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Bitcoin Tech Talk #470

Interesting Stuff

I've been trying to get this brilliant Substack writer to come over to Nostr, and he wrote about it in this article. He's very well aligned on getting around gatekeepers, writing on subjects outside the Overton Window and from a content perspective, would be great for Nostr. But the reason he's not switching or releasing his work here is simply the friction, and the lack of discovery. What do you think? Full article here:

Decentralized Fiction and the inherent tradeoff between censorship-resistance and distribution

Expat Press, New Ritual Press, and the question of inherent tradeoffs for the outsider artist

Altseason is when you find out who the opportunists are.

Crypto VCs are like cockroaches, surviving on the dead bodies of altcoin traders.

It would be a good time to say "I told you so" but nobody needs to say anything when the carnage is so evident.

Courage is your biggest edge. Prudence is your second.

Within the datacarriersize/OP_RETURN change is hidden a change to how many OP_RETURN outputs are allowed. Previously, it was 1. With the datacarriersize change, it's now as many as the user wants. The technical justification for multiple OP_RETURNs now being standard is completely unconvincing. To quote @theinstagibbs : "The motivation for doing this is for situations where you cannot commit to all data efficiently otherwise. Think SIGHASH_SINGLE | ACP scenarios. The datacarriersize argument applies to payloads themslves, so yes, if someone wants to do ~80 bytes of payload and can do it in one output, they should just do that." To paraphrase, he's saying there might be transactions where multiple people sign one input and have one output that they get to control, which are each OP_RETURN. No wallet I know of even supports SIGHASH_SINGLE/ANYONECANPAY constructions. I'm not sure if you get 10 Bitcoin seasoned developers together that they'd be able to construct a transaction like this together without a lot of debugging. I have never seen any transaction like this in the wild (multi-op-return, sighash_single), and I have not seen anyone even ask for something like this. This justification was never brought up until I specifically asked this question in the un-deprecation PR. The multiple OP_RETURN becoming now standard was pointed out in the original PR, asking if this was an intended effect, to which no one responded with anything like the quote above. Thus, the rationale quoted above looks like to me an elaborate post-hoc justification for bad code. This modification is going into v30. Honestly, I'm not too concerned about the consequences of this particular aspect of the PR as the effects of it aren't too great (the 100k default is far more consequential), but the fact that this flimsy rationalization was accepted without much question is what makes me question not just the user-alignment, but code quality of the datacarriersize PR.

Assuming usage of OP_RETURN as the garbage can for non-financial data that would otherwise go into the UTXO set is naive. First, it's more expensive than inscriptions, control block embedding and other techniques. Second, you're expecting developers of ordinals, inscriptions, stamps, brc-20, etc to *change* their protocol to accommodate. There's zero evidence this is going to happen. Third, you're assuming that these are people that want to act as good stewards of the Bitcoin protocol. They spam specifically to hurt Bitcoin. They've demonstrated this by spamming in the first place. That's like asking malicious spray painting vandals to paint a particular wall that's easy to wash off. Again, no evidence that this is going to happen. The logic is misguided and makes unfounded assumptions.

There is no technical reason the default should be 100,000 bytes instead of 160. It's a pure power play to win the argument once instead of having to justify increasing the number again and again.

A lot of very technically proficient people are economically illiterate and get offended when you point out their economic illiteracy. That sums up the current OP_RETURN drama in a nutshell.