REPOST FROM SOURCE: https://xcancel.com/jamesob/status/1860340932706730261

---

BITCOIN CORE'S LOSS OF FOCUS

The legacy technical leadership in bitcoin is becoming increasingly less effective.

--

Almost universally, Core and "graybeard" devs are not focusing on _the_ fundamental problem in bitcoin: preserving trustless UTXO ownership.

Instead they are distracted with valuable but secondary issues like mempool policy, Core code architecture, and minor IBD performance. These things are important in their own right, but they fundamentally don't matter if in times of trouble most users can't take possession of their own coins.

Core devs are exceptionally talented people. The brightest engineers. But the priorities of the project are out of whack.

The aggregate focus does not reflect the thing that makes bitcoin a unique asset: trustless custody.

--

Given the current limits of bitcoin, even upper-middle class Americans will not be able to self-custody, let alone the rest of the world.

If bitcoin doesn't figure out how to ensure that most users have a trustless way of owning and sometimes moving coins, it will become basically indistinguishable from a gold ETF. A row in some OFAC-compliant database. Another financial widget that is subject to the regulatory dictates of government.

In fact, if bitcoin does not scale UTXO ownership, gold will have the advantage that at least small amounts of it *can* be self-custodied and traded peer-to-peer. The same won't be able to be said for bitcoin. In a world where on-chain fees are in the thousands of dollars and there is not a workable, trustless layer two, most coins will be stuck with custodians.

Forget payments. I'm talking about savings. I'm talking about less than checking-account volume. 1-2 transactions a month.

If you think that most people should be able to DCA and withdrawal to self-custody once a month, maybe spend once every few years for big purchases, I've got news for you:

Given bitcoin's current limitations, only 18 million users can do that. A little over 5% of Americans.

--

Right now, the chain capacity is able to meet demand for self-custody because we are in a time of relative peace.

Most don't feel at risk keeping their bitcoin with a custodian. That can change very rapidly.

As bitcoin grows in value and challenges fiat currency, governments will increasingly want to control it. They won't ban it, which is now obvious, but almost certainly they will impose OFAC-like restrictions and possible wealth taxes.

When the regulatory hammer comes down, tens of millions will look to withdrawal their coins into self-custody. But they may not be able to.

--

Unfortunately this risk does not seem to be top of mind in the current Core culture.

One instance of a tone-deaf Core response to this kind of problem relates to CTV. As Jeremy Rubin has been pointing out for years, CTV would be the most efficient way to guarantee that people can withdrawal coins from institutions in times of chain-panic and congestion, allowing exit to happen during crises without fully "unrolling" transactions. I wrote about this at length in 2023, and why it seems there is no more efficient way to do this (https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/thoughts-on-scaling-and-consensus-changes-2023/32#design-for-exit-5).

And yet technical figureheads like  nostr:npub185h9z5yxn8uc7retm0n6gkm88358lejzparxms5kmy9epr236k2qcswrdp and  nostr:npub1j5mp526z5fkz9wkrk6mt5nzu43xndyrwkr8mnqngdqwytgcpc5vqcnsd5c downplay the value of CTV, claiming that it has no compelling uses.

CTV is one of the primitive building blocks that we need to figure out UTXO scaling solutions. (Not to mention its use in applications like vaults.)

Some Core devs might argue "well okay, maybe we need that functionality - but CTV isn't the right way to do it. We need to think harder!"

The problem is that time is running out. As nation-states begin to enter the technical ecosystem, soft forks that promote scaling and self-custody will be more difficult to deploy. Powerful actors will not want bitcoin to change - they're perfectly happy letting regulated custodians act as the L2.

As the market cap grows, the stakes of change go up, and it will be much harder to get economically relevant actors to run new consensus.

Because Core devs aren't paying close attention to the covenants conversation, they may not realize that CTV is upgradeable, simple, and well-tested. It's good enough.

This gap in understanding partially reveals that those devs prefer to work on more smaller self-contained puzzle problems that are more tractable. Maybe this is understandable given the fraught Core development process and historical drama of soft forks, but neither of those are an excuse for abandoning the core challenge of realizing bitcoin.

--

Segwit and Taproot were massive changes, and I can almost understand why so much drama was spent on them. They both basically reinvented how locking scripts are stored and executed in bitcoin.

But to make significant headway on finding a scaling solution for self-custody, it may only take a few opcodes - much more narrowly scoped bits of functionality. Changes that are much easier to test and reason about, and don't reinvent the engine of bitcoin.

--

As I continue campaigning for a renewed focus on scaling coin ownership, some may compare me to the "big blockers" of the 2017 scaling wars.

The big-blockers camp wanted to raise the blocksize for the sake of housing the world's P2P payments. They resisted the use of Lightning and other second layer solutions.

The reality is that they have been partially vindicated. Lightning has not solved our problems, and given the on-chain footprint that existing channel constructions require, it categorically cannot. Lightning certainly helps reduce on-chain payment volume once someone has opened a channel - but to do that for most people will require a layer 1 innovation.

I don't share the big blockers' objectives.

I don't think that trying to fit the world's P2P payments on the base chain is a reasonable target.

But the ability to resist near complete capture of UTXO custody by third-party financial institutions - *that* is intertwined with the core purpose of bitcoin.

In Satoshi's whitepaper, the first sentence claims

"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

If most users become unable to even take possession of their own coins a few times a year, we have failed on the objective.

--

I am not writing this out of any sense of antagonism. Yes, I am frustrated that after numerous attempts, Core devs are not engaging more productively with the few people trying to translate scaling strategies to the base layer.

But I'm hoping that by calling attention to this issue, we can get some of these great minds to refocus on bitcoin's critical mission, and to realize that ossification will come sooner than we thought.

The existing (and well-funded) power structures *want* stasis.

The recent show of rapid institutional affinity should make you suspicious that bitcoin in its current form isn't a threat to the fiat order.

The lack of "ivory tower" attendance in the recent OP_NEXT and the broader covenants discourse demonstrates that, like many of America's elite institutions, there has been mission drift in bitcoin's technical elite. I hope this changes.

--

The risk of merging many of the opcodes proposed during the last few years is limited.

OP_CAT, OP_CTV, lnhance, probably OP_CCV, some others; they're all fine. If sufficiently tested, great additions to bitcoin.

We can pretty easily mitigate what risk there is with comprehensive testing and analysis, provided the focus is there.

The upside is almost infinite: a reasonable attempt to continue the preservation of bitcoin's unique function - trustless self-custody that is practically available to most.


BREAKING NEWS! ODELL RELEASES A NOTE WITH LOWERCASE LETTERS!


Block size discussion no. 29572824 incoming


Luckily not. I think CTV is interesting. I'd like to see a litecoin wallet which uses it first though.


Valid points


It's interesting. It's increase in complexity though. "I'm not a technical person, but" introducing complexity into bitcoin's scripting logic should make you think twice.


I remember you selling Taproot like a silver bullet for privacy. instead we got ordinals. How can you with a straight face say there's no risk when you did not predict ordinals and the like. I think there's a good argument against how the data discount Works in segwit. It is crazy to build features, there's clearly no demand for. Virtually anyone that wants to self custody can right now. We'll see what the future holds but why would we put in a solution that most don't want or wouldn't use. Necessity is the mother of ingenuity. Who knows what ideas we will see in the future.


I agree.


Anyway, topics like this is why I look forward to the bear market. lol.


> I remember you selling Taproot like a silver bullet for privacy.

FAKE NEWS. I WAS ONE OF THE FEW THAT WAS NOT.


I listened every week to Rabbit Hole during that time and I very vividly remember you being super excited about Taproot and about how much privacy was going to bring. Maybe I overstated by saying Silver Bullet. I haven't seen any benefits from Taproot personally and if I could go back in time I would be against it.


FEEL FREE TO CLIP IT OUT AND POST IT.

I LOST A MILLION SATS ON MY TAPROOT ACTIVATION BET WITH MARTY LMFAO


SIMMER DOWN BUD


THESE ARE JAMES OBIERNE'S THOUGHTS.

I AM JUST REPOSTING THEM HERE.


Break this up.

Very few will read all or most or even part of it when structured this way


Totally Radical! 🏄♂🌴


What are we arguing here? I overstated by saying you called it a silver bullet. Sorry.

Am I wrong that you were very excited excited about it and definitely wanted to see Taproot implemented? Am I wrong that you thought it was a positive and would increase Bitcoin privacy, especially around multi-sig and opening lightning channels?
Am I wrong that there was a very little to any discussion around the potential risks of Tap Root?


Onward 🫡


Do you agree that not scaling self custody tools is a protocol killing flaw?


only cuz he copied pasted form another post.  All his words are still caps.


I understand ODELL's concern.

Bitcoin is unique because it's truly decentralized and its creator just vanished (or perhaps it's even dead), all the other shitcoins that came after are scams or really dubious/sus. So it's not a matter of "build another thing", it's a matter of improve the best we have.

The bigger the institutional adoption, the better, because it means widespread adoption and an alternative to the corrupted system. But at the same time means that more groups of power from the legacy can influence things, and we as an agorist community can't let the centralization win such battle.

Bitcoin need some important tweaks before the inevitable increase in the ossification process indeed. We must gift to the next generations an alternative civilization model, not just a high valuable "asset".

I love the "number goes up" thing, sure, but the alternative BTC can give to us as humanity has no price tag.
nostr:nevent1qqsdtj7ny0r09rs4l00dr2mnq2xt66nnp0ygpffergfy0pu8wvck2jgpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgtczyqzvj9w6alhrsvtl5u6ygjkwuwg2sf5lukqskgjpuhnd6dpal0kvjqcyqqqqqqgqw2a8g


AGREED.

JAMES SHOULD SPEAK MORE CLEARLY.


PETITION TO GET JAMES ON NOSTR SO HE CAN DISCUSS FREEDOM MONEY WITH FREEDOM TECH


I tend to. It’s not certain but likely as I see it.


In that case, what do you think the safest approach to that is? I also agree and it seems to me that we need some form of covenants if we want btc to remain freedom money


I THINK YOU MISREMEMBER.

REGARDLESS I AM NOT ADVOCATING ANYTHING HERE. I JUST THINK IMPORTANT TECHNICAL BITCOIN DISCUSSION SHOULD NOT BE EXCLUSIVE TO X AND SINCE JAMES REFUSES TO USE NOSTR I HAD TO BE HIS REPOST BOT.


REPOST FROM SOURCE: https://xcancel.com/jamesob/status/1860340932706730261

---

BITCOIN CORE'S LOSS OF FOCUS

The legacy technical leadership in bitcoin is becoming increasingly less effective.

--

Almost universally, Core and "graybeard" devs are not focusing on _the_ fundamental problem in bitcoin: preserving trustless UTXO ownership.

Instead they are distracted with valuable but secondary issues like mempool policy, Core code architecture, and minor IBD performance. These things are important in their own right, but they fundamentally don't matter if in times of trouble most users can't take possession of their own coins.

Core devs are exceptionally talented people. The brightest engineers. But the priorities of the project are out of whack.

The aggregate focus does not reflect the thing that makes bitcoin a unique asset: trustless custody.

--

Given the current limits of bitcoin, even upper-middle class Americans will not be able to self-custody, let alone the rest of the world.

If bitcoin doesn't figure out how to ensure that most users have a trustless way of owning and sometimes moving coins, it will become basically indistinguishable from a gold ETF. A row in some OFAC-compliant database. Another financial widget that is subject to the regulatory dictates of government.

In fact, if bitcoin does not scale UTXO ownership, gold will have the advantage that at least small amounts of it *can* be self-custodied and traded peer-to-peer. The same won't be able to be said for bitcoin. In a world where on-chain fees are in the thousands of dollars and there is not a workable, trustless layer two, most coins will be stuck with custodians.

Forget payments. I'm talking about savings. I'm talking about less than checking-account volume. 1-2 transactions a month.

If you think that most people should be able to DCA and withdrawal to self-custody once a month, maybe spend once every few years for big purchases, I've got news for you:

Given bitcoin's current limitations, only 18 million users can do that. A little over 5% of Americans.

--

Right now, the chain capacity is able to meet demand for self-custody because we are in a time of relative peace.

Most don't feel at risk keeping their bitcoin with a custodian. That can change very rapidly.

As bitcoin grows in value and challenges fiat currency, governments will increasingly want to control it. They won't ban it, which is now obvious, but almost certainly they will impose OFAC-like restrictions and possible wealth taxes.

When the regulatory hammer comes down, tens of millions will look to withdrawal their coins into self-custody. But they may not be able to.

--

Unfortunately this risk does not seem to be top of mind in the current Core culture.

One instance of a tone-deaf Core response to this kind of problem relates to CTV. As Jeremy Rubin has been pointing out for years, CTV would be the most efficient way to guarantee that people can withdrawal coins from institutions in times of chain-panic and congestion, allowing exit to happen during crises without fully "unrolling" transactions. I wrote about this at length in 2023, and why it seems there is no more efficient way to do this (https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/thoughts-on-scaling-and-consensus-changes-2023/32#design-for-exit-5).

And yet technical figureheads like  nostr:npub185h9z5yxn8uc7retm0n6gkm88358lejzparxms5kmy9epr236k2qcswrdp and  nostr:npub1j5mp526z5fkz9wkrk6mt5nzu43xndyrwkr8mnqngdqwytgcpc5vqcnsd5c downplay the value of CTV, claiming that it has no compelling uses.

CTV is one of the primitive building blocks that we need to figure out UTXO scaling solutions. (Not to mention its use in applications like vaults.)

Some Core devs might argue "well okay, maybe we need that functionality - but CTV isn't the right way to do it. We need to think harder!"

The problem is that time is running out. As nation-states begin to enter the technical ecosystem, soft forks that promote scaling and self-custody will be more difficult to deploy. Powerful actors will not want bitcoin to change - they're perfectly happy letting regulated custodians act as the L2.

As the market cap grows, the stakes of change go up, and it will be much harder to get economically relevant actors to run new consensus.

Because Core devs aren't paying close attention to the covenants conversation, they may not realize that CTV is upgradeable, simple, and well-tested. It's good enough.

This gap in understanding partially reveals that those devs prefer to work on more smaller self-contained puzzle problems that are more tractable. Maybe this is understandable given the fraught Core development process and historical drama of soft forks, but neither of those are an excuse for abandoning the core challenge of realizing bitcoin.

--

Segwit and Taproot were massive changes, and I can almost understand why so much drama was spent on them. They both basically reinvented how locking scripts are stored and executed in bitcoin.

But to make significant headway on finding a scaling solution for self-custody, it may only take a few opcodes - much more narrowly scoped bits of functionality. Changes that are much easier to test and reason about, and don't reinvent the engine of bitcoin.

--

As I continue campaigning for a renewed focus on scaling coin ownership, some may compare me to the "big blockers" of the 2017 scaling wars.

The big-blockers camp wanted to raise the blocksize for the sake of housing the world's P2P payments. They resisted the use of Lightning and other second layer solutions.

The reality is that they have been partially vindicated. Lightning has not solved our problems, and given the on-chain footprint that existing channel constructions require, it categorically cannot. Lightning certainly helps reduce on-chain payment volume once someone has opened a channel - but to do that for most people will require a layer 1 innovation.

I don't share the big blockers' objectives.

I don't think that trying to fit the world's P2P payments on the base chain is a reasonable target.

But the ability to resist near complete capture of UTXO custody by third-party financial institutions - *that* is intertwined with the core purpose of bitcoin.

In Satoshi's whitepaper, the first sentence claims

"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

If most users become unable to even take possession of their own coins a few times a year, we have failed on the objective.

--

I am not writing this out of any sense of antagonism. Yes, I am frustrated that after numerous attempts, Core devs are not engaging more productively with the few people trying to translate scaling strategies to the base layer.

But I'm hoping that by calling attention to this issue, we can get some of these great minds to refocus on bitcoin's critical mission, and to realize that ossification will come sooner than we thought.

The existing (and well-funded) power structures *want* stasis.

The recent show of rapid institutional affinity should make you suspicious that bitcoin in its current form isn't a threat to the fiat order.

The lack of "ivory tower" attendance in the recent OP_NEXT and the broader covenants discourse demonstrates that, like many of America's elite institutions, there has been mission drift in bitcoin's technical elite. I hope this changes.

--

The risk of merging many of the opcodes proposed during the last few years is limited.

OP_CAT, OP_CTV, lnhance, probably OP_CCV, some others; they're all fine. If sufficiently tested, great additions to bitcoin.

We can pretty easily mitigate what risk there is with comprehensive testing and analysis, provided the focus is there.

The upside is almost infinite: a reasonable attempt to continue the preservation of bitcoin's unique function - trustless self-custody that is practically available to most.


We need bitcoin core implemention alternatives. Core should just be the most conservative implementation. And raise the damn blocksize.


Fair enough, I could be. I'll just blame Marty 🤣. Didn't realize it wasn't your write up until after I commented. Generally a fan, and didn't mean to seem so confrontational.

I don't think the risks of soft Forks are discussed enough.  Satoshi was conservative for a reason.


Considering the amounts of unnecessary bullshit and aggression that core devs face on a regular basis, I'm not surprised none of them want to be associated to anything remotely controversial anymore.

Toxic maxi culture has become a caricature of itself. It's not an immune system, it's become an auto immune disease


We have consensus. That's enough. But the details will evolve. I don't think there's a silver bullet. A lot of small steps will make the difference.

Furthermore, Bitcoin doesn't need to be used by every person on the planet. There is a minimum viable user base for bitcoin to fulfill its function, and currently no one really knows what that size will be.

Either way, humanity as a whole will benefit, including people who do not have the privilege of interacting with the base.


“Running out of time”
-classic red flag


FOR THOSE WITHOUT AN X ACCOUNT:

https://xcancel.com/jamesob/status/1857049961235403101


Makes you wonder why he isn’t here already


good job working for the feds nostr:nprofile1qqs8k0mcqd6sw3h524qn5gslszt9am9knmes3uh268dgnnpv3yfwj6qpzamhxue69uhky6t5vdhkjmn9wgh8xmmrd9skctcppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qyw8wumn8ghj7mn0wd68yttsw43zuum9d45hxmmv9ejx2a30y7ph8a nostr:nprofile1qqsw4v882mfjhq9u63j08kzyhqzqxqc8tgf740p4nxnk9jdv02u37ncpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9uju6mpd4czuumfw3jsz9nhwden5te0wfjkccte9ec8y6tdv9kzumn9wsq3yamnwvaz7tmsw4e8qmr9wpskwtn9wvql3tqm


Thanks for the link. I don't have an X account either... (could only see the original post)


this is too fucking technical for me.


1) what?


“I JUST WANT TO NOT HAVE TO THINK ABOUT MY BITCOIN” …. SAID BY ALMOST EVERY “BITCOINER” READING THIS POST


KEEP UP THE FIGHT


matt. really. when someone warms up with waffle and then start talking about "time is running out" without having given me substance to build on, i'm like

what the fuck is the reason why you posted this CATV waffle?

did you actually read it and are you thinking about the fact that bitcoin transaction scaling has maintained the fee rate at mere cents and nobody should be fucking putting their coins in custody anyway so pray tell what the fuck logic is going on here?


dude, this guy is trying to hustle people "hurry up, time is running out, doomsday is coming, the end is nigh"

up to that point in the text the only thing i got was "when people have their shit in custody they want to move it fast"

uh, no

they shouldn't have had it in custody


why


BECAUSE HE FELT LIKE IT?


so he feels like an idiot?


Could be, not sure, I am not him.


> what the fuck is the reason why you posted this CATV waffle?

BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE HAVING SOFT FORK CONVERSATIONS ON X INSTEAD OF NOSTR AND I TOOK THAT PERSONALLY


Agreed about the no silver bullet. That’s why I think making a new primitive available sooner is important though. User available taproot tools are just starting to become more widely available. Getting a new building block in place now gives time for actual testing on what scaling solutions it enables. CTV has been around the longest, is the best studied/tested,  and has the lowest chances of unintended side effects


reposting nonsense without your own take on it seems kinda daft to me


Generational Wealth. You are Welcome 🫡


isnt it ok for us to keep educating to take custody, then when the protocol is buckling under fee pressure and theres no space in blocks for people to move btc that is in their custody( or at least somewhere remotely close to that), then we consider a scaling soft fork? honest question why not?


hahah thatd have been hella funny if he updated it to all caps. would change tone drastically 😃 whys James yelling at us hahah


Onward 🫡


Would be helpful with a list of pros and cons of implementing CTV. This is a lot to take in.


:RedHeart:


REPOST FROM SOURCE: https://xcancel.com/jamesob/status/1860340932706730261

---

BITCOIN CORE'S LOSS OF FOCUS

The legacy technical leadership in bitcoin is becoming increasingly less effective.

--

Almost universally, Core and "graybeard" devs are not focusing on _the_ fundamental problem in bitcoin: preserving trustless UTXO ownership.

Instead they are distracted with valuable but secondary issues like mempool policy, Core code architecture, and minor IBD performance. These things are important in their own right, but they fundamentally don't matter if in times of trouble most users can't take possession of their own coins.

Core devs are exceptionally talented people. The brightest engineers. But the priorities of the project are out of whack.

The aggregate focus does not reflect the thing that makes bitcoin a unique asset: trustless custody.

--

Given the current limits of bitcoin, even upper-middle class Americans will not be able to self-custody, let alone the rest of the world.

If bitcoin doesn't figure out how to ensure that most users have a trustless way of owning and sometimes moving coins, it will become basically indistinguishable from a gold ETF. A row in some OFAC-compliant database. Another financial widget that is subject to the regulatory dictates of government.

In fact, if bitcoin does not scale UTXO ownership, gold will have the advantage that at least small amounts of it *can* be self-custodied and traded peer-to-peer. The same won't be able to be said for bitcoin. In a world where on-chain fees are in the thousands of dollars and there is not a workable, trustless layer two, most coins will be stuck with custodians.

Forget payments. I'm talking about savings. I'm talking about less than checking-account volume. 1-2 transactions a month.

If you think that most people should be able to DCA and withdrawal to self-custody once a month, maybe spend once every few years for big purchases, I've got news for you:

Given bitcoin's current limitations, only 18 million users can do that. A little over 5% of Americans.

--

Right now, the chain capacity is able to meet demand for self-custody because we are in a time of relative peace.

Most don't feel at risk keeping their bitcoin with a custodian. That can change very rapidly.

As bitcoin grows in value and challenges fiat currency, governments will increasingly want to control it. They won't ban it, which is now obvious, but almost certainly they will impose OFAC-like restrictions and possible wealth taxes.

When the regulatory hammer comes down, tens of millions will look to withdrawal their coins into self-custody. But they may not be able to.

--

Unfortunately this risk does not seem to be top of mind in the current Core culture.

One instance of a tone-deaf Core response to this kind of problem relates to CTV. As Jeremy Rubin has been pointing out for years, CTV would be the most efficient way to guarantee that people can withdrawal coins from institutions in times of chain-panic and congestion, allowing exit to happen during crises without fully "unrolling" transactions. I wrote about this at length in 2023, and why it seems there is no more efficient way to do this (https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/thoughts-on-scaling-and-consensus-changes-2023/32#design-for-exit-5).

And yet technical figureheads like  nostr:npub185h9z5yxn8uc7retm0n6gkm88358lejzparxms5kmy9epr236k2qcswrdp and  nostr:npub1j5mp526z5fkz9wkrk6mt5nzu43xndyrwkr8mnqngdqwytgcpc5vqcnsd5c downplay the value of CTV, claiming that it has no compelling uses.

CTV is one of the primitive building blocks that we need to figure out UTXO scaling solutions. (Not to mention its use in applications like vaults.)

Some Core devs might argue "well okay, maybe we need that functionality - but CTV isn't the right way to do it. We need to think harder!"

The problem is that time is running out. As nation-states begin to enter the technical ecosystem, soft forks that promote scaling and self-custody will be more difficult to deploy. Powerful actors will not want bitcoin to change - they're perfectly happy letting regulated custodians act as the L2.

As the market cap grows, the stakes of change go up, and it will be much harder to get economically relevant actors to run new consensus.

Because Core devs aren't paying close attention to the covenants conversation, they may not realize that CTV is upgradeable, simple, and well-tested. It's good enough.

This gap in understanding partially reveals that those devs prefer to work on more smaller self-contained puzzle problems that are more tractable. Maybe this is understandable given the fraught Core development process and historical drama of soft forks, but neither of those are an excuse for abandoning the core challenge of realizing bitcoin.

--

Segwit and Taproot were massive changes, and I can almost understand why so much drama was spent on them. They both basically reinvented how locking scripts are stored and executed in bitcoin.

But to make significant headway on finding a scaling solution for self-custody, it may only take a few opcodes - much more narrowly scoped bits of functionality. Changes that are much easier to test and reason about, and don't reinvent the engine of bitcoin.

--

As I continue campaigning for a renewed focus on scaling coin ownership, some may compare me to the "big blockers" of the 2017 scaling wars.

The big-blockers camp wanted to raise the blocksize for the sake of housing the world's P2P payments. They resisted the use of Lightning and other second layer solutions.

The reality is that they have been partially vindicated. Lightning has not solved our problems, and given the on-chain footprint that existing channel constructions require, it categorically cannot. Lightning certainly helps reduce on-chain payment volume once someone has opened a channel - but to do that for most people will require a layer 1 innovation.

I don't share the big blockers' objectives.

I don't think that trying to fit the world's P2P payments on the base chain is a reasonable target.

But the ability to resist near complete capture of UTXO custody by third-party financial institutions - *that* is intertwined with the core purpose of bitcoin.

In Satoshi's whitepaper, the first sentence claims

"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

If most users become unable to even take possession of their own coins a few times a year, we have failed on the objective.

--

I am not writing this out of any sense of antagonism. Yes, I am frustrated that after numerous attempts, Core devs are not engaging more productively with the few people trying to translate scaling strategies to the base layer.

But I'm hoping that by calling attention to this issue, we can get some of these great minds to refocus on bitcoin's critical mission, and to realize that ossification will come sooner than we thought.

The existing (and well-funded) power structures *want* stasis.

The recent show of rapid institutional affinity should make you suspicious that bitcoin in its current form isn't a threat to the fiat order.

The lack of "ivory tower" attendance in the recent OP_NEXT and the broader covenants discourse demonstrates that, like many of America's elite institutions, there has been mission drift in bitcoin's technical elite. I hope this changes.

--

The risk of merging many of the opcodes proposed during the last few years is limited.

OP_CAT, OP_CTV, lnhance, probably OP_CCV, some others; they're all fine. If sufficiently tested, great additions to bitcoin.

We can pretty easily mitigate what risk there is with comprehensive testing and analysis, provided the focus is there.

The upside is almost infinite: a reasonable attempt to continue the preservation of bitcoin's unique function - trustless self-custody that is practically available to most.


We need another CD on this topic


yes-it's really "damned if you do, damned if you don't"
i'd agree it's not an ideal situation, but unlikely to be changed by angry rants


Really? I think this is very clear.

Except for the fact that it doesn't give any solutions.


It may be clear if you decided to take more than 5 minutes out of your day.

It’s an insult to the reader to post like this.


The one out of ten thousand btc posts on nostr that carries signal. Thanks for sharing


thanks for sharing!


I do want vaults and happy to help layer 2 scale.


I would like to see CTV stew for a good while longer. We are not running out of time.

I think we need to approach future soft forks from a system dynamics perspective. Humans have a fatal flaw; we tend to think linearly. But complex dynamic systems like Bitcoin are NOT linear. Most problems in organizations are created by past policy decisions. The same, perhaps, could be said for Bitcoin.


:bitcoin:


Fair point. It’s good to solutions in place. It’s also good to wait a little. Procrastination is a safety measure. Especially when it comes to making changes to bitcoins scripting method


A daptive
B locksize
L imit
A lgorithm


it makes it seem like you agree with it


nostr:npub1qny3tkh0acurzla8x3zy4nhrjz5zd8l9sy9jys09umwng00manysew95gx LOOK 👀
👀

WHAT DO I HAVE TO GIVE YOU? Cue cards 🎴

https://media.tenor.com/c6J4aZ58vacAAAAC/laugh-funny.gif


nostr:npub1qny3tkh0acurzla8x3zy4nhrjz5zd8l9sy9jys09umwng00manysew95gx WANT ME TO BE YOUR BODYGUARD? I’m actually an ace shot. 😂😂😂


> The problem is that time is running out.

Bitcoin has serious trauma with claims like this.


Personally reposting is useful as it’s useful to read over people’s thoughts. Discussion can then he had on Nostr


everyone will get the bitcoin they deserve?


aw. too many wordses for mleku ❤


I don’t know about you but I “deserve” more bitcoin…

😏


if you didn't have a thought about something and you repost it, and loads of people follow you, and you have no comment?

how naive are you?


adding "taken from X" doesn't make any difference

it's the same as me boosting a post on nostr

i would only do that if i agreed 100% with the content... you see? what other motivation would there be for it?


Well yes i get your point, but I appreciate Matt sharing stuff and i am able to digest and think about it. It’s not the end of the World. I’m sure he has thoughts, sharing just let’s others formulate thoughts too


the text of that screed had the same tone as a scammer in a third world country "rush rush, the end is coming, you must buy our widgets or be washed away in the storm"


Sharing something interesting i didn’t see is useful, especially on Nostr as I’m not on X. I do get your point. It’s just an opinion by someone that’s directly related to Bitcoin, doesn’t mean we all agree. Good to read others’ thoughts on important topics


Yeah, it’s not needed to be panicked but the thoughts stimulate further questions


INTERESTING. I DONT THINK BOOSTING A POST ON NOSTR IS AN ENDORSEMENT EITHER.

OPEN DISCUSSION IS GOOD. AS A LARGE ACCOUNT I FEEL AN OBLIGATION TO BOOST MORE.

FEW PEOPLE I AGREE WITH 100%.


Personally I agree here, it guides me to question and think through the topic more. I didn’t think you agreed just that you are thinking it’s a topic worth discussing


no, because of the way it waffled and then tries to paint this urgent necessity it was not anything worth thinking about

a rational presentation of the benefits of CATV is honest, what that was, was fucking bullshit


Fair enough, but now I’m thinking about it which is useful


my objection was not the spirit of discussion but the spirit of crappy methods of persuasion, and matt engaged also in this dishonesty as well


It’s often hard to find deeply formulated posts on topics, it’s more a promotion of an important area of discussion and hope for a thread to open


What's the rush? Low time preference, Bitcoin will be here for a very very long time and we'll fix anything that needs fixing in time. Patience.

Plus, the majority of people will likely never self custody and IMO that's okay. The important thing is Bitcoin offers the option to self custody or to choose companies that offer transparency to customers on the assets they hold, and as long as people have the ability to choose self custody then we can hold all custodians accountable.

Custodians are not the enemy, they are just another service that within large economies has demand and will always have demand. In a way anyone who helps other people with securing their assets is a custodian. You see people on here talk about orange pilling someone and being a backup for them if they lose access to there wallet. That's being an unpaid custodian. Anyone with access to funds that are not owned by them are custodians for those funds.

Society has been poisoned by FIAT currency and dishonest unaccountable banks, Bitcoin fixes both of those issues. They can't print more, and dishonest actors will eventually be pushed out by honest ones.

Just be patient, humanity will outshine our FIAT clouded expectations when we are all on a sound money once again.

Things will work out in the end.


Values


WHO IS THAT ANYWAY


REPOST FROM SOURCE: https://xcancel.com/jamesob/status/1860340932706730261

---

BITCOIN CORE'S LOSS OF FOCUS

The legacy technical leadership in bitcoin is becoming increasingly less effective.

--

Almost universally, Core and "graybeard" devs are not focusing on _the_ fundamental problem in bitcoin: preserving trustless UTXO ownership.

Instead they are distracted with valuable but secondary issues like mempool policy, Core code architecture, and minor IBD performance. These things are important in their own right, but they fundamentally don't matter if in times of trouble most users can't take possession of their own coins.

Core devs are exceptionally talented people. The brightest engineers. But the priorities of the project are out of whack.

The aggregate focus does not reflect the thing that makes bitcoin a unique asset: trustless custody.

--

Given the current limits of bitcoin, even upper-middle class Americans will not be able to self-custody, let alone the rest of the world.

If bitcoin doesn't figure out how to ensure that most users have a trustless way of owning and sometimes moving coins, it will become basically indistinguishable from a gold ETF. A row in some OFAC-compliant database. Another financial widget that is subject to the regulatory dictates of government.

In fact, if bitcoin does not scale UTXO ownership, gold will have the advantage that at least small amounts of it *can* be self-custodied and traded peer-to-peer. The same won't be able to be said for bitcoin. In a world where on-chain fees are in the thousands of dollars and there is not a workable, trustless layer two, most coins will be stuck with custodians.

Forget payments. I'm talking about savings. I'm talking about less than checking-account volume. 1-2 transactions a month.

If you think that most people should be able to DCA and withdrawal to self-custody once a month, maybe spend once every few years for big purchases, I've got news for you:

Given bitcoin's current limitations, only 18 million users can do that. A little over 5% of Americans.

--

Right now, the chain capacity is able to meet demand for self-custody because we are in a time of relative peace.

Most don't feel at risk keeping their bitcoin with a custodian. That can change very rapidly.

As bitcoin grows in value and challenges fiat currency, governments will increasingly want to control it. They won't ban it, which is now obvious, but almost certainly they will impose OFAC-like restrictions and possible wealth taxes.

When the regulatory hammer comes down, tens of millions will look to withdrawal their coins into self-custody. But they may not be able to.

--

Unfortunately this risk does not seem to be top of mind in the current Core culture.

One instance of a tone-deaf Core response to this kind of problem relates to CTV. As Jeremy Rubin has been pointing out for years, CTV would be the most efficient way to guarantee that people can withdrawal coins from institutions in times of chain-panic and congestion, allowing exit to happen during crises without fully "unrolling" transactions. I wrote about this at length in 2023, and why it seems there is no more efficient way to do this (https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/thoughts-on-scaling-and-consensus-changes-2023/32#design-for-exit-5).

And yet technical figureheads like  nostr:npub185h9z5yxn8uc7retm0n6gkm88358lejzparxms5kmy9epr236k2qcswrdp and  nostr:npub1j5mp526z5fkz9wkrk6mt5nzu43xndyrwkr8mnqngdqwytgcpc5vqcnsd5c downplay the value of CTV, claiming that it has no compelling uses.

CTV is one of the primitive building blocks that we need to figure out UTXO scaling solutions. (Not to mention its use in applications like vaults.)

Some Core devs might argue "well okay, maybe we need that functionality - but CTV isn't the right way to do it. We need to think harder!"

The problem is that time is running out. As nation-states begin to enter the technical ecosystem, soft forks that promote scaling and self-custody will be more difficult to deploy. Powerful actors will not want bitcoin to change - they're perfectly happy letting regulated custodians act as the L2.

As the market cap grows, the stakes of change go up, and it will be much harder to get economically relevant actors to run new consensus.

Because Core devs aren't paying close attention to the covenants conversation, they may not realize that CTV is upgradeable, simple, and well-tested. It's good enough.

This gap in understanding partially reveals that those devs prefer to work on more smaller self-contained puzzle problems that are more tractable. Maybe this is understandable given the fraught Core development process and historical drama of soft forks, but neither of those are an excuse for abandoning the core challenge of realizing bitcoin.

--

Segwit and Taproot were massive changes, and I can almost understand why so much drama was spent on them. They both basically reinvented how locking scripts are stored and executed in bitcoin.

But to make significant headway on finding a scaling solution for self-custody, it may only take a few opcodes - much more narrowly scoped bits of functionality. Changes that are much easier to test and reason about, and don't reinvent the engine of bitcoin.

--

As I continue campaigning for a renewed focus on scaling coin ownership, some may compare me to the "big blockers" of the 2017 scaling wars.

The big-blockers camp wanted to raise the blocksize for the sake of housing the world's P2P payments. They resisted the use of Lightning and other second layer solutions.

The reality is that they have been partially vindicated. Lightning has not solved our problems, and given the on-chain footprint that existing channel constructions require, it categorically cannot. Lightning certainly helps reduce on-chain payment volume once someone has opened a channel - but to do that for most people will require a layer 1 innovation.

I don't share the big blockers' objectives.

I don't think that trying to fit the world's P2P payments on the base chain is a reasonable target.

But the ability to resist near complete capture of UTXO custody by third-party financial institutions - *that* is intertwined with the core purpose of bitcoin.

In Satoshi's whitepaper, the first sentence claims

"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

If most users become unable to even take possession of their own coins a few times a year, we have failed on the objective.

--

I am not writing this out of any sense of antagonism. Yes, I am frustrated that after numerous attempts, Core devs are not engaging more productively with the few people trying to translate scaling strategies to the base layer.

But I'm hoping that by calling attention to this issue, we can get some of these great minds to refocus on bitcoin's critical mission, and to realize that ossification will come sooner than we thought.

The existing (and well-funded) power structures *want* stasis.

The recent show of rapid institutional affinity should make you suspicious that bitcoin in its current form isn't a threat to the fiat order.

The lack of "ivory tower" attendance in the recent OP_NEXT and the broader covenants discourse demonstrates that, like many of America's elite institutions, there has been mission drift in bitcoin's technical elite. I hope this changes.

--

The risk of merging many of the opcodes proposed during the last few years is limited.

OP_CAT, OP_CTV, lnhance, probably OP_CCV, some others; they're all fine. If sufficiently tested, great additions to bitcoin.

We can pretty easily mitigate what risk there is with comprehensive testing and analysis, provided the focus is there.

The upside is almost infinite: a reasonable attempt to continue the preservation of bitcoin's unique function - trustless self-custody that is practically available to most.


Bitcoin is going to die one way or the other like the imaginary thing it is which is made me so much profit off so much other imaginary money but you know or you don't


Why can't UTXOs scale at current stage? Is it linked to perceived high fees and dust UTXOs? What's the essence of the problem here? Imagining what could happen in 50-100 years time is not a constructive proactivensss. And why does James feel like LN is custodial? It easy quite easy to run a lightning node and it is not as gloomy as pushed by the author.


Onward 🫡


Fees are still 2sat/vbytes in bull markets , I guess scaling can wait


There's an upper bound limit on the amount of UTXOs that can be created. Can't recall how many it is tho.


Its more telling of the reader that doesn't wish to spend more than 5 mins learning about where they keep their net worth tbh.


TLDR.  Still interesting, in scan.


Fuck. I just got rick-rolled. Haha. Noice.