BIP 110 contains literally nothing that a "monetary maxi" (whatever that is) would want to see in a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal. Nothing to help Layer 2s to scale. Nothing to help the relay network with DOS attacks. Nothing to help privacy. Nothing to help small mining pools to see the same transactions that the big pools are getting. Nothing to help with the faster block propagation that will benefit the small pools. Nothing like Cluster Mempool, which will help small pools to play on a level playing field with the big pools.

The long term future of Bitcoin depends on anonymous miners being able to connect to the network, see all the transactions that are likely to be mined, quickly see the other blocks so they can mine on top of them, and be able to broadcast their blocks and have them propagate quickly and be built upon by the other miners. This is needed to ensure the small miners and small pools can mine profitably, i.e. they have an incentive to mine things that the government-controlled big pools are unwilling to mine. They must be able to include any consensus-valid transaction; i.e. have no corporation or committee or government which blocks the 'naughty' transactions

BIP 110 contributes nothing to any of this. It doesn't even try to do so

If you want less spam in the blocks, maybe them smaller. Luke Dashjr has suggested 300kB. Why not go further? 100kB, 10kB. 0kB would get rid of all the spam.

That might seem like a stupid point in the last paragraph. But I'm actually making a very important point. Our goal is to make Bitcoin the best money, to maximize its ability to instantly settle our private transactions at a very high frequency. If you "fight spam" and you don't care that you are harming the moneyness of bitcoin, then I can't talk to you. "Fighting spam" simply isn't a valid goal in itself; it best, it's a means to an end. Every proposal that somebody makes to fight spam will be judged exclusively on how to helps or hinders our real goals

We want and need our Layer 2s (Lightning, Ark, Lightning on Ark's Channel Factories) to massively scale, along with other Bitcoin scaling ideas like Cashu, in order that billions of people can make dozens of payments each day. (I'm working on extremely-high-frequency micropayments within Cashu)

We want as much as possible to stay off-chain in order to keep fees on blockchain as low as possible. Low fees today gives us room to onboard billions of people. Low fees help with security of the Layer 2s, as users of Lightning need the ability to quickly and cheaply access Layer 1 if their channel partner is cheating

We will continue to work on all the above, making the fees on L1 as low as possible

This means that blockspace will, if we succeed, stay cheap for a long time. Also, there is a basic fact:

Basic Fact: Steganography exists

If blockspace is cheap, then spammers will fill it with spam. This is a meaningless and fully-expected side effect.

There are lots of ways to encode spam in the blockchain. Some methods involve contiguous bytes and some do not. Nobody really cares about the distinction. Pseudo-lawyers will try to pretend that contiguous bytes are more dangerous than non-contiguous

But they are wrong legally, wrong technically, and wrong in every possible way about "contiguousness". The "contiguous" discussion is now over

Remember Mike Hearn and his "RBF derangement syndrome"? Remember MempoolRBF? If big pools are getting consensus-valid transactions via out-of-band systems (e.g. Mara's Slipstream) and are including them in blocks, then this is an advantage to big pools and a disadvantage to small pools

We know that a critical responsibility of the public relay network is the help the small pools so they can earn money at the same rate as the big pools. This is what decentralized mining is all about

Therefore, there will always be people who will help to relay those kids of transactions, in order to help the small pools. They'll mine fee-bumping transactions where the original transaction didn't signal willingness to be fee-bumped. They'll mine under 1-sat-per-vByte. They'll mine large OP_RETURNs if the big pools are benefiting from them

When a spammer posts a large OP_RETURN via an out-of-band system, we don't care about the fact that a spammer posted the transaction. It could be a heroic freedom fighter getting important information - or important payments - onto the chain. Spammer-vs-monetary is not the issue. BigPool-versus-SmallPool is the issue

As every Bitcoiner has learned in recent years, it's sufficient for a few dozen people to switch on relaxed nodes (LibreRelay, Core with lower fees rates, ...) and they will win. Moving policy close to consensus is easy to do, simply by firing up a few nodes. Trying to do the opposite, firing up thousands of filtering nodes, is laughably stupid

There will always be many people willing to help the small pools by relaxing their policy in cases where the big miners are getting this advantage. If you don't like it, you must engage your brain to think of a good response. If your opponents can trivially beat you by switching on a few dozens nodes, then you need to accept their existence as a fact in your game theory

The Knots movement pretends to be for decentralization of mining. If that was true, they would encourage (in the right circumstances) things like LibreRelay. It's truly bizarre that they took literally the opposite approach, and are trying to make it difficult for small pools and small miners.

Why do people run nodes? There are broadly two categories of reasons. Obviously, we run them for our own ability to make transactions and to monitor that our transactions go through correctly. But there are also less "selfish" motivations. I run my node in order to help small pools. We need to keep the miners divided, working for us, and that means allowing small miners to mine whatever consensus-valid transactions they want, and it means ensuring it's economically viable for them to do so.

That is the main role of the relay network, and a few dozen 'non-filtering' nodes are sufficient; and this is why Bitcoin will win.

Finally, BIP110 explicitly attacks many important things for the moneyness of Bitcoin. Attacking the OP_SUCCESS opcodes is particularly dumb. No sane person thinks that Bitcoin won't be having dozens of OP_SUCCESS opcodes for centuries to come. Just get over it

There's a lot more that I can say on this. Clearly, the orchestrators of BIP 110 relish in all the sexist and abusive rhetoric that is spread by their retarded bots and lapped up by some plebs. But I'm too lazy to write about that

Basically, my first paragraph above sums it up nicely

#bip110 #AskNostr #Spam