Understanding the Core vs Knots Debate Simplified

If you're new to bitcoin and you're trying to figure out the whole drama between core and Knots about spam and op_return, you're probably drowning in technical terms and feeling totally lost. So you might just end up saying "I'll trust the experts" from either side and just let it be. I'm here to break it down for you in super simple language, skipping all the confusing jargon like "utxo set", "op_return", and all that mumbo jumbo you might not get. Basically, a node's job is to check if new transactions are legit, keep them in a mempool, and pass them along to other nodes, who do the same thing. Think of the mempool as a waiting room for transactions until they get confirmed or added to a block in the blockchain. Nodes also check and add new blocks from miners to the blockchain, which makes the transactions in those blocks confirmed and permanent. Most of the game here is about profit exchanges, miners, core devs, wallet devs, and so on are all in it for the cash. They get paid for their work. But node operators? Not so much. We have to invest in hardware, electricity, and internet on our own dime, without seeing any returns. Running a node is like being a volunteer who just wants to ensure those profit-driven players are doing their jobs right.

how many threads are you going to spam the form with?  People are tired of posting the same corrections to the same lies and misinformation that you keep repeating. NO.  When blocks propagate slowly it is not the miner that mined the slower propagating blocks that suffer, it is the smaller of the miners.  So: Small miner produces block with not-well-propagated transaction? Then small miner loses out relative to large miner.  Larger miner produces block with not-well-propagated transaction? Then small miners loses out and larger miners benefit. In a fair lottery your chance is just proportional to how many tickets you buy... in mining that's hashrate. But the time it takes for blocks to propagate turns mining from a lottery to more race like. In a race the fastest (highest hashrate) will always win.  So the slower propagation is the worse off smaller or anonymous miners are.  Bitcoin's security depends on it being as lottery like as we can make it, otherwise the largest miner will gradually bankrupt everyone else. Similarly--  when the public relay network doesn't successfully get fee paying transactions to miners who will mine them, people work around by just submitting directly.  No one bothers submitting directly to small miners or can submit directly to anonymous miners.  So direct submission makes the largest few miners earn more fee income relative to their hashpower than everyone else, income they can reinvest to increase their dominance. And what dick pics are you talking about?  The only dick picks I'm aware of in this discussion are in your fevered and perverted imagination... perhaps stop with the purple hair die, it seems to be rotting your brain.   Your post is just a wall of related misinformation.  Hopefully no one here cares about your lame ass cancellation campaign. They're not censorship when there aren't any transactions that they're blocking.  The censorship comments are mostly also not directed at anything op_return based but the dozen other filters and filter proposals knots because of course the "11 years" stuff doesn't achieve their goals-- so they have a campaign of perpetual centeralized 'fixes' from their monarch king luke-jr against transaction types he proposes... and most recently suggestions of centeralized keyholders to edit the blockchain to remove material he disapproves of.  And the thing that changed is not about censorship: It's that major miners removed the op_return limit themselves, meaning it was no longer doing anything good and began creating harm. The fact that censorship destroys the value of Bitcoin as money is why it's not worth fucking around with anything in that space just to try to ineffectually beat back some traffic that you and I find stupid or pointless. I know it's a little hard for smoothbrains to understand but relay polices are systems with two equilibrium states,  one where the policy works because everyone enforces and no one is willing to pay fees to bypass,  and one where the policy does nothing because people are willing to pay fees and miners want to accept those fees.  The first of these two equilibriums is unstable-- it only lasts until someone bypasses and then it collapses to the other state which *is* stable.  This has played out in Bitcoin many times before including most recently the minimum fee rates and Full RBF.  In all cases it works until people start making transactions that violate the policy that miners want to profit from and then it doesn't work. Nothing bitcoin devs can do with policy prevent the stable state.  Their choice is to either acknowledge it and avoid any collateral harms, or stick their fingers in their ears and delusionally deny reality while harming bitcoin's security and value as money.  Fortunately, they're doing the former. Policy is not for blocking transactions users want to make at any significant scale-- it's never been used for that, and it doesn't work for that.  It's primarily useful for preserving compatiblity for future changes.

Yeah, I was worried that some of you would object to my forcefully making you read my posts. And so I embedded a complaint button in all of my posts. This complaint button can be found at the very top right corner of this window. It looks like an X. Once you click it, your request to not be forced to read my post will be promptly forwarded to the proper authorities. Mmmkay? I'm busy now. I'll look at the rest of your post later on. But I felt it was too important to tell you now about my embedded complaint button. Cheers for now!

There may be some pools that are not well connected to others. But for the most part it's been more or less proven that the largest pools are very well connected to each other. So even if every 'free' node does not have the transactions you don't like then it will not matter since the largest pools all talk to each other without having to worry about what the people who are not contributing to BTC by mining care about. So if one of those pools that does not like the 'dick pick' transactions and refuses to peer with the other pools then they are always going to be at a disadvantage during block propagation. And that may lead to loss which may be considered a breach of fiduciary responsibility and then a lawsuit. I know I would not mine at one of those pools. And remember miners are there to maximize profit. Anything you can shove into a block even if it's only an extra penny is going to go into the block. Outside the cost of electricity which for the most part is nominal, nodes are free. Saying people are spending money to run them is disingenuous at best. Yes you can if you want to but there is no reason to. Also, time to set one up is well under an hour for anyone with any PC knowledge. With Win10 kind of going away there are 10's of 1000s if not 100's of thousands of PCs out there that are fully capable of running a node FOR FREE IN MANY LOCATIONS if not then well under $30. We are talking 6th gen intel machines with 1TB drives. Hell I made money labor day weekend here by filling a van with about 100 of these PCs for a company that was getting rid of them and taking them to the e-waste facility. Paid to load them into the van and then paid $0.40 a lb at the scrap yard. Everyone was happy, they got rid of their e-waste for very little money, I got paid, and the scrap yard made money. Why did this happen? Because nobody wanted those PCs. Too old and slow. Kept a bunch of them and have been installing umbrel on them. instant node amongst other things. Cost $0.00 OT but important to mention it's kind of sad, but there was an effort to send these machines to people who needed them. But the cost of shipping them was more then the cost of what you could get ,once again get 9 and 10 year old machines for locally. I even tried to donate them to some other places I knew but no takers. But that is another discussion for another day. -Dave

Exactly. Bitcoin Core's view (going all the way back to Satoshi, AFAICT) is that Bitcoin is a system secured by economics and self interest. The knots vision of Bitcoin seems to be a system (in)secured by altruistic hope and populist theocracy-- by cancel culture and paper straw bans.  And like other forms of cancel culture and paper straw bans it's really popular on social media and (I expect) a big fail in the real world. None of the core regulars particularly like NFT/shitcoin traffic, many outright hate it at levels that would even make most knotzis blush.  But core's commitment to individual freedom, self determination, and related principals is great enough that they recognize that some wasteful or stupid traffic is the cost of an open system, and that speculative small improvements related to "spam" aren't worth risking properties that underlie Bitcoin's entire reason for existence.  It's nothing new that there is a sizable portion of the population that understand "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." and a sizable (and vocal!) portion that don't understand it or don't agree with it. You can see it in these threads where the OP is absolutely committed to characterizing Core's anti-censorship values as being fixated on "dick pictures" as if *anyone*, much less bitcoin developers, wanted dick pictures relative to bitcoin.  Anyone who wants dick pictures can find all that they could ever consume on twitter or reddit already.  OP just is unable to understand that principled people can dislike or even hate something but value freedom enough to defend it or at least recognize a fight against it does more harm than good.  (particularly against totally imaginary threats like "dick pictures"...) The Bitcoin project isn't going to meet would-be censors half way simply because they were loud, obnoxious, and repetitive, or because they throw out legal threats or try to bring down adverse actions by governments. Bitcoin Core contributors are certainly not going to waste their own time building and deploying weapons that can be used against Bitcoin -- if someone wants to do that, they're not going to stop them from trying by force, but they will route around them by using and improving Bitcoin just as they would with the weapons of any other attacker. The people who work on Bitcoin do so for themselves-- to create and protect a system they want to use.  They're not making a product for customers (and to the extent that some contributors are paid to work on it, the people *paying* them are doing so for their own benefit and not to make some product for customers).  Everyone is invited to share in the benefits of their work if you want what they've created, sure.   But they're not going to work against their own interest in a open system secured by economics and resistant to human influence because of popular outcry.  Bitcoin was an unpopular system from day one-- labeled crazy or a scam or a facilitator of evil at every step of the way-- and the paid marketers from Ocean are repeating insults that Bitcoin contributors were done listening to before 2013.  If someone doesn't like that-- that's fine. They don't have to use it.   There is irony too in the twitter mobs demands, because if contributors to core did let popular whim direct their actions-- it probably would be shitcoin shit all the way down because in reality that shitcoin stuff is WAY more popular than filter fundamentalism.  The fact that filter fundamentalism is a thing at all is a reaction to the popular success of NFT/shitcoin bullshit -- and which partially explains why luke-jr stood mostly *alone* in his personal transaction morality police crusade for most of a decade but picked up a little traction lately (the rest of the explanation is that he got handed millions in charity investment after becoming an involuntary no-coiner, and now can pay people to work with him and promote his positions since few would previously do it voluntarily).

You are not the first one to tell me about this. Though I haven't looked into that claim. If true, than those "well connected pools" should be treated as hostile actors. It's a problem. But it doesn't work the way you think it work. No matter if pools are well connected, relay whatever garbage to each other, and quickly propagate shit filled blocks to each other, all that conspiring against the network remains meaningless if the rest of the network have not propagated the latest block and they rest of the network is still on the last block. I would need to write an other post on the subject, but suffice to say that propagation time matters, a lot. And shit filled blocks take longer to propagate. If/when I become the BTC overlord, I'll look onto nodes going for a coffee break instead of propagating a shit filled block too fast. Let me guess, American? Over 80% of the world population make less than $2 per day. Here in El Salvador the minimum wage will get you around $350 per month and the unemployment rate is currently above 50%. And we are not even considered a third world country. Electricity is not free. Internet is not free. A computer is not free. While you could argue that those costs are marginal for privileged Yankees, they are still costs. If you pay $25.month for your TV internet, and you run a node on top of that, you don't get to say your node's internet is free because you already paid for your TV internet. A portion of that $25/month should be allocated to yoye node as a cost. No matter how marginal the cost of running a node, it's still a net expense. Point being that nodes are the only actors in the space to do work for free. And one could argue at a cost. Like you, I am a highly privileged person (Canuck not Yankee). But I have travelled in my life, and I live in El Salvador now. Let me assure you, running a node is not *free* and I sure hope you pay someone else to do your accounting for you, or else you are in deep caca. I don't have any machines with a 1TB drive. And if you were to look around here, you likely won't find a computer with a 1TB drive. Even Walmart has $1300 laptops and none of them have a 1TB drive. And neither RadioShack nor Steren sell external drives around here. Order one on Amazon you say? No problems. If you can get an Amazon verdor to ship to El Salvador, shipping alone will be $200 USD at least. And it will take over a month. The average lawyer around here makes $20k/year. A dentist makes $34k/year. And those are the privileged few. Think about that for a second. And we are not even talking about a 3rd world country here. El Salvador has it pretty good when comparing to many other countries.

A bit OT, but every time someone including myself mentions 'dick pick' I chuckle a bit because I think of this web comic: Perhaps that's his endgame. To release a version of knots that would return the coins he lost due to his poor op-sec. -Dave

The fact that someone as crazy as Luke is gaining popularity and support is Core Dev's own fault. It's like the real world where the so called "leaders" fail to solve the problems and the population seeks an alternative and that alternative is usually worse. You Americans should understand this better than anybody else these days after your people voted for a senile pedophile warmonger because he was promising to solve their problems, from economy to healthcare! I hope we are not heading toward another BIP148-like attack on Bitcoin where they end up saying "it's okay to reject valid blocks even if you are a minority". As much as I support rejecting abusive transactions that have been trying to turn bitcoin into a cloud storage, but rejecting valid blocks is a malicious attack itself.

I agree with gmaxwell. Let me summarize the core and spam debate for the newbies who do not want to read your emotionally-charged post: The issue is: freedom vs. efficiency Minimalizing spam and preserving low cost validation by subjecting Bitcoin to content filters, censors or other "gatekeeping" measures of the blockchain is not acceptable. It is a sorry sight that OP prefers efficiency but personally, I prefer freedom.

Hi all, How dangerous is it to live blowing up UTXO set? And how long will node holders can wait for possibly better further solution? 2 years and then Raspberry Pi node will die slowly? To be effective btc blockchain have to hold spam as minimum as possible. Why should my transaction fee have to compete with spam in 5 years? So SPAM competitor should pay 2x or 3x more fee if it possible.

Anyone that wanted could do what they want, the reason that it's a delusional person is because saner people realize that the juice isn't worth the squeeze-- that there is little that can be done, and what little could be done would come with a lot of cost and risk, and not doing it just isn't that big a deal. ...Except to the people who can't help but feel touched in the bad place because some obnoxious shitcoin troll did something they didn't personally approve on the blockchain and then laughed about it on twitter.  People get so fixated on defeating "the enemy" they lose sight of the fact that the cost makes it a net loss for themselves. Everyone else doesn't think the 'spam' issue is worth more than some occasional complaining about it on the forums/lists and even then mostly only when it flares up. You mean where ignorant people get sold on unsustainable handouts that can only come from selling out our future and don't have the courage to bite the bullet and accept that the state and their magical money printers can't actually print their way out of the problems their expensive interventionists policies create? Where people are manipulated by clickbait "journalism" that gets printed because outrage is profitable, and politicians prefer to split the vote up on fringe issues that are actually of only moderate consequence the the public but are great tribal totems in part due to the subjectivity and largely irrelevant nature? yeah it is kinda like that. You and I both don't like the NFT shit, but come on. Particularly right now it's largely irrelevant-- we pay for transactions equal to or perhaps even less than if it never existed. All of this is about a cult of nocoiner/fewcoiner bipolar bitcoin haters and their manic savior delusions. And even if for no other reason than attack resistance it's important to not give into these kinds of campaigns and their cult leaders. OP_RETURN specifically keeps stuff *out* of the UTXO set, so to the extent the utxo set is your concern you should want as much op_return as possible.   The "spammers" (really just people making transactions inefficiently, bloated up with their data-- they're not actually spam) already pay 100,000 times the cost other publicly accessible storage methods to use Bitcoin, if they're forced to they will just encode their data as fake address outputs which are unblockable and demolish the UTXO set.  They are not particular sensitive to price or they wouldn't use Bitcoin at all and certainly wouldn't ever drive fees up. Trying to restrict it mostly just fails and gives them a lot of free press. To whatever extent restricting them is successful it makes their grift more profitable by making their tokens more scarce.  It's lose lose and as a side effect the attempt creates censorware and a history of its use that may be weaponized against other users.  If you look deep into the campaigners they're also quick to talk about blocking L2s like lightning and basically anything that amounts to "use of bitcoin that is different than my own", or even shit like consensus changes so that trusted signers can edit the chain.  Insanity. (you know the same thing that Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre laid a total of a trillion dollars worth of legal claims against Bitcoin devs to try to achieve ... good thing we have all these saviors out to protect bitcoin from threats. Oh wait, they didn't give a fuck about that, and now their leader wants to do the same shit...)

That's true.  👍 Every pleb and Bitcoin newbie should do their own diligence and research on Bitcoin Stamps, a protocol" built by MikeInSpace. The narrative for Stamps is, because your dick pics are embedded in the part of the block that CANNOT be pruned - in the UTXO set, then therefore they're more valuable.     ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That's very dangerous for Bitcoin is more and more start believing in that "concept" and more and more start embedding their dick pics in the UTXO set.

I have always respected, even admired you, which is why it's SO hard to see you make dumb arguments like these that are 180 degrees from what is actually happening. Antoine Poinsot is on record saying he sat down with Citrea and tailor made the filter removal proposal just for them. So now noderunners are "the mob" and real shitcoiners are not? And look at the reaction from the release of v30. All the shitcoiners support it, are salivating over it, and Vitalik himself is out there agreeing with and defending you. It's a sad day for Bitcoin and a worrisome trend.

Basically, your point is that op_return is a less harmful way to spam the chain. While that sounds reasonable on the surface, it's actually ridiculous. Even the core devs claim that the spammers likely will not use op_return because it's more expensive than what they already are doing. Let me know if you need me to cite that for you. However I disagree with core here. Blowing up the op_return filters is basically creating a new way to spam the network while doing nothing about the other ways they already are using. It's inviting more spammers to come to Bitcoin. We are basically saying "Hey, we pulled a chair at the table just for you. You were already crashing the party. But now we have reserved a place just for you." If there is a leak in your boat and you literally drill an other hole while not fixing the existing leak, you will end up with two leaks, and  telling the water "Please come in but please only use this hole I just made for you." I'd be all in for a less damaging way to spam us. But only if we can close the other leaks first. Praying that they will just willingly use the new way and completely stop using the other more damaging ways to spam us, that is just dumb.

Sorry Greg, there are just too many idiotic personal insults for me to be able to make it through that or treat it as worth making a detailed rebuttal to. I suggest dropping the constant allegation that this is "ocean marketing" as betrays the motivated reasoning at play here too. It does absolutely nothing for our company taking the position on spam that we do and has been a sticking point for many miners we have spoken to. Further, we're the only pool that cannot impose an ideology onto the block contents of its miners. And if you were prepared to do some research, you'd see that plenty of our miners use Core and not Knots. If we had the authoritarian intentions that you constantly allege, then the last thing we'd be doing would be to push for decentralized mining as it fundamentally undermines any would-be dictator in the space. You cannot be oblivious to this so to anyone paying attention to this discussion, you simply appear to be arguing in bad faith looking to attack people's characters and call their motives into question.

I don't think rejecting consensus valid blocks just because I don't like the block is a viable solution to anything, no. But if I can "accidentally" get an other San Salvador quake that somehow slows down my upload speed every time I see a block full of dick pics.....hey man! Who am I to bitch about natural phenomenons? On an unrelated subject, it appears my puter doesn't work as fast when it's violently shaken by a quake. I think that has something to do with the quake altering my clock speed, maybe? I don't think you should listen to a dumb and ugly guy like me to explain block propagation to you. It's like asking a single guy for marriage advise. Rather than listening to my dumb opinion, you should listen to Gloria Zhao, lead core dev explaining block propagation here at around 1:09:40: https://youtu.be/VsUyjFkkp4E Gloria confirms it, blocks that comply with nodes mempool get propagated faster. Miners that put junk in their block that nodes threw in the bin will encounter major friction in trying to propagate it. It's a considerable risk the spam miner takes. It could get very costly to him. And here the miner who doesn't add junk to his blocks gets a headstart on the spam miner.

This summaries everything I believe.

Quick upload the image to the blockchain. -Dave

Translation: we must facilate and tolerate jpegs and other nonsense that have nothing to do with money or else it's censorship

Translation: "I do not understand why Bitcoin's neutrality is so important. Also I am secretly turned on by all of these dick pics."