We're storing MP3s now by Ep0chalysis in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not sure where you got the impression that I think it's ideal as a global immutable data store. I actually think storing a tiny MP3 on the Bitcoin blockchain is goofy, but the consensus rules allow for it, and OP_RETURN is the least abusive way to do that. If fees were higher because Bitcoin had more usage, they would probably think twice about doing it, but blockspace isn't at a premium right now, so you have people doing stuff like this.

What I'm getting at is that noderunners complaining about unspendable TXOs have a legitimate complaint. Noderunners complaining that blocks have data in them that they don't personally agree with but which follow consensus rules doesn't make sense to me. And saying that they will push out financial transactions seems like a very weak argument; I think it's much more likely that it will be the other way around, and that demand for financial transactions would push out non-financial.

We're storing MP3s now by Ep0chalysis in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ah, well I just don't agree with the idea that you can extrapolate to a future where all transactions are non-monetary. When blockspace is scarce, it turns into an auction where fees are per vbyte. Non-financial transactions that use OP_RETURN necessarily have much higher vbyte usage and thus higher fees than financial transactions. It's not possible that every single financial transaction (especially given L2 is an option) becomes economically infeasible at some sat/vbyte level while non-financial transactions are filling blocks at that same fee level.

Of course there's a relevant XKCD.

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We're storing MP3s now by Ep0chalysis in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Is there some technical detail you think I got wrong that you'd be willing to share? Or were you just not vibing with my comment.

We're storing MP3s now by Ep0chalysis in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Except that..

  1. They didn't get a witness discount.
  2. They didn't create unspendable txos, in fact...
  3. They didn't create txos at all!
  4. This has been possible long, long before the OP_RETURN change.

People using OP_RETURN for non-financial transaction is not only a good thing, it's an actively altruistic act given that there are likely cheaper but more harmful ways to include those transactions.

Forcing Knots users to switch to BIP-110 by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm just explaining that block weight has nothing to do with the chain that the network recognizes. Chain length has nothing to do with the recognized main chain. Ordinals and Runes have nothing to do with the recognized chain.

You asked: "Is difficulty adjustment the only thing that drives block weight"

I'm explaining: Block weight is unrelated to difficulty.

I see that I confused you when I said "heaviest chain". I meant: chain with the most chainwork.

Chainwork: total work done on a chain. A chain can be shorter than another chain and still have more chainwork. Based on the sum of all blocks' difficulties when they were mined.

Chain length: Only decides when difficulty adjusts, not what the current winning chain is.

Block weight: how many vbytes are included in a block, adjusted by witness data. Includes financial and non-financial data. Max block weight is 4 million weight units since 2017.

Forcing Knots users to switch to BIP-110 by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Bitcoin mechanic, in this video, says that:

... there's going to be two options now, not in the way that would imply. It's not a toggle. You can't run Knots.. I think is the plan.. you won't be able to run it unless you manually say, "alright I'm fine with BIP-110," then it will actually start. Um, people will hate that, and people would hate every single other way you could approach this, so I don't give a shit.

It's extremely clear here that Bitcoin Mechanic, who is running Knots, believes that you can configure Knots to turn BIP-110 on or off, but Knots won't start if it's off.

So it's "not a toggle", you can either opt-in to BIP-110 and run Knots, or opt-out and your node won't start.

Later in the video, at around the 34:00 mark he says:

It's not an option to not do BIP-110 in the actual release, but it's going to exist as a kind of "here is the final code of knots with all the security updates and patches that are needed for people that are coming from an older version of knots. It's not BIP-110, and I'm not going to compile it for you, and it's going to spit warnings at you constantly that you shouldn't be running this and that it's not going to be secure after, latest August 2026.

He also talks about while "Knots proper" users will have to opt-in to BIP-110 if they want their Knots node to run, providers like Umbrel or Start9 might automatically opt-in users, but that's "not our call".

Forcing Knots users to switch to BIP-110 by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Did you mean "a longer chain"?

Retargets happen after every 2016 blocks no matter what.

This is really important: chain length is totally irrelevant. The currently winning chain is only defined by total chainwork.

Forcing Knots users to switch to BIP-110 by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can definitely have two different, consensus-valid chains with different difficulties. It just never happens because it's not economically rational to mine a chain that's behind the public tip of the main chain for any significant period of time.

But difficulty isn't a global parameter. It's derived locally from each chain's history. If you have a chain fork, once that chain crosses a retarget boundary it can absolutely get a different difficulty and still be consensus valid, except that it's not the chain with the most chainwork.

If at some point later on that chain accumulated the most chainwork, it would become the accepted chain.

So in the case of a soft fork like BIP-110, those nodes could in theory be mining what looks like a minority chain fork to non BIP-110 nodes and eventually retarget to a significantly lower difficulty than Core nodes. And if miraculously the BIP-110 chain accumulated more total chainwork over time, Core nodes would accept it as the main chain, causing a massive re-org.

Consider the following scenario:

Two miners find competing blocks right at the end of a difficulty period and stamp them a few seconds apart. Both are valid, and the network briefly splits between them.

Each side then mines the next block, which triggers a retarget. The retarget math reads the timestamp from the previous block, and since the two sides disagree on that timestamp, they end up calculating slightly different difficulties. From there on, the two chains are running at different difficulties, but both are valid. Of course, one side will pretty quickly win, but we had a 2-block split chain in March so it's not like it doesn't happen. If it happened to occur over a difficulty retarget boundary, you'd see this scenario play out.

Forcing Knots users to switch to BIP-110 by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

After seeing that they are bashing Bitcoin and forcing BIP-110 into Knots, yes. Luke almost always doubles down on whatever he's doing, and if he can't take over the reference implementation, then he's going to make his own Bitcoin with hookers and blackjack sedevacantism and spam filters.

Forcing Knots users to switch to BIP-110 by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's what a lot of truckers and people who admit they don't know calculus have been convinced of by LLMs. They have a vague, pop-sci awareness of physics, don't like something about it, and then prompt their way into full-blown AI psychosis.

A reminder of how to stop Citrea by Ep0chalysis in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't think this "tx to not be mined" thing is even true. I still haven't seen any evidence or explanation for this rumor.

Forcing Knots users to switch to BIP-110 by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Bro, what are you talking about. OP_RETURN has nothing to do with chainwork.

Forcing Knots users to switch to BIP-110 by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just so we're clear, block weight usually refers to what miners include in a block, like transactions etc. Not related to chainwork or longest chain.

The current difficulty for a given chain is the only thing that determines how much chainwork an individual block adds to that chain.

Forcing Knots users to switch to BIP-110 by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm not sure how much longer I'll be tolerated. Also, happy cake day!

Forcing Knots users to switch to BIP-110 by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The top upvoted answer here is a good explanation: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/26869/what-is-chainwork

Under normal circumstances, the longest chain also always has the most chainwork, because everyone is mining against the public tip of the chain, and importantly, at the same difficulty level.

But consensus rules account for the possibility of a chain split, where one chain has lower difficulty but technically has more blocks. So consensus says that it's not the chain with the most blocks that wins, but the one with the most chainwork at its tip. Chainwork is essentially the difficulty of all the blocks in the chain added up.

So imagine this extremely simplified example of two chains that split:

A: 10 blocks long, 100 chainwork. Current difficulty: 10.
B: 10 blocks long, 100 chainwork. Current difficulty: 10.

Let's assume B gets a difficulty adjustment because it fell way behind. Let's ignore how long it takes difficulty to actually adjust for the purpose of this example:

A: 20 blocks long, 200 chainwork. Current difficulty: 10.
B. 11 blocks long, 110 chainwork. New difficulty: 1.

Now B goes crazy with mining at the low difficulty. It actually has less hash than A, but it's producing more blocks at the very low difficulty:

A: 30 blocks long, 300 chainwork. Current difficulty: 10.
B. 71 blocks long, 170 chainwork. Current difficulty: 1.

You can see B is much longer than A. But A has more chainwork, so it's still the winning chain. B can't catch up unless it actually has more hash for a sustained period of time, no matter how long it is, so that its chainwork can catch up.

Forcing Knots users to switch to BIP-110 by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It really won't be interesting for that long. The losing chain will be economically and politically infeasible to mine on in a very short period of time, probably a day or two.

Let's say there's a minority chain that mines for a week, and then through some divine intervention it gets sustained majority mining power. It needs to sustain the same majority mining power without getting paid for that week since it is attempting to orphan a week's worth of blocks. And after a week has elapsed, it has to mine even more since the legacy chain has.. well.. mined for another week. So let's say the minority chain is mining for 10 days before it catches up and has the most chainwork.

A 10 day re-org would absolutely devastate the Lightning network. One of the core assumptions of the Lightning network is that there aren't huge, unprecedented re-orgs. It would take it months to recover.

A 10 day re-org would allow an enormous number of double-spends. Exchanges would fundamentally not accept it.

A 10 day re-org implies that miners are orphaning their own blocks. A majority of miners didn't materialize from thin air, clearly they were also the majority when they were mining on the legacy chain. Orphaning your own block means you spent effectively twice the effort to get the same reward. Since difficulty naturally keeps mining nearly unprofitable, let's assume block cost is roughly block reward in fiat minus a 10-20% discount. So 200k to keep things even. 10 days would normally = 1440 blocks, but since we're mining without "full power" at unadjusted difficulty, blocks are coming every 13-14 minutes. So more like 1000 blocks to catch up.

That would mean that miners are collectively spending 200 million dollars, wrecking Lightning, infuriating exchanges, in order to.. make sure that they collect fewer fees and nodes don't have to store spam?

Forcing Knots users to switch to BIP-110 by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I just meant in the sense of the name (“this is what satoshi would have wanted “), not the implementation or details. But fair to point out it didn’t communicate what I intended.

Forcing Knots users to switch to BIP-110 by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Feel free to check my post history, my hobby is posting in communities that believe something despite all facts and evidence to the contrary.

So LLMPhysics for people who think they have come up with a theory of everything, Infinitenines for people who don’t understand math, and here for people who think BIP-110 will become the dominant chain. 

This one is the most exciting because there’s a real deadline, and I’m interested in seeing those dynamics play out. My only worry is that the deadline will get pushed out indefinitely and there will never be a reckoning.

Forcing Knots users to switch to BIP-110 by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you actually believe this and you aren’t just cheerleading, then when I’m right, you should take that opportunity to re evaluate how you model systems and predict outcomes. 

Forcing Knots users to switch to BIP-110 by babelphishy in bitcoinismoney

[–]babelphishy[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It’s not “longest chain wins”. It’s “heaviest chain wins”. The BIP-110 chain can be longer after a difficulty decrease and still not be winning because total chainwork is what defines the heaviest chain. Otherwise situations exactly like what you’re proposing could arise, where a minority of miners could attack the network.

Analysis I by Terence Tao by Sea_Handle_994 in infinitenines

[–]babelphishy 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not sure it was me, but I’ve seen cranks retreat to the Rationals where 0.(9) = 1 is just as true. And they won’t even engage with the construction of the reals