN. Purists would consider this “non-financial” use of the blockchain, but I’m fine with it because it’s such a small obscure payload attached to a legitimate transaction.
https://opentimestamps.org/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabel-foxen-duke-87272423
https://youtu.be/LU-lc31MsyY

2026-07-11 04:53:43 UTC

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I get it. Spam can be encoded in transactions, and BIP-110 does not completely prevent that. Imagine a future where dust transactions are invalid (which is how most spam gets encoded), and transaction data sizes are limited to reasonable amounts of inputs and outputs, and spam for large payloads like JPEG images then needs to span multiple transactions and/or span multiple blocks. Still not impossible (in fact NEVER impossible), but it becomes such a PITA to spam that it goes back to being a minor problem of bible verses and other annoying but small spam payloads instead of 70% of transactions in a single week (if that recent statistic is true).
Just stop it with the fees propaganda from Core and think for a second. If someone pays the local mob boss for their permission to shit on my living room floor and they are willing to wait a few days to take a shit during a low fee period. The free market never produces an economic incentive where people stop shitting on my living room floor. Eventually my only option is to leave the neighborhood so only mob owned living room floors are available (and that’s node centralization in a nutshell).

2026-07-11 02:54:49 UTC

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With that many bitaxes it must almost be time to level up to an s21 and do immersion mining so it’s quiet enough for your living room 😂

2026-07-10 23:03:40 UTC

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Nice setup! I hope you get it resolved soon.
I agree with the suggestion to turn on the pump without the miner if you can, and measure the flow by filling a bucket.
If that confirms that the flow is less than it should be (with the miner off) you can divide and conquer (bypass half the system, to find the half that’s blocked and then bypass half of that) until you find the blockage.
The place where the hose leaked and is swelling could just be the weakest link - I don’t think it necessarily helps you to find the blockage if there is one.
Since you’re using distilled water, I would be surprised if you have an actual blockage - the other suggestion of an air-pocket makes more sense to me.
Good luck!

2026-07-10 22:27:15 UTC

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I don’t care which camp does it (BIP-110, production-ready, Core, other RDTS nodes), and I don’t think we have to do it immediately as an existential risk (though sooner is better), but we need to start limiting the amount and type of spam on chain or node running’s eventually going to get centralized, like we are already seeing happen with mining. With enough centralization, Bitcoin becomes a few steps away from being Ripple and that’s pretty much game over. I don’t think BIP-110 solves everything, we need to keep tightening consensus rules over time so it becomes more and more impractical for anything other than financial use cases. We’ve seen from Libre Relay and Core
V30 that node filters are insufficient, so consensus rule changes seems like the only viable path to me. At least the BIP-110 crowd is taking an initial step in the direction of mitigating spam on-chain. Fees and market dynamics will never solve it because the fees for spam go to miners and the costs/legal risks go to unpaid node runners who volunteered to support the ecosystem of peer-to-peer money (not permanent cloud storage).

2026-07-07 20:25:20 UTC

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Reasonable request. It’s not going to happen quickly though, so in the meantime, Lighting+VPN or Lightning+Tor is good enough privacy for many people who want to make small transactions that don’t need significant liquidity across the Lightning network.
https://coin.space/best-crypto-wallets-2026-top-9-tor-self-custody-options/

2026-07-07 19:27:38 UTC

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Sure - I understand that perspective. I’m not sure those are all sensible techniques in the first place because they require the protocol to ossify in certain ways for long periods of time and that’s not a risk I would take on any protocol. I wouldn’t time lock a UTXO for multiple years because if I needed to move it because the crypto it depends on is broken, I can’t. Spam mitigation doesn’t need to block script improvements - it just needs to mitigate arbitrary embedding techniques in the scripts. The most obvious at the moment being very large non-executable scripts - that are clearly a data payload.

2026-07-07 19:11:58 UTC

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Bitcoin has evolved a lot since the genesis block. If we went back to what Bitcoin was like back then, lots of good things like Lightning and (I think) multisig wouldn’t work. On the upside, malicious things like Libre Relay and Slipstream didn’t exist, nodes limited OP_RETURN to ~80 bytes and mining wasn’t centralized.

2026-07-07 18:17:12 UTC

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The “money” part. Spam is not a monetary use case.
Mitigating spam is not censoring “permissionless money”, it’s protecting the monetary use cases from the unnecessary costs and risks introduced by the spam.

2026-07-07 17:08:04 UTC

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Thanks

2026-07-07 06:37:16 UTC

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I think you could say the same about the folks on either side.
I was also hoping for a higher high. Did you notice that the ATH was a few days before Core v30 was released on Oct 10th despite intense opposition on all the various mailing lists and forums (and the same OP_RETURN change being rejected by the Core Dev community a couple of times over the previous few years)? Maybe be unhappy with whoever made that decision to make a contentious release of v30? I personally don’t think that was the main cause for the price drop, but rather that we were all wrong about the 4yr cycle being dead and the price drop after v30 was mostly a coincidence, and partly a lack of confidence in the long term success of Bitcoin because v30 legitimized spam and showed how a small number of devs could ignore the wishes of a large portion of the community and fears of how the Core/Knots fight could unfold.
Have you tried reading the BIP instead of listening to the trained seals? It’s a short read and not that radical.
Hodlonaut wrote some well researched articles showing governance issues within Core. They’re a little biased but worth reading too.
The Core press release in support of v30 is also worth reading - mainly because if you take a few minutes to think about it you can see flaws with most of their reasoning.

2026-07-07 05:00:35 UTC

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I guess that invitation to speak at Bitcoin 2027 was more important than taking a stand against spam. Disappointing.

2026-07-07 03:24:27 UTC

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Why so much hate for people who don’t want spam on the blockchain?

2026-07-07 03:13:09 UTC

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Not by enough. Plus if it’s anything like the current economics where miners get paid and node runners store the data forever without getting paid - those incentives simply can’t work to reduce spam - that’s why a consensus change is needed to mitigate spam. The rules seem arbitrary because they’re trying still allow any legitimate monetary use case. Much simpler rules would be more effective at stopping spam but would also prevent some legitimate monetary use cases.

2026-07-06 22:22:49 UTC

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I think there’s a difference between the puritans and the plebs who just want Bitcoin to be money. Privacy makes money better so it’s not against the monetary maximalist view.
Unfortunately the puritans are the only ones offering a path towards mitigating spam at the moment. IMO it’s fine to use what the puritans build now and move elsewhere later when there are more options to choose from.

2026-07-06 22:08:54 UTC

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Can you please expand your explanation of group 5? Are you saying you don’t like the forced change (coercion) in BIP-110? And does group 5 rely on all participants doing the right thing for the money focus? That doesn’t seem to be happening for the past few years.

2026-07-06 21:28:45 UTC

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Good for you to point this out for people reading the thread. Folks like Lopp already know Satoshi was against spam - they just want to mislead plebs because BIP-110 will start Bitcoin down a pro-money path that crushes their spammy businesses.

2026-07-06 04:34:36 UTC

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Yep - been there. It’s awesome when it just works and sucks when it doesn’t.

2026-07-06 03:13:12 UTC

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“BTC would only be kinda private if of a sudden no one would ever off-ramp again” there is still a privacy issue for on-chain transactions because let’s say you pay a friend for your share of dinner - they can easily look on-chain and see how much you had in that UTXO initially - and depending on how well you managed your UTXOs that might reveal more about your finances than you want. Lightning payments provide better privacy than on-chain transactions.

2026-07-06 02:37:14 UTC

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The biggest problem is when it’s used excessively on crops people eat (they seriously drench some crops with glyphosate). Killing weeds on your driveway is not the problem. The “debate” in the scientific community seems a little silly to me. It was credibly identified as “probably” causing cancer back in 2015, and we can avoid the risk through organic food. I suspect that at least some of the “scientists” who think the evidence is insufficient are probably on the payroll one way or another:
https://www.iarc.who.int/featured-news/media-centre-iarc-news-glyphosate/

2026-07-03 23:27:16 UTC

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False dichotomy. It can be distilled down to should we remain continuously vigilant against non-financial use cases, or just let spammers slowly destroy Bitcoin even though they COULD just do their spamming on Ethereum where it’s welcomed.
The rules aren’t arbitrary - they are targeted at preventing non-financial uses of Bitcoin. We should add new rules periodically as necessary to keep Bitcoin focused on monetary use-cases and mitigate non-monetary use-cases. It’s actually not that difficult from a technical perspective (as you know) it’s more challenging to get the community/ecosystem to embrace the necessary mitigations.

2026-07-03 22:48:17 UTC

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Slowly increasing adoption by nodes signaling BIP-110. Plebs are learning slowly. Ballpark 17% now: https://btcnodes.io/

2026-07-03 22:42:13 UTC

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Two story Hillbilly stretch limo.

2026-07-01 03:33:29 UTC

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Yes - BIP-110 does change consensus. It tightens the rules and grandfathers in existing UTXOs so it’s a soft fork not a hard fork because any transaction/block that is BIP-110 compliant is also compliant with current consensus rules.
What BIP-110 does is essentially plug the gaps caused by Segwit/Taproot/Core v30/Libre Relay/Slipstream that have enabled spammers over the past few years.
It’s not a perfect solution but is a step in the right direction that buys us a year to figure out an even better long-term solution.
Please take a few minutes to read the BIP instead of listening to the echo chamber.
https://bip110.org
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0110.mediawiki

2026-07-01 03:14:08 UTC

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Inflation makes asset owners in the upper class become even wealthier without them needing to do anything. Some of the disparity is from the Cantillon effect where the Government gives money to those closest to power (typically very wealthy political donors). The rest of the disparity is caused by entrepreneurial risk taking that often advances society and is worth rewarding. So…. the solution is to stop printing money that inflates away the savings of the lower and middle class (who own few assets), and stop giving money and contracts to donors and their NGOs!!!!

2026-07-01 02:43:53 UTC

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His claims are reasonable over that sort of timeframe - look at the chart of this analysis (turn off logarithmic display) and you can pick a timeframe where $30/day gets you close to $1m. This tool only permits monthly contributions - so daily contributions may have slightly better results than this portfolio tool shows.
https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&sl=4IUsHuGgxEmu5cTpWzWy88

2026-07-01 02:19:15 UTC

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I feel that way too. There’s been too many suits, shitcoiners, spammers, and stablecoiners over the past few years. Plus zero progress to get de-minimus capital gains tax exemptions so normies can use it for payments. I see the most influential people pushing for legislation that helps their specific company at the detriment of the overall Bitcoin purpose and community. Then there’s the prosecutions of open source developers and the dude who clearly wasn’t running Bitcoin fog. And we’re in a bear market so that doesn’t help morale either.

2026-07-01 02:06:09 UTC

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Some BIP-110 people are a bit like Mormons. They ride their bicycle into your thread and ask if you’ve heard about the gospel according to Luke yet :)
I try to approach BIP-110 as a Bitcoiner rather than treating it as a religious or sporting event where you need to take a side.
It took me a long time to do enough work and code review to migrate from Core to Knots (because it’s heavily controlled by Luke), then even longer to run Knots + BIP-110 (because BIP-110 is not perfect and seems likely to fail - but is a step in the right direction and worth giving it a shot and at least sending a protest message).
I’m yet to meet someone who (1) sees Bitcoin as money, (2) has a strong technical background, (3) has done the work, (4) is not compromised by incentives/funding and (5) rejects BIP-110 on technical grounds.
Lack of doing the work is what kept me in the non BIP-110 camp until very recently.

2026-07-01 01:37:46 UTC

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I don’t think reducing block size would do enough to mitigate spam, and it could unreasonably increase fees for financial transactions during busy periods. I was looking at some blocks today and saw giant inscriptions that had taken days to get into blocks because they paid very low fees and just waited in the mempool until there was less fee competition. So I can see why the approach seems appealing. I just think there will naturally be periods with lower demand for block space, and spam would still creep in then. Maybe someone’s figured out the statistics from looking on chain and has a more scientific view than mine.

2026-07-01 01:23:13 UTC

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Normies will come for the NGU phase after this bear market.
I agree with you that this bear market feels worse than previous ones. Maybe it’s because we feel the absolute fiat drop (which is larger this time) more than the percentage drop (which so far is smaller this time).

2026-07-01 01:17:46 UTC

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Try stepping back from all the personalities on both sides and ask yourself if you want to mitigate spam or ignore it until nodes are essentially centralized due to increased cost and legal burden.
I’d prefer it if Core decided to mitigate spam through a consensus change similar to BIP-110 that would more smoothly go into effect and reign in malicious short-term incentivized miners and spammers but the current influential Core devs are not interested in mitigating spam. I’ve spoken directly to some of the key Core devs and concluded their rationale is at best naive/flawed, and at worst compromised by the desire to remain aligned with the people who pay their salaries.

2026-07-01 00:34:55 UTC

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Agreed.

2026-07-01 00:28:37 UTC

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Startup time after upgrading to the latest version of Knots configured for BIP-110 was less than 20 seconds according to the logs. So no time-consuming re-indexing.

2026-06-30 23:59:38 UTC

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BIP-110 was designed to allow Lightning to continue operating because Lightning is an application of Bitcoin as money, plus Lightning is a separate layer with its own nodes and economic incentives for Lightning node runners.
Spam is not an application of Bitcoin as money so that gets mitigated by BIP-110.
If spammers want to create their own node network to store the spam forever and just put hashes and timestamps proving who owns the amazing “art” on the Bitcoin blockchain, that would be BIP-110 compliant. Better yet - just use Ethereum where spam is welcome.

2026-06-29 04:01:12 UTC

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There are rationales from Core, but they are misguided. One rationale goes like this:
(1) They want nodes to estimate fees better
(2) There are miners mining transactions with larger OP_RETURNS that nodes don’t relay so don’t see
(3) By making the filters closer to the consensus of what miners are currently mining (via Libre Relay or Slipstream), a node can estimate fees better.
The problem is that even with these changes you won’t see Slipstream transactions and even if those transactions start to propagate through the network instead of Slipstream and Libre Relay, each node will still have a slightly different mempool, so there is no perfect fee estimation. And monetary maximalists care more about spam than using their node to estimate fees a little better.
Another rationale is:
(1) Citrea needs 144 bytes
(2) If we increase OP_RETURN limits they will put their data there instead of UTXOs (spoiler alert - they didn’t stop using UTXOs)
(3) Core devs don’t want the hassle of justifying each increase as new use cases arise so lets blow OP_RETURN wide open now.
The problem is that data in OP_RETURN costs 4x more so spammers prefer embedding spam in witness data where they get the 75% segwit discount. And blowing OP_RETURN wide open will allow all sorts of use cases with unintended consequences - instead of considering each small increase cautiously.

2026-06-29 03:37:22 UTC

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Preventing the opening of new lightning channels seems too extreme.

2026-06-29 03:29:11 UTC

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The datacarriersize setting doesn’t mean the same in v30 as it used to.
“In v30, this same number and setting will now permit nine times more data than that same number would have allowed in v29 and prior versions.”
https://protos.com/three-sneaky-changes-in-bitcoin-core-v30-are-confusing-node-operators/

2026-06-28 14:18:46 UTC

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Take a look at https://btcnodes.io/ every now and then: BIP-110 is now 17% of nodes and was 12% a couple of weeks ago. That data shows it is increasing in popularity. Also “this is how it works” because greedy spam miners are currently bypassing node filters but they also need nodes to validate blocks so if enough nodes start rejecting their blocks they will have an incentive to stop mining spam.

2026-06-28 05:11:58 UTC

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3. Doesn’t need to be viewed as a conspiracy.
I personally don’t care WHY Core refused to add a few lines of code to each release to mitigate spam. I’ve talked to some of the key Core devs about it and their answers are lame (how do we know what’s spam? Slippery slope/Censorship/Can’t stop everything so no point trying/boring maintenance work/fees will solve this/etc…). At this point, I think we need a consensus change because Libre Relay and Slipstream are going to (maliciously) bypass node filters anyway, so even if Core didn’t blow open OP_RETURN, we would still have a problem.
It took me a long time to get comfortable enough to move from Core to Knots. I reviewed the policy source code of both and when I saw how trivially Knots identifies most current spam attacks (e.g. Runes always start with a value of 13 so that’s a single line of code to identify Runes) I really questioned why Core outright refused to mitigate spam, and update the code with a few more lines of code each release as spammers evolve to try to circumvent the filters. Especially since Luke and friends would be doing the work of updating those filters.
It then took me even longer to move from Knots to Knots+BIP-110 because it seemed destined to fail.
I don’t love Knots or BIP-110, but it’s a step in the right direction and buys us a year to find a better solution to spam. Core has zero interest in solving the spam problem.
If BIP-110 fails (which seems likely to me) that just means another year or two of spam on chain before we collectively decide to do something about spam.
I’ve been very disappointed with the ad-hominem attacks from both sides, the propaganda, the bad-faith pseudo-technical arguments, and the lack of interest in solving the problem of spam.

2026-06-28 04:38:09 UTC

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The game theory is going to be interesting if the number of nodes signaling BIP-110 continues increasing. It was 12% about a week ago and today it’s 16%. If I was a miner, I’d want to avoid the potential chaos and would just stop mining spam and take the 10% revenue hit (at least in the near-term) until everything settles down.

2026-06-28 04:19:18 UTC

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To answer your questions - yes that’s all a problem for BIP-110. Why you’re gloating about that says a lot about how much you care about Bitcoin as money.

2026-06-28 04:15:27 UTC

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I’m not sure why you decided to be so anti BIP-110. If you take the time to understand it, all it does is mitigate currently known spam attacks and buy us a year to find a better solution to spam.
Are you an ordinals-maxi?
Do you own any bitcoin? Because if you do, you should care about the problems spam causes for the ecosystem.

2026-06-27 19:07:56 UTC

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Miner signaling for BIP-110 is less than 1%. If the BIP-110 advocates had lots of money they would rent hashrate to increase that number.
More importantly, this question of bots and sybil attacks is just noise. Everyone should focus on the actual issues.
(1) do you want Bitcoin to succeed as money or provide free storage for spammers until it’s so expensive to run a node that it becomes as centralized as mining is?
(2) are you happy with the incentives/governance of the current Core devs and their refusal to mitigate spam over the past few years?
(3) if you want spam mitigated, then we’re going to need some consensus changes (like BIP-110 proposes) because Libre Relay and Slipstream deliberately bypass node filters.

2026-06-27 18:47:29 UTC

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Are you running an older version of Core or one of the newest versions with the OP_RETURN changes?
Also curious about your views on spam.
I was uneasy about moving from Core to Knots initially - then I reviewed the Knots policy source code and saw how a few lines of code per spam attack vector is enough to filter it which made me seriously question why Core had refused to mitigate spam or accept Luke’s filters for years (my conclusion is that the main Core devs are passionate about Bitcoin but not monetary maximalists and fine with any use case that existing consensus rules allow). I don’t like all the unnecessary stylistic changes Knots makes to Core source code because it makes comparing differences time consuming, but I got comfortable with it. I would prefer if it was a minimal patch that I apply to Core source code.
It took me a very long time to decide to run Knots with BIP-110. I eventually decided that to stop Libre Relay and Slipstream (and similar) spam threats, we need to change consensus rules because they deliberately bypass node filters. Even if BIP-110 fails, I think we should try as a community.
I’m an “almost” monetary maximalist. Open timestamps, and other minimal data payload use cases are fine with me. I would even be ok with OP_RETURN allowing a small payload of say150 bytes to support use cases like Citrea - even though I’m not a fan of Citrea.
I’ve been really disappointed with all the ad-hominem attacks from both sides. It’s a distraction from the key issues in my opinion.

2026-06-27 17:22:02 UTC

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Yes - you are correct about the version. It’s the latest version of Knots and it’s configured for BIP-110. Upgraded from an older version of Knots. For me the upgrade was quick and easy. Not sure if re-indexing was required - didn’t pay that much attention to startup time.

2026-06-27 06:03:23 UTC

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It’s not just the recent OP_RETURN changes that are problematic. It’s also the lack of action over the past few years to mitigate spam as it grew. Outright rejecting code Luke offered them to mitigate spam (code that is now in Knots).
If we assume there will always be bad actors like Libre relay and MARA slipstream that completely bypass node filters policy, then a consensus rule change is the only way to mitigate spam.
It would be awesome if Core proposed consensus rule changes that will meaningfully mitigate existing known spam attacks. In the absence of that, BIP-110 is a good enough step in the right direction that buys us a year to find an even better next step.

2026-06-27 05:42:06 UTC

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“They responded to the change” - factually a correct statement, but they responded POORLY to the change is a more honest assessment.
Their response to increasing UTXO spam plus Libre relay and slipstream bypassing node filters was like if someone breaks into your house and steals your TV, so you respond by removing your front door rather than improving your security. Then tell your neighbors that locking your front door would be a form of censorship because criminals should be free to use your house any way they want and adding a dead-bolt is a slippery slope towards government mandated home security policies. And for bonus points - claim that upgrading your security periodically will in no way deter criminals because they can figure out new ways to break in, and that no matter how much you secure your home, a seasoned expert burglar can still break in, so there’s no point even trying to be secure.

2026-06-27 05:15:51 UTC

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Very well said!
I’m pro BIP-110 but wouldn’t throw all Core devs under the bus because every one I’ve met seems committed to the success of Bitcoin. I think the OP_RETURN mistake was a few developers and a governance/incentives problem. I even think the people involved were probably well intentioned, just misguided and perhaps as you pointed out misaligned with the monetary maximalist view of Bitcoin.

2026-06-27 04:16:48 UTC

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I think it’s even less. 12.5% is in the ballpark of the number of nodes that signal for BIP-110 (it’s now increased to around 16%), but the number of mined blocks signaling for BIP-110 is less than 1%.
https://bip110.org/monitor
https://btcnodes.io/

2026-06-27 04:03:21 UTC

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Can you please explain? Are these filters that add minerals back into the purified RO water? If so, that’s what I’m planning to add. Is there a particular filter you recommend?

2026-06-27 03:23:19 UTC

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Yes - I’ve spoken directly with Antoine and his rationale is based on the assumption that consensus can’t be changed. BIP-110 will change consensus to mitigate a lot of the current spam approaches. So it’s a better solution (if it gets adopted) than Antoine’s. Also, his approach was reckless because his immediate goal was to provide enough space for Citrea to store there data in OP_RETURN instead of UTXOs and he could have achieved that by conservatively increasing the size to something like 128 bytes (I don’t remember the exact number). He didn’t want to have to justify further increases for other use cases in the future so decided to blow the limit wide open which was reckless because it’s difficult to estimate unintended consequences, so a conservative approach is safer.

2026-06-27 02:39:36 UTC

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Thanks for the link. I read it and there’s no compelling technical argument there. BIP-110’s changes to consensus rules to mitigate spam makes (valid) arguments about filters being bypassed irrelevant. It also makes the laughable approach of offering unlimited OP_RETURN space in the hope that spammers will pay 4x the price to put spam there so it can be pruned (they don’t want it pruned, and don’t want to pay more) irrelevant because the proposed consensus changes make it more difficult (but not impossible) to embed spam in UTXOs.
Also, you do realize the author of that article is an Ordinals maxi - don’t you?

2026-06-26 01:47:18 UTC

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Reasonable position. I was on the fence for a long time before deciding to run BIP-110. Both sides of the argument have had terrible public attacks on the other side. “Lesser of two evils” is a good way of positioning it. What finally tipped me over was the question of if not me then who? I want Bitcoin to be money. The current Core devs don’t want to fight SPAM. They’re just not interested in that because for whatever reason they’re not monetary maximalists. I think people who want Bitcoin to be (primarily) money should do the work to understand the current arguments and if they do the work they will probably decide BIP-110 is worth supporting.

2026-06-26 01:25:16 UTC

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I don’t agree with any of the “technical reasons” please explain what they are?

2026-06-25 06:22:00 UTC

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A consensus change is the only way to make it more difficult for Libre relay or Marathon slipstream (or others) to fill blocks with non-financial data because as you point out - they route around node filters and consensus allows this data in blocks. If this BIP-110 consensus change came from the Core team it would happen relatively smoothly because they are the default implementation, but the current key Core devs have no interest in fighting SPAM and/or mistakenly consider it censorship to oppose non-financial use cases. Although BIP-110 is not a perfect fix (and the BIP acknowledges that it’s not perfect - just a stop-gap to buy a year to engineer a better fix), it’s the best chance we currently have to correct the misadventures of the past few years and restore the primary purpose of Bitcoin as money. Unfortunately, I think BIP-110 is likely to fail because adoption is too low, but why are so many people against Bitcoin being money? I expected more independent thought and proof of work from Bitcoiners and not so much degen tribalism and blind faith in so-called experts. I’m disappointed with what I see from both sides of this fight.

2026-06-25 01:46:01 UTC

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You’re probably right about it helping to improve things. There’s all kinds of toxic stuff in the water supply that’s good to filter out and the EWG database lets you search for your town water supply test results. I love my whole house water filter and UV (for showers, toilets, dishwasher, washing clothes) and additional reverse osmosis for drinking water. I’m about to add a remineralization filter to my reverse osmosis setup to put some good stuff back in the water.
https://waterdefense.org/water/contaminants/most-common-contaminants/
https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/

2026-06-22 23:03:54 UTC

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Hi Frank - it’s good that you’re open to understanding the BIP-110 perspective. Hodlonaut recently published a great series of well researched articles about the dangers we face from the existing highly centralized funding for Core developers and how Core allowed SPAM to increase. I think centrists like me just want Bitcoin to go back to being money and not supporting the unnecessary SPAM that has crept in over the past few years because Core has refused to mitigate it (and in some cases made spamming easier). BIP-110 is aiming to enforce SPAM mitigation via a consensus change. If successful, BIP-110 would mean that Libre Relay and MARA Slipstream would no longer be able to bypass the rules designed to prevent SPAM. We then buy some time to more thoroughly organize how to mitigate SPAM more effectively for the long-term and ensure it doesn’t impact any likely financial use-cases. There’s a lot of FUD and nasty ad-hominem attacks out there and Luke does have some views that centrists like me don’t agree with. Unfortunately, Core remains unwilling to mitigate SPAM (and Libre Relay/Slipstream would route past nodes even if Core did start mitigating SPAM) so Knots and BIP-110 are the only viable path to mitigate SPAM at the moment. I can’t imagine many BIP-110 supporters agreeing to remove PoW because it would weaken the monetary use cases they are passionate about - they just wouldn’t upgrade to that change (and that tweet is likely about a willingness to consider a change to PoW rather than removing PoW).

2026-06-21 22:36:00 UTC

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Electric cars are “woke” but they are also awesome. Two things can be true at the same time. I’d also argue that the “woke” movement abandoned Tesla because they hate Elon so much, so they might not even be “woke” anymore but I don’t care enough to die on that hill. Woke or not, if you can afford one you’ll love it and never go back to a legacy dino-juice car. Amazing acceleration, almost zero maintenance, and cheaper per mile for electricity vs. gas. I have an electric car that has never been to a dealership for maintenance in TEN YEARS - replaced wipers and wiper fluid myself, and tires every few years - that’s it. All my other gas cars need at least annual servicing at a dealership. There’s just no comparison. I’d say that if you want to do long road trips then get a Tesla not one of the other brands because the Tesla supercharger network is abundant and everywhere you need for road trips plus it’s reliable. My Tesla drives itself for 4hours then recharges enough while I take a bathroom break to continue the trip. Anyone who tries the latest Tesla EVs will never go back - it’s just progress. I have Tesla and non-Tesla EVs plus high performance gasoline cars in my family fleet and for me it’s a no-brainer to buy Tesla cars.

2026-06-21 22:20:16 UTC

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EVs are awesome to drive. Better acceleration than most supercars. You can remotely turn the climate control on to cool or heat the car before you get there without emitting deadly fumes. Much cheaper per mile than gasoline powered cars and almost zero maintenance needed. There’s downsides like the upfront cost and how clean or dirty the electricity in your home is. Federal subsidies are already gone in the US but people keep buying EVs because they like them. Thats product superiority in a free(ish) market.

2026-06-09 02:51:28 UTC

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Sometimes the location for a data center is based on existing access to large amounts of electricity - that’s not necessarily the cheapest available land. Cheaper land may require building expensive infrastructure to access electricity, so overall might not be cheapest location to choose.

2026-05-03 03:38:14 UTC

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The reason for the initial small deposit is to ensure that the seed was backed up correctly to the steel plate (not writing down the wrong seed) and also that the restore from that backup was for the correct seed (not a mistake when reading the seed or entering it into the new wallet during the restore). Without that deposit, the on-chain balance for the correct wallet and an incorrectly restored wallet would both be zero. The small unique balance makes it easy to confirm the whole workflow of backing up and restoring worked correctly.
Splitting the metal seed backup across multiple geographic locations is good advice because if one location gets compromised, the attacker only gets part of the seed.
The restore is from the metal backup seed to ensure it’s both readable and correct. Your suggestion about taking a PHOTO of the metal seed backup is CRAZY - most people have phones that sync photos to cloud storage where they could be SUBPOENAED or HACKED and the seed and wallet balance STOLEN. Also - (although unlikely for most people) the phone could already be compromised and steal the seed as soon as that photo is taken.

2026-04-30 02:05:48 UTC

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And needing to provide an email address? Generate a token on receipt of the payment in the browser and let people watch without sacrificing their privacy (or needing to create an anonymous email address).

2026-04-09 01:40:37 UTC

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You probably already know this, but do NOT enter the seed phrase into a website that says it will check it for you.
My approach is to deposit a tiny amount of BTC into a newly created hardware wallet then put the seed phrase on virtually indestructible steel and restore from that steel backup onto a second hardware wallet to ensure I stored the correct seed phrase before I start using the wallet.
AFAIK the only way to test a seed phrase is to restore from it.

2026-02-21 09:54:19 UTC

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Core Devs made a massive controversial change to the default node behavior. Sure, it wasn’t a consensus change, but we should tighten consensus rules on Bitcoin to mitigate the problem of non-financial use-cases. If we had already tightened consensus then the recent Core dev recklessness would not have been possible, and they wouldn’t have felt compelled to do it because the Citrea use-cases would have already been forced to not spam the blockchain due to consensus rules. It’s time to re-affirm that Bitcoin is money not arbitrary data storage. Consensus changes are the way to do this correctly.

2026-02-21 09:16:53 UTC

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@nprofile…2uzc

2026-02-21 09:16:25 UTC

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@ODELL - this sounds like something opensats should fund as an alternative to both Core and Knots.

2026-02-21 09:05:06 UTC

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Agreed - Core definitely overstepped with that massive controversial reckless loosening. As a long-term software engineer and manager of software engineering teams, I would have fired them all for that lack of understanding of the unintended consequences and deliberate side-stepping of controls by loosening so much because they don’t want to go back to the community for future loosening. What in your opinion is the “fix” because what I’ve heard from you so far is to run Core v29 and not upgrade, but that’s not really a “fix” to the problem that a very very small number of Core developers made a massive unnecessary high risk change to the default node implementation that a lot of people brainlessly upgrade to. Having lots of nodes switch to Knots is not ideal either because that’s a different concentration risk. Is OpenSats actively funding some other (non-Core) implementations to mitigate this obvious risk to Bitcoin?

2026-02-17 11:19:07 UTC

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I’m going to assume you’re trolling. Most spammers don’t use OP_RETURN because they get a 75% discount if they embed their spam using SegWit. OP_RETURN is about VC-backed spammers who want to “comply” with the “mainstream BTC standards” so their investors don’t get spooked. E.g. Citrea that is VC-backed by Lopp.

2026-02-12 10:20:42 UTC

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For those reading the thread (because you obviously already understand this - and that’s why you keep pushing it), 1 BTC for you is far less of a commitment than 1 BTC for many other people.
That’s if the bet makes sense. I’m not sure this bet even makes sense.
I think the issue people are raising is that spam is bad and that we should discourage spam. Your response should also be that spam is bad - but you refuse to say that, so people reasonably conclude that you have a financial interest in spamming the Bitcoin blockchain.
We can define spam as non-monetary use of Bitcoin - then legitimately argue about how to identify that via dust outputs etc…
We should also agree that fighting spam is not really hard (it’s tedious, but not difficult from a technical perspective. Knots has some very simple spam filters Core could adopt - that would need to be periodically updated as spammers change tactics).

2026-02-12 09:50:14 UTC

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Who was claiming that “Bitcoin Core v30 was going to result in a massive node crash / network outage”? It seems like you offered a bet that nobody would reasonably take and now claim it means people were wrong about something vaguely related.
Instead, can you please explain the rationale for the Core v30 changes to OP_RETURN and why they are beneficial for Bitcoin as money? I still have not heard a single rational explanation for that change.

2026-02-12 09:42:02 UTC

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We should not be arguing about this. Spammers say you can’t define “spam”. It’s not that difficult- if you need to attach large amounts of arbitrary data, or hide it in massive amounts of unspendable “dust” outputs, then it’s not a financial transaction, and belongs somewhere else that’s not on the bitcoin blockchain. I agree there’s a bit of a slippery slope here - like how side-chains anchor on the base layer blockchain, and we should periodically reconsider how much arbitrary data is needed for financially adjacent use-cases.

2026-02-12 09:22:04 UTC

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Weird - this seems like we agree on spam being bad, but in the other thread you are advocating “permissionlessness” (I.e. spamming). What am I misunderstanding?

2026-02-12 09:11:05 UTC

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If miners including it is sufficient for it being ok, that’s ignoring the centralization impact of the externalities they impose on nodes. If miners choose to include even more toxic arbitrary data due to the lax Core v30 filters, or massive amounts of non-financial data (even if it’s not toxic) then fewer people will run nodes, and Bitcoin gets more centralized, which increases the risks of (future) censorship.

2026-02-12 08:55:27 UTC

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I think this libertarian view of “permissionless” (without any boundaries whatsoever) is a risk for bitcoin. Yes, the protocol allows it, but that doesn’t make it good for bitcoin, and until Core v30, default node policy discouraged it. We should agree that bitcoin needs to focus on being money and leave the other use-cases to other protocols/platforms. I’m not a fan of BIP-110, but Core really dropped the ball on spam and that’s not good for bitcoin. Are you running a Core v30 node?

2026-02-12 08:37:02 UTC

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Please do the work to understand this issue. If you believe that bitcoin is money, then large amounts of arbitrary data storage is not acceptable because it weakens bitcoin as money (because nodes incur the cost of storing the data while miners extract the value of mining it). Saying that all financial transactions are ok, and that attaching large amounts of non-financial data is not ok, is not *censorship* - it’s common sense. Try depositing a check at your bank and attaching a poster size photo and requiring your bank to archive that photo and make it available to everyone forever - no matter what the photo is of. That’s not a monetary use-case, and has no place in the bitcoin ecosystem.

2025-12-19 03:32:27 UTC

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They took their time - low time preference was their super power. For example, it took 70 years to carve this chapel in an underground salt mine in Poland: https://www.visitwieliczkasaltmine.com/st-kingas-chapel

2025-12-19 03:20:50 UTC

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Wow - would not have guessed that!

2025-12-17 18:33:44 UTC

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Wow! Just confirmed that myself on Google. DuckDuckGo still returns it as the first result.

2025-12-16 05:44:53 UTC

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https://forbestadvice.com/Religion_Spirituality/Images/Jesus_Dionysus_Krishna_Mithra_Horus.jpg