By @udiWertheimer
i read the luke dashjr hit piece.
it's wrong. basically the entire article is wrong.
i'm (obviously) not on luke's side, but guys this is just a sloppy low quality propaganda piece.
first of all: sharing private messages is not cool. for many obvious ethical reasons. but one reason that is often overlooked is that sharing private messages often puts them out of context and makes it easy to construct a false narrative without understanding the conversation
with that, let's look deeper into the article published by "the rage":
the rage: "dashjr... proposes the implementation of a multisig quorum on bitcoin that grants a designated group of people the ability to retroactively alter data that is hosted on the blockchain"
there is no discussion of "altering the data that is stored on the blockchain" anywhere in the screenshots provided.
luke discusses a hypothetical mechanism that would allow knots node operators to avoid downloading "spam" that's already in blocks.
imagine a hypothetical knots client that syncs blocks with a delay of eg 1 hour. when it downloads a block (late, on purpose), it pings luke's server and asks, "hey, is there any spam in this 1 hour old block?".
luke's server responds with a list of transaction IDs that contain "spam", and provides a "zero knowledge proof" that proves to knots nodes that those "spam" transactions are valid, without having to download them.
this is the magic of zk proofs and we don't need to get into how it works. suffice to say that the reason bitcoin nodes download transactions is to verify that they're valid, and if there's a way to verify without downloading them then the node can continue functioning without having to download the "spam".
so now knots have a mechanism to avoid "spam" on their computer while still validating the chain. this doesn't remove the "spam" for the chain. it is still available on clients that don't run knots (70%+ of the network). core nodes continue to function as normal, with "spam" and with no issues, and continue to be in sync with knots nodes. the only difference is that the knots nodes can avoid ever downloading "spam", while staying on the same network
the rage: "luke dashjr plans hard fork"
this isn't true and it's a misunderstanding of what luke is saying. his messages do not describe a plan to hard fork bitcoin. he's referring to a technicality, saying that whenever knots nodes use a mechanism like the hypothetical knots node i described above, every time they avoid downloading a transaction they technically hard fork. but just technically, not really. it doesn't split the network, and those hypothetical knots nodes remain fully compatible with core nodes. core nodes can continue to verify, their chain is not censored, and they're fully synced with knots nodes.
the rage: “right now the only options would be bitcoin dies or we have to trust someone,” dashjr writes. The proposed solution would require a consensus change, activating a bitcoin hardfork.
the quote about "we have to trust someone" is taken out of context. luke is literally saying in the convo that thanks to zk proofs and his proposed solution, they would NOT need to trust anyone.
the second part about a consensus change is made up. nothing in the screenshots suggests a consensus change. and i explained above that the "hard fork" bit is just a technicality. in this hypothetical design, there would be no chain split, and core nodes would remain compatible and uncensored.
the rage: dashjr reveals that public letters are being drafted by third parties to seemingly support the sanctioning of illegal content on the entire Bitcoin network.
the leaked conversation does not AT ALL mention a public letter that supports sanctioning illegal content "on the entire bitcoin network". luke is asked by his conversation partner a legal question, whether or not an op_return relay network will be perceived by authorities as illegal. luke replies that he can't answer that question because he's not a lawyer, but his understanding is that a group is working on a formal letter that addresses that legal question.
as far as I can tell that hypothetical letter is a simple "legal opinion", not a letter that calls for sanctioning transactions on bitcoin.
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fyi, they hypothetical design of a knots node that i provide above is just that: hypothetical. the leaked dms don't go into implementation details at all so i had to fill in the blanks. luke might've had some other design in mind. but my description is conceptually correct, and the article's isn't.
you can go back to the leaked screenshots and re-read them and tell me if anything there contradicts the hypothetical design I offered (nothing does).
also, an important point is that the entire leaked convo is hypothetical. people are allowed to have hypothetical conversations. that doesn't mean there's some conspiracy. everyone I know that discusses this issue in private has brought up all kinds of weird ideas to me that doesn't mean they actually plan to implement them.
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my conclusion is that this article is a hit piece, and not a particularly good one.
the most charitable explanation i can come up with is that the author misunderstood the leaked messages and wrote the incorrect article based on that misunderstanding
but honestly it really seems that this isn't the case, it seems like the author was employing a lot of motivated reasoning to arrive at the conclusions in the article. the goal was to make luke bad, and his words were manipulated for maximum effect
this isn't the first time "the rage" is doing this. last time it was a fake news article claiming that google is about to ban self-custody wallets from the android app store. it was based on the author's borderline malicious interpretation of the google store rules, to make them look like they're against self-custody.
that was incorrect, but the fake news article got so viral that google itself had to issue a clarification saying that they have not and will not ban self-custody wallets from the android store.
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perhaps most disappointing was seeing many big names from the "anti-knots" camp jumping on this and declaring that luke is working on a hard fork, that "they knew it" and that soon we will be getting "airdrop fork coins" to sell. all of those things are false.
this is, as always, a nothing burger. it's pretty obvious to me that this proposal never gets implemented, and even if it did, it does not censor the network and does not split the network, and remains fully compatible with core.
it's actually, dare i say it, a pretty good hypothetical solution (to a problem that doesn't matter). i wish they'd implement it. but they probably won't.
do better everyone.
https://x.com/udiWertheimer/status/1971401252450734278
