Damus
giacomozucco profile picture
giacomozucco
I hope to have clarified why.

After our agreement about ordinals being retarded (and not a fundamental threat to Bitcoin), I couldn't really ignore the escalation, initially just because I got myself involved into OCEAN. Even if the entire deal of the pool is about miner-side template creation (which means they will be able to include everything they want), for a few day it worked using Luke's own default node, which is Knots, which was filtering out inscriptions (and incidentally also the >40b opreturn that the Samourai devs needlessly used to label pre-coinjoin txs in their terribly broken scheme). The option to switch to Core was added, as planned, a few days after that, but in that brief time the whole operation was targeted with nonsense "censorship" accusations (and even worse, for a coinjoin advocate, power-user and patron like me: accusations of sabotaging privacy practices). To this day, I still read stuff like Gmax publicly defaming the company, and I can't ignore it, since he's attacking me as well, in a way I consider absolutely unfair and unfounded.

Then I've seen the github abuses after the first PR by Peter (the one eventually closed down), which I couldn't ignore because it brought me back to some serious red flag about Core development organizations and processes (namely the infamous "blocklist" episode, but also other less public discussion I was involved in, regarding developers rejected from residency program due to their perceived politics, or a couple of "DEI hire" operations ended up with maintainers explicitly praising Buterin in public). I just couldn't ignore the gaslighting attempts of people trying to re-frame some history which I was directly involved in, or suddenly labeling as "crazy", "dangerous" and "against Bitcoin's ethos" the very same sentences about onchain spam that they would have written themselves just a few years before.

These two situations, combined, made it very hard for me to ignore the story as you did, and radicalized me enough to make a "Knozi" out of me, even if I fundamentally agree with Todd (who's a personal friend of mine just as much as Luke is) about mempool policies, and if I disagreed with most of them about the "existential" magnitude of the spam issue.

When the CSAM FUD started, I voiced my disagreement privately and publicly, without any ambiguity. When the contentious "UASF" proposal surfaced, I did so even more. But I still remain very concerned of all the rest. I don't think Bitcoin is going to die. I think the role of Core as the reference implementation we know may. Which is not optimal for several reasons.