provoost
Sjors Provoost

Physicist turned bitcoin developer aka "shadowy super-coder", author of Bitcoin: A Work In Progress

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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npub1s6z7hmmx2vud66f3utxd70qem8cwtggx0jgc7gh8pqwz2k8cltuqrdwk4c

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Last Notes

2025-05-10 11:35:39 UTC

There seems to be genuine confusion about how open source works. In particular some people believe that Bitcoin Core developers have a fiduciary duty, either towards them personally or towards some general notion of the Bitcoin network. They are surprised that I and some others respond to this rather aggressively.
Remember that this is the argument Craig Wright tried to make. He failed, but not after millions of dollars were burnt on defending these developers. And not after several quit because of the stress. Don't go down this path.
To put it as a catchy phrase: open source means you can do whatever you want with the code, not with the people who write it.
Open source lets you fork code, and modify it to your liking. That's pretty much what I do every day, which isn't to say that I don't also try to make sure other people like it. I get paid in Bitcoin and OpenSats keeps their whole treasury in it, so the idea that I want destroy potential future income is rather retarded.
Part of CSW's demands was that Bitcoin Core wrote specific (confiscation) code for him. Eventually he just hired people to write it for him, as one should, but somehow that still wasn't enough for him. I get a very similar vibe from people who run Knots but yet don't find that enough. Should we worry about a new round of lawsuits?

2025-05-10 10:02:17 UTC

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It's also unclear what he's offended by. If it's the "catholic" part, I'm merely describing the suspect without any value judgement. There's additional context that allowed me to narrow it down. I won't share that, because it's something only the perpetrator would know, so potentially relevant if they escalate.

2025-05-10 09:54:26 UTC

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Ja, ik ben een van de (daadwerkelijke) reviewers van de pull request(s) die de op_return limiet verwijderen. Mijn ack heeft aanzienlijk meer gewicht dan een drive-by commenter. Daarnaast heb ik een vrij uitgesproken en geïnformeerde (toch?) mening over dit onderwerp hier op nostr en mijn podcast.
Ik ben hier niet bepaald gevoelig voor, danwel ik raak er extra gemotiveerd van, maar veel developers zijn een stuk voorzichtiger en zouden hier wel degelijk door ontmoedigd worden. Zie bijvoorbeeld de opmerking op Reddit van achow101 dat ze onmiddellijk op unsubscribe drukte van die eerste pull request.

2025-05-10 09:44:03 UTC

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Intimidatie. Zelfde principe als een granaat voor je door, alleen een mildere stap. Probleem is dat je niet weet wat de volgende stap is.

2025-05-10 09:42:29 UTC

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No. Donations are not a contract for performance of specific tasks or the creation of a fiduciary relationship. They are appreciated of course.

2025-05-10 08:21:42 UTC

Someone, probably a US based catholic young male, subscribed my email to a bunch of lists in order to spam me. I can't be bothered to trace the IP they used for this. But Luke, control your herd.

2025-05-06 18:55:30 UTC

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Reminds me of a Bitcoin lawyer who was often a guest on Junseth's podcast, forgot his name, who used to say: "I'm a lawyer, but not YOUR lawyer"

2025-05-06 18:51:14 UTC

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cc @npub1xap…cnde

2025-05-06 18:49:43 UTC

Excellent take by me! :-)
The fact that many Bitcoin Core developers are paid by someone, when that someone is NOT YOU, does not make YOU a customer that gets to demand things. You need to hire developers directly if you want to work on your behalf.
#nevent1q…x62e

2025-05-06 18:44:05 UTC

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nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzpp59a0hkv5ecm45nrckvmu7pnk0sukssvly33u3wwzquy4v037hcqy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hj7qgewaehxw309ahx7um5wgh8xurjdamx7mmnwshxump0qqsvgyvfqz383j30szkg24hzyvvcvenmzdp2areaea68n0g8wnspdcqj6tstn

2025-05-06 18:36:48 UTC

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Quadrupple it!

2025-05-06 18:20:11 UTC

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That particular section was mostly written ten years ago, even before the Blocksize wars. Social media powered brigading wasn't much of a thing back then. It could make sense to update it and mention that each fork may or may not have a moderation policy.
https://img.sprovoost.nl/845ede961226b3d832259cca1fea1ea96d195debbf21512b1eba2918475f48b7.webp

2025-05-06 18:12:15 UTC

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Especially important now:
3. Rough consensus is achieved when all issues are addressed, but not necessarily accommodated

2025-05-06 18:11:20 UTC

On Consensus and Humming in the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force)
Classic read.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7282

2025-05-06 18:06:06 UTC

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Moderation guidelines are not in the Bitcoin Core codebase itself. That would make no sense, since any fork could and should have its own policy.
There's ongoing effort to move bitcoin/bitcoin to bitcoin-core/bitcoin to reduce that confusion.
https://github.com/bitcoin-core/meta/blob/main/MODERATION-GUIDELINES.md

2025-05-06 18:00:02 UTC

Well, according to AI - which must be right - this way the best quote from me in the @npub1hku…432p podcast: https://riverside.fm/guest-page?sessionId=2c859898-b88a-4016-abb6-c0fc6e8cb3c8&clientId=3d897568-30e6-4244-8a6d-59ebb8c8855b&archiveId=sjors-qg14v9s75&t=080a6fc0b5a20ddcd074

2025-05-06 15:54:00 UTC

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How many times do people need to repeat this? USE SOMETHING ELSE IF YOU'RE UNHAPPY.

2025-05-06 14:13:28 UTC

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There's also the question of how many people audit the 1370 commits that make Knots different. It's basically a giant patch set on top of Bitcoin Core, similar to what Liquid does. Despite my issues with Luke, I do trust him to not steal peoples coins.
But that's not an ideal trust model. Part of the problem is a lack of upstreaming. And that's not always because of a fundamental disagreement on functionality. Sometimes the patches just don't meet the review bar for Bitcoin Core. That itself isn't the end of the world either, but it does make comparative review harder.
But I hear OpenSats is going to fix that with grants? :-)
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/compare/v28.1...bitcoinknots:bitcoin:28.x-knots
#nevent1q…g5j7

2025-05-06 13:35:21 UTC

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Here's an alternative timeline to consider: Bitcoin Core as a project seizes to exist, no more updates appear on Github. The current developers are all hired by different companies that can afford it. They continue to work, and informally exchange patches.
Some of those patches are published, and maybe one or two developers maintain a public collection of the most useful patches. The end result would be that most users are running inferior software compared to the corporations with money. Afaik this would be perfectly legal under the MIT license.

2025-05-06 13:23:15 UTC

People seem to be confused about the fact that although Bitcoin Core is open source software, the bitcoin/bitcoin Github repository is a private space, not a public square. As a private space it has rules. Very few, and there's not much enforcement, but they're there. And those rules are not decided by users (in fact, ultimately Microsoft controls the domain).
People are free to fork the code and create an alternative space to work on that code. There they can have whatever rules they want. You can make it completely private. The MIT license is very permissive, you don't even have to share the resulting code. You could also allow anyone to comment and sell viagra pills. Up to you!
Such code forks are not ideal though. It could create confusion around where to download the "real" Bitcoin Core. Slightly different codebases make things difficult to audit. When implementations diverge too much, it will make future soft forks hard to coordinate. But if contributors to Bitcoin Core can't get any work done when doing so in public, they'll have to find another way to get work done.
So as a user, you should not be happy when brigading happens on the repo. Those are precious developer days being wasted, in which actual bugs are not being fixed - or even introduced because tired developers make mistakes.
Even if you disagree with a specific change, you have an interest in that being communicated in a non-disruptive manner.
#nevent1q…dctu

2025-05-06 12:44:35 UTC

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> You suggested censoring people which is a form of harassment
It's complete nonsense and I don't have time to engage bad faith actors like "BitcoinIsFuture".

2025-05-06 12:38:52 UTC

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[1] De Volkskrant, 29 april 2025, ‘Cryptomijnen in een land onder hoogspanning’, (https://www.volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/v/2025/ethiopie-bitcoin-miners-crypto~v1402259/) 

2025-05-06 12:38:47 UTC

Ethiopië is niet eens een voormalige kolonie, maar de Tweede Kamer wil er zich mee bemoeien. Tekst van de motie:
Vragen van de leden Diederik van Dijk, Stoffer en Flach (allen SGP) aan de ministers van Buitenlandse Zaken, van Financiën en voor Buitenlandse Handel en Ontwikkelingshulp over het bericht ‘Cryptomijnen in een land onder hoogspanning’. 
• Bent u bekend met het artikel ‘Cryptomijnen in een land onder hoogspanning’?[1] 
• Welke Nederlandse of Europese wet- en regelgeving, dan wel IMVO-normen, zijn van toepassing op Nederlandse ondernemers en bedrijven die actief zijn in het cryptomijnen in derde landen? 
• Wat is precies de toegevoegde waarde van het cryptomijnen in Ethiopië aan de lokale economie en samenleving? 
• In hoeverre profiteert de lokale bevolking van Ethiopië van de praktijken die in het artikel genoemd worden? 
• Kan het kabinet toelichten wat volgens haar de wenselijkheid is van het cryptomijnen in Ethiopië door Nederlandse ondernemers en bedrijven? 
• Hoe ziet de inzet van het kabinet eruit om de beperkte elektriciteit die voorradig is in Ethiopië ten goede te laten komen aan de bevolking zelf? 
• Acht het kabinet het noodzakelijk om met extra regelgeving te komen om de negatieve gevolgen van cryptomijnen in derde landen te verminderen, en zo nee, waarom niet? 
• Wat is het morele oordeel van het kabinet over het artikel, met name met het oog op de schrijnende armoede en grote maatschappelijke problemen die een land als Ethiopië teisteren? 
• Hoe verhoudt de ontwikkeling die in het artikel genoemd wordt zich tot de Nederlandse hulp aan Ethiopië? Werken deze elkaar niet tegen? 
https://www.tweedekamer.nl/kamerstukken/kamervragen/detail?id=2025D19807&did=2025D19807

2025-05-02 17:51:25 UTC

Roger Ver 'calm and politely' calling out Bitcoin Core censorship, even of people who've been around since the early days. He calls out their conflicts of interest and corruption, their deviation from the original version of Bitcoin... And they always go off on these super technical tangents. And they're mean on camera. "Won't even answer a single question".
Install Bitcoin ABC, now! (yes, it's still actively maintained)
P.S. wow people were young back then
https://youtu.be/dUxXGmgv5mo

2025-05-02 16:23:48 UTC

I don't mean to diss OP here, but free market analogies have often misguided people. Sometimes you need good engineering. It really is what led to Bitcoin Cash.
But that doesn't mean blindly trusting engineers. You should find out if they really know what they're doing. How to find out? That's a hard problem, i.e. they can't all get on a person phone call with you, some have an abrasive communication style, sometimes a problem seems very simple but take a lot of curriculum knowledge to grok. You can't just trust them either when they say "it's complicated", because that what charlatans would say too.
#nevent1q…5yle

2025-05-02 16:20:07 UTC

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To cite Roger Ver:
> The market determines the ideal block size and network fee.
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/errkm2/the_market_determines_the_ideal_block_size_and/

2025-05-02 16:10:13 UTC

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I would recommend Greg Maxwell and AJ Towns latest replies on the mailinglist. It's harmful if people use different settings, whether that's by configuration option (-datacarriersize) or by code forks (Knots). The chaos of a "free market" for settings is disruptive for the network, which only helps its real adversary: governments.
The custom Knots default of 42 bytes caused problems in the past for Samurai wallet (which they in turn used for their drama marketing). In theory it should also interfere with compact block relay (I haven't seen measurements though).
https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/[email protected]/

2025-05-02 14:16:53 UTC

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Yes, that's on. But I get a notification for each zap afaik. I don't get that many, a few per day, but I really don't like push notifications :-)

2025-05-02 13:22:15 UTC

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So although I understand it doesn't look great when I respond like this, it would have been even worse if I attacked him without provocation. Even though perhaps that would have been more ethical.

2025-05-02 13:20:03 UTC

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Since then he hasn't attacked me personally, until now, because I reviewed a pull request he hates.
In the mean time Luke has attacked Bitcoin Core on multiple occasions, e.g. creating needless drama around Taproot activation. Meanwhile despite calling Bitcoin Core all sort of bad names, he uses 99.99% of its code for Knots. Although he does occasionally contribute back, and of course has contributed much in the far past, it's not a healthy open source relationship.
Much of the drama he creates also comes across as either blatant self-promotion or his company Ocean (which I like, so that's unfortunate).

2025-05-02 13:12:19 UTC

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To be fair, my router runs BSD, I have several Ubuntu machine, a Mac to get actual work done and a Windows machine for Bitcoin Core occasional testing.

2025-05-02 13:03:21 UTC

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* after which he block me

2025-05-02 13:02:48 UTC

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If you're saying I should have called him out earlier, you're correct.
In fact I probably did back in 2017 on Twitter, because he blocked me for a few years.

2025-05-02 11:00:25 UTC

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Looks like there's a beta? https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/utreexo/

2025-05-02 10:59:21 UTC

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If you're worried about sitting on user funds for too long, and the app can't do all this in the background, it's fine if the app nags me once a day or so collect the sats. And send a push message like: X dust ready to collect!

2025-05-02 10:56:55 UTC

@npub1kva…tkzv can you add a threshold amount setting below which:
1. You don't send a push notification
2. You don't show the transaction
3. You do collect the zap(s), either in the background or the next online session
#spam #zapvertising

2025-05-02 09:29:04 UTC

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That's what I've been told, I don't know if there's (public) data on this.
It does make sense. While the big corporate miners can hire fancy developers, who would use Mac or Linux, there's many very small miners out there. Those are often "normal" people who are good at buying equipment and getting access to electricity. Most "normal" people use Windows.

2025-05-02 09:04:50 UTC

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One way to look at OP_RETURN usage by "L2" projects, is to get a sense of what future op codes could look like. If people keep sticking zero knowledge proofs there, maybe at some it makes sense to just add a zero knowledge proof output type. Obviously that's a _very_ long time out, and there might be very good reasons to never do it. But you can look at it as a (permissionless) draft.

2025-05-02 09:01:32 UTC

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And yes, Linux people look at Mac users they way Mac users look at Windows users.

2025-05-02 09:00:57 UTC

Windows is back!
Although Satoshi started out with a Windows client, and apparently many miners still use it, most sane developers and security conscious people use Mac or Linux. Over time this led to increasing neglect of Windows support in #BitcoinCore, to the point where some people joked (?) about just dropping it entirely.
But it seems there's renewed attention.
https://img.sprovoost.nl/2096c8f45ef082bde223d06fc0de0b2c866db8c7936ef7adb02f5979b0f8cb49.png

2025-05-02 08:53:26 UTC

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From a PR point of view I agree that tone matters. But I find it unreasonable to expect people to be very nice and friendly when they're attacked by a brigade of mostly bad faith actors, whether it's just people who refuse to read up on a topic before expressing their strong opinion, or actually targeted attacks to intimate developers into not writing or reviewing code.
That, and he's just French :-)

2025-05-02 08:42:38 UTC

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And from that I'm assuming various BitVM schemes will work in similar ways. Hard to predict what ends up being successful here.

2025-05-02 08:41:44 UTC

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The Stack Exchange post links to the mailinglist post by Antoine Poinsot. It it turn uses Citrea as the example. They use some sort of watch-tower scheme that needs to look for zero-knowledge proofs on chain and then react.

2025-05-02 08:40:24 UTC

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This also illustrates that if we had made this change earlier, they would not have designed the system to create unspendable public keys in the first place.
They have no financial incentive to deviate from the original design. And once such a system goes live, assuming it has any uptake, their engineers will be busy with all sorts of more urgent things.
Any typical corporate CTO would look at this situation and say: hey look, there's a bunch of drama here, let's assume the brigaders win and the OP_RETURN limit stays in place. So let's just stick to the original design. We're not price sensitive, so it's the safest option. It also saves us a bunch of engineering hours. Also, it protects our engineers from being harassed.
Finally, this also goes to show that we really need to make progress on Utreexo, because UTXO set growth is a sitting duck. All we can do is ask people nicely to not grow it needlessly.

2025-05-02 08:25:48 UTC

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Right, that would make more sense. In the insane scheme of things.

2025-05-02 08:18:35 UTC

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Stamps use CounterParty under the hood, which simply switches to bare multisig once the payload goes over 80 bytes. With the proposed Bitcoin Core change to policy, or just considering relay reality, CounterParty could stop doing that. But afaik nobody is maintaining it, and the inefficiency is a feature for some of its users (stamps).

2025-05-02 08:17:20 UTC

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With stamps the explicit goal was to bloat the UTXO set. Their marketing framed that as "unprunable".
Counterparty was designed before SegWit and due to fee spikes around that time was pretty much unmaintained afaik.
BRC-20 is just crazy. JK, I have no idea how that one works.
https://bitcoinexplainedpodcast.com/@nado/episodes/bitcoin-explained-76-stamps-and-the-invalid-block-caused-by-it

2025-05-02 08:07:19 UTC

This seemed worth clarifying, so I did the thing where I ask a question and answer it myself:
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/126208/4948

2025-05-02 07:19:13 UTC

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With regards to what I said here:
> This then encourages them to be on the safe side and use these filters. Bitcoin Core might then have to adopt similar rules in order to produce blocks that are safe.
This would be a "nice" use case for what Greg Maxwell suggested today on the mailing list (and earlier on Reddit), to separate relay policy from mining policy - where the latter can be more strict:
> That said, Bitcoin core has generally not
had knobs to adjust relay policy as distinct from mining policy in large
part because of the design assumption that the two need to be the same.
But in this case if there were a knob here I think would make more sense
for it to control mining policy rather than relay policy, since it would
actually have some effect in the mining context (in excluding the txn from
your own blocks) while as a relay only thing it is impotent.

2025-05-02 06:24:46 UTC

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Luke is signalling his followers to attack me via his clown emojis. That has nothing to do with being on the side of any argument. It's an intimidation tactic to stop me from reviewing the pull request. It's as effective as the filters though.
My observation that he is a cult leader is not based solely on this incident. He's been consistently behaving like one since at least the 2017 UASF days.