Sjors Provoost (possibly compromised)

"The dollar is king, we're gonna keep it that way. Just saying, if people wanna challenge it, they can, but they're going to pay a big price. And I don't think any of them are willing to pay that price." - Donald Trump
Now you know. To be fair, it was in reference to BRICS and you can't accuse the man of consistency.
https://fountain.fm/episode/gzfxBKiY94NTCUKySPQ2
#nevent1q…zr7g

2025-05-31 20:49:10 CEST

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Still can't believe X users have their (eye) balls scanned.
https://fountain.fm/episode/rgEmfe8E7ivWuORiUdA1
#nevent1q…vfly

2025-05-12 09:22:19 CEST

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Whaha, I've been in DC more often than Odell and I'm a foreigner.
https://fountain.fm/episode/0SwABFKl22JmThk9ARlz
#nevent1q…mfnv

2025-05-10 13:52:23 CEST

Removals after removal are my favorite type of removal. And I have a PR on top of this that removes even more :-) #MakeBitcoinCoreMaintainableAgain
#nevent1q…phvg

2025-05-10 13:35:39 CEST

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 12:02:17 CEST

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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 11:54:26 CEST

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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 11:44:03 CEST

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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 11:42:29 CEST

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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 10:21:42 CEST

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.

2025-05-08 11:25:32 CEST

Guess who's back? https://bitcoinexplainedpodcast.com/@nado/episodes/episode-98-return-of-the-op-return

2025-05-07 20:17:18 CEST

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Yup, and that was just the last PR in a series.

2025-05-07 20:16:43 CEST

> this will be my last comment on this topic
Well, that aged like a Higgs boson... Bitcoin Explained episode 98 coming soon(tm).
#nevent1q…h4tm

2025-05-07 16:44:02 CEST

Yippee-Ki-Yay!
#nevent1q…nmve

2025-05-07 15:22:52 CEST

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And then there's still people who claim they haven't seen any technical arguments of this change. Sure, if you refuse to read.

2025-05-06 20:55:30 CEST

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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 20:51:14 CEST

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cc @npub1xap…cnde

2025-05-06 20:49:43 CEST

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 20:44:05 CEST

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nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzpp59a0hkv5ecm45nrckvmu7pnk0sukssvly33u3wwzquy4v037hcqy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hj7qgewaehxw309ahx7um5wgh8xurjdamx7mmnwshxump0qqsvgyvfqz383j30szkg24hzyvvcvenmzdp2areaea68n0g8wnspdcqj6tstn

2025-05-06 20:36:48 CEST

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Quadrupple it!

2025-05-06 20:20:11 CEST

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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 20:12:15 CEST

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

2025-05-06 20:11:20 CEST

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

2025-05-06 20:06:06 CEST

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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 20:00:02 CEST

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 17:54:00 CEST

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

2025-05-06 16:13:28 CEST

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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 15:49:24 CEST

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There haven't been that many incidents like this one. The previous round of OP_RETURN drama also saw some moderation. Also, it took many years to agree on having a moderation policy in the first place.
#nevent1q…uyne

2025-05-06 15:35:21 CEST

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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 15:23:15 CEST

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 14:59:38 CEST

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* already stated

2025-05-06 14:59:22 CEST

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It was already multiple times on that pull request that conceptual discussion needs to happen on the mailinglist. Yet people ignore that instruction. And as I predicted, they kept doing so.
When people break into your office and start screaming at staff, sending them away is not "censorship".

2025-05-06 14:44:35 CEST

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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 14:40:47 CEST

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You can leave a comment (not answer) on the Stack Exchange post asking for clarification. I can edit or expand it later.

2025-05-06 14:38:52 CEST

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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 14:38:47 CEST

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 21:54:08 CEST

And now for something ... completely different: https://youtu.be/2URXWmTiajA

2025-05-02 19:51:25 CEST

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 18:53:29 CEST

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Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised at a (spectacularly failing) UASF to make the Knots OP_RETURN limit and other filters consensus.

2025-05-02 18:46:33 CEST

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Massive collatoral damage. The hypothesis could have proven with a simple alt coin, rather than years of vicious attack on Bitcoin Core.

2025-05-02 18:23:48 CEST

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 18:20:07 CEST

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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 18:10:13 CEST

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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 16:16:53 CEST

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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 15:22:15 CEST

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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 15:20:03 CEST

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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 15:12:19 CEST

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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 15:03:21 CEST

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* after which he block me

2025-05-02 15:02:48 CEST

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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 13:49:47 CEST

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My very limited understanding of Citrea is that it implements such a light client in BitVM.

2025-05-02 13:02:42 CEST

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In general I'd like to be able to turn off push notifications, maybe with the exception of really big zap. I prefer to occasionally go through the list instead.

2025-05-02 13:00:25 CEST

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

2025-05-02 12:59:21 CEST

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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 12:56:55 CEST

@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 11:29:04 CEST

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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 11:04:50 CEST

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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 11:01:32 CEST

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

2025-05-02 11:00:57 CEST

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 10:53:26 CEST

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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 10:42:38 CEST

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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 10:41:44 CEST

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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 10:40:24 CEST

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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 10:25:48 CEST

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

2025-05-02 10:18:35 CEST

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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 10:17:20 CEST

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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 10:07:19 CEST

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 09:19:13 CEST

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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 08:24:46 CEST

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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.

2025-05-02 08:17:43 CEST

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To be clear, this won't permanently censor these transactions either, but because not everyone is going to be sufficiently intimidated. But it will delay them more than in the scenario where those miners only exclude things from their own blocks. And definitely delay them more than can be achieved with just policy, even if 90% of nodes used these filters.

2025-05-02 08:13:49 CEST

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I should also emphasise the word "might", in contrast to the current proposals which certainly don't work.
The goal of the filter people is to censor OP_RETURN and inscriptions specifically. They have no rational basis for this, as you explained, but I'm just taking this goal at face value.
Without a consensus change it's impossible to stop the transactions from going through eventually, but you could try intimating miners into self-censorship. We know from human societies that a fairly small group of people can control a very large group at fairly low cost. A key ingredient seems to be to disproportionately punish offenders to set an example.
So if you can gather a few percent of hash rate that enforces these arbitrary filters through reorgs (N deep, depending on budget), some pools will experience noticeable losses. 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.

2025-05-02 08:01:59 CEST

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pot_calling_the_kettle_black

2025-05-01 20:43:10 CEST

> It is about time that we stop tolerating nonsense and come back to a place where most of us value (proof of) work, ideas, and selflessness instead of overblown emotional reactions, unbacked wild claims and adhesion to various cults.
Anyway, in the unlikely event I can restrain myself, this will be my last comment on this topic.
https://antoinep.com/posts/relay_policy_drama/

2025-05-01 19:39:57 CEST

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How convenient that you don't have to read anything!

2025-05-01 19:27:59 CEST

But yes, we need to nice to @npub1lh2…a9nk and his aggressive cult.
#nevent1q…cm4n

2025-05-01 19:24:49 CEST

https://img.sprovoost.nl/c3523912bc232cb58b308df5fcd0ebac658d5e346e97abc21ed8cd5d59c6f71b.png
#nevent1q…jpg0

2025-05-01 19:21:27 CEST

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* met

2025-05-01 19:21:11 CEST

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The pull request links to a mailinglist post that explains all of this. You're not required to read it, but this "burden of proof" has been more than bet. On the flip side, those who oppose the pull request have not raised a single technically valid argument. And rather than just running Knots, many of them choose to harass developers and frustrate the Github repo.

2025-05-01 15:54:49 CEST

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I also think that if you explore technical solutions that might _actually work_ (though also require people to spend their own money), rather than the current and proposed feel good settings, you quickly end up attacking the heart of censorship resistance.
nostr.
#nevent1q…shlf

2025-05-01 15:40:56 CEST

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I'm happy to give @npub12rv…85vg some artistic license here. It's also worth considering that the people who advocate for filters do not have a clearly articulated position. That includes a lack of clarity about how far they're willing to go. Is the line really at automatic updates? Just because nobody said it out loud? The arguments in favour of filtering seem to vary by who you ask. So that means any attempt at summarising the position can be interpreted as a straw man by someone who has a slightly different position that the other person.

2025-05-01 14:04:13 CEST

"Life changing" - anonymous person who first learned about this
https://lornajane.net/posts/2011/navigating-bash-history-with-ctrlr

2025-05-01 10:32:32 CEST

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* before the release is even out

2025-05-01 10:32:02 CEST

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You can't change consensus on a whim. Standardness filters don't work. But even if they did, Bitcoin Core does a release once every six months and people can take years to upgrade. Spammers can adjust because the release is even out. So for all intends and purposes these filters are static.
Now you add a privileged public key to each that accepts new filters in real time. Then they wouldn't be static. And then OFAC asks for the corresponding private key.

2025-04-30 20:53:30 CEST

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Yes please, at least with sigops there's some serious skin in the game if you overestimate your own skill: https://bitcoinexplainedpodcast.com/@nado/episodes/bitcoin-explained-76-stamps-and-the-invalid-block-caused-by-it

2025-04-30 20:52:13 CEST

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Additionally, for each of these topics there is / was at least one well respected developer very fanatic but (imo) misguided about it. That's pretty much the same dynamic as the "blah blah medical doctor says establishment is hiding miracle cure".

2025-04-30 20:50:12 CEST

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Because they're obviously hard to understand, so people are reluctant to immediately have strong opinions about it. The problem with things like the block size, op return and RBF is that they're deceptively simple. People don't feel like they need to spend a bunch of time reading up on the topic to form an opinion. Combine that with "influencers" to up the emotional ante and you have a recipe for drama.
It's a very similar dynamic as with bike shedding.

2025-04-30 20:38:00 CEST

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> I don't understand how smart technical people believe [X]
Unfortunately this is completely normal human behaviour (which I don't pretend to be immune for, but I try).

2025-04-30 20:36:28 CEST

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Did you read the mailinglist thread where this was explained? https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CAAANnUy08NBOq3B++80Rpna2qkD6NJV9RdV9v0Oi8c3G8eq_4g@mail.gmail.com/T/#mb13230a0c1c39b82b74f928791726d6a254063a4

2025-04-30 20:35:00 CEST

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Meant to link to a later post in that thread: #nevent1q…shlf

2025-04-30 20:33:41 CEST

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It's not a strawman. Static content filters do not mitigate spam on the blockchain at all.
To continue the police analogy, to reduce spam you need actual deterrence in the form of very serious real cost. Such cost should ideally be imposed on the spammer or on the miner that facilitates the spammer. The former would require KYC. The latter can be done. But be careful what you wish for.
#nevent1q…kzjv

2025-04-30 19:05:00 CEST

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Nobody owns the project, you can simply fork it, and enforce your own views.

2025-04-30 19:03:12 CEST

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Paid volunteers are a thing. Especially if you consider the opportunity cost of not working for Google.
From the point of view of a user it doesn't matter if a developer is working from savings, government welfare, or hired by a benevolent rich Bitcoiner. Users are not customers of the developers. There's no fiduciary duty. They don't get to make demands. You would treat them exactly as you would a volunteer in the more narrow sense of an unpaid volunteer.

2025-04-30 18:57:24 CEST

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The most effective way to encourage significant censorship by all miners is to credibly threaten them with reorgs if they include bad things. Needless to say, that would set terrible precedent and probably be the actual end of Bitcoin.
#nevent1q…9hdj

2025-04-30 18:55:22 CEST

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Interesting idea, could stimulate people to use Stratum v2 / DATUM without having to run a fork of Bitcoin Core:
> While discussing this here it does occur to me that there is a different line of compromise which might make more sense-- Bitcoin Core conflates relay policy and mining policy. The historical reason for this is that they should match or vaguely bad things happen. But in case where there is a dispute over policy it makes more sense for mining to be the more restrictive of the two, because the negative effects largely come from miners including txn nodes weren't expecting. So maybe it would make sense to change the option to be one that only changed mining policy. At least as mining policy it has a real effect (assuming you're mining!) -- I'm not sure, this is just an off the cuff thought.
Though this also sounds like an implementation headache, and it's still ultimately a placebo. Since this would only be used by tiny miners, the thing they don't like will go in the next block.
From that same thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1kab15o/comment/mprj4tv/?context=3

2025-04-30 18:48:42 CEST

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So is this point from a followup:
> Sometimes developers have left in options to silence disputes from people in the sense of "look if there is an option it will have no effect because virtually no one will set it, and the people committed to this argument can feel that they won, that they did something, but it's really just a placebo". It's expedient but arguably it's not particularly respectful. Especially in a case like this where even if virtually everyone set the option it still wouldn't have the intended effect.

2025-04-30 18:42:40 CEST

> If development were primarily about choice the developers ought to instead just ship a copy of GCC: there tada, you get all the choices, write your own node. :)
/u/nullc
Jokes aside, it's a good post.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1kab15o/bitcoin_cores_github_mods_have_been_banning_users/mpou6xb/

2025-04-30 16:13:06 CEST

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Well Kraken has some sort of proof-of-reserve thing on top of their PHP variable!

2025-04-30 16:12:22 CEST

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They're used to their customer bank accounts getting hacked / phished that they're just adding this delay by default.

2025-04-30 16:11:48 CEST

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Wait until you see their #SafetyShield
https://together.bunq.com/d/61799-extra-protection-for-your-crypto-with-safety-shield