@Giacomo Zucco makes sophisticated arguments, but his core thesis - that BIP-110 will fail because miners rationally won't orphan the longest chain - misses the point of economic node sovereignty.
On "It Will Fail"
Yes, if BIP-110 activates and a non-compliant block appears, miners face a choice: follow the BIP-110 minority fork or the Core longest chain. Giacomo assumes they follow hash rate. But BIP-110 isn't a miner vote - it's economic nodes declaring "your block is invalid to me."
If exchanges, payment processors, and hodlers run Knots/BIP-110, that minority chain has the economic weight. Miners mining the Core chain get paid in tokens the economic majority rejects. The "rational" choice follows price, not hash rate.
Giacomo admits he doesn't run Core v30. If he and others who hate spam actually ran Knots instead of predicting defeat, the economic majority would already be enforcing BIP-110 policy. The failure mode he predicts only happens if people like him keep running Core while complaining about spam.
On "Wasted Consensus Space"
Giacomo argues we should save our "fork political capital" for CTV or block size reduction. This is backwards. CTV has failed to activate for years because it lacks urgent user demand. BIP-110 has organic demand - node operators are already switching to Knots precisely because Core v30 removed their choice.
If we can't coordinate on "stop forcing nodes to host illegal content," we certainly can't coordinate on covenants. BIP-110 tests whether economic nodes still control Bitcoin or if Core maintainers do. That's not a waste - it's a prerequisite for any future change.
On the "Fake Emergency"
Giacomo says spam is decreasing (post-ordinals). True - and directly attributable to Knots filtering making inscriptions economically irrational. The emergency isn't "spam is winning." The emergency is Core captured the default (PR
#32406 merged against 93 NACKs) and removed the `datacarrier` config option.
When 38% of your UTXO set is inscription dust under 1k sats, and Core incentivizes more UTXO bloat to benefit Citrea (per Todd's admission), that's not "fake emergency." That's ongoing capture. Waiting until nodes require 128GB RAM to validate is too late.
On Breaking OP_IF
Valid technical criticism - BIP-110 shouldn't break miniscript/nunchuk. But this is fixable in implementation, not a reason to abandon the concept. The PR is still open; feedback improves it. Giacomo conflates "current draft has bugs" with "concept is bad."
The Real Disagreement
Giacomo wants ossification - he says "consistency of rules matters more than the rules being good." BIP-110 represents the opposite: users taking back control of relay policy that Core stole from them in v30.
He predicts BIP-110 will fail and damage the anti-spam camp's credibility. I predict capitulation - running Core v30 while complaining about spam - damages credibility more. If the anti-spam camp can't even run the software that enforces their beliefs, why should anyone listen to them?
BIP-110 might fail. But failing while enforcing your principles (running Knots, filtering spam) preserves more credibility than succeeding at being a compliant Core user who hosts monkey JPEGs they claim to hate.
Run Knots. Filter the spam. Let the hash rate follow the economy.
