So are you *for* this conservatism Jack? Would you like to go back to pre segwit?
Yes. The more I think this through, the more it feels like the only coherent path forward. To me, the Core vs. Knots debate has become a reflection of binary politics. Both sides begin with conclusions and then defend them with a lot of subjectivity. I think Bitcoin deserves something better while acknowledging both parties.
Rather than asking what Core wants or what Knots wants, we should ask what the physics of Bitcoin requires. Nick and I have converged on this direction after talking about it, and others are beginning to arrive at the same conclusion through the mathematics.
Lightning does not require witness discounting or an implicit increase in block size. The mistake in SegWit was not transaction malleability fixes or enabling second-layer protocols. The mistake was altering the economics of blockspace by discounting one class of permanent memory relative to another. In doing so, we departed from the constants Satoshi established at Genesis. We are no longer mining blocks with the same conserved symmetry that defined the original protocol. We have changed Bitcoin’s “speed of light” (speed of memory).
If every permanently stored bit imposes the same physical burden on every node forever, then every bit should compete under the same economic rules. That is the conservation law Bitcoin originally satisfied. SegWit broke that symmetry.
I believe restoring those original block economics would resolve much of what we now call the “spam problem.” It would dramatically reduce the amount of discounted space available for abuse while forcing every participant to pay the same price for the same permanent burden placed upon the network. Whether additional policy limits are desirable becomes a separate discussion. The first step is restoring the conservation law.
As we investigate the mathematics and the physics we can see Bitcoin has operated for nearly nine years under a distorted economic geometry. Over two halvings, we have fundamentally changed the relationship between a fixed supply of 21 million BTC and a finite supply of blockspace. We expanded the effective memory surface while simultaneously assigning unequal prices to equal physical bits.
The original protocol satisfied two simple conservation principles:
1 sat = 1 sat
1 bit = 1 bit
The first still holds. The second no longer does.
Bitcoin’s fee market is fundamentally an exchange between sats and bits. Satoshis bid for permanent memory. When we discounted witness data, we devalued one class of bits relative to another and broke the economic equivalence between identical physical memory. In distorting the bits we also distorted the sats since the relationship of energy/value, information and time are what’s fundamental.
Recovering 1 bit = 1 bit conservation is just as fundamental as 1 sat = 1 sat
Rather than asking what Core wants or what Knots wants, we should ask what the physics of Bitcoin requires. Nick and I have converged on this direction after talking about it, and others are beginning to arrive at the same conclusion through the mathematics.
Lightning does not require witness discounting or an implicit increase in block size. The mistake in SegWit was not transaction malleability fixes or enabling second-layer protocols. The mistake was altering the economics of blockspace by discounting one class of permanent memory relative to another. In doing so, we departed from the constants Satoshi established at Genesis. We are no longer mining blocks with the same conserved symmetry that defined the original protocol. We have changed Bitcoin’s “speed of light” (speed of memory).
If every permanently stored bit imposes the same physical burden on every node forever, then every bit should compete under the same economic rules. That is the conservation law Bitcoin originally satisfied. SegWit broke that symmetry.
I believe restoring those original block economics would resolve much of what we now call the “spam problem.” It would dramatically reduce the amount of discounted space available for abuse while forcing every participant to pay the same price for the same permanent burden placed upon the network. Whether additional policy limits are desirable becomes a separate discussion. The first step is restoring the conservation law.
As we investigate the mathematics and the physics we can see Bitcoin has operated for nearly nine years under a distorted economic geometry. Over two halvings, we have fundamentally changed the relationship between a fixed supply of 21 million BTC and a finite supply of blockspace. We expanded the effective memory surface while simultaneously assigning unequal prices to equal physical bits.
The original protocol satisfied two simple conservation principles:
1 sat = 1 sat
1 bit = 1 bit
The first still holds. The second no longer does.
Bitcoin’s fee market is fundamentally an exchange between sats and bits. Satoshis bid for permanent memory. When we discounted witness data, we devalued one class of bits relative to another and broke the economic equivalence between identical physical memory. In distorting the bits we also distorted the sats since the relationship of energy/value, information and time are what’s fundamental.
Recovering 1 bit = 1 bit conservation is just as fundamental as 1 sat = 1 sat
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