Oddbean

What covenants allow is an increased attack surface and the potential for unintended consequences. Segwit and Taproot helped produce the spam that's currently attacking the network. Bitcoin is working perfectly fine without new opcodes. It's feature complete. Leave it alone.

"Segwit and Taproot helped produce the spam that's currently attacking the network." This is simply wrong. Segwit increased block size, so you could pack 4MB instead of 1MB into blocks. This worst-case was well understood. And indeed, most nodes didn't notice (block relay is not the majority bandwidth for default nodes). Without segwit, the spam would have driven up fees much more: they were clearly prepared to spend the money!

I have been a professional software engineer for 25 years and studying bitcoin specifically for 7. I can assure you I understand the details of the protocol quite well. If you do not understand how the witness section is abused to produce spam then you should study bitcoin more deeply. I am not your tutor.

If you have to ask, you don’t understand the second order impacts on plebs. My tor node is incredibly slow now. I can’t run it all the time and it’s not a fast computer. I sync the node when I need to broadcast a transaction. In my last sync I waited weeks.

Not only did the Segwit devs increase the block size, but, in their wisdom, actually gave spam a discount! Yes, the spammers were clearly prepared to spend the money. With the discount, we reduced their fees so now the spammers make even more profit. 🫡 “This worst-case was well understood.” That virtually all of the block size increase would be filled with spam? I guess if you put spam on sale, you sell more spam, right? After spending a couple weeks recently to sync a node over Tor, I would argue it wasn’t worth it. We still have high fees and now we struggle to sync our nodes privately. I noticed how you didn’t mention the impact on our Tor nodes. 😔 In second thought, maybe it’s a good thing that the devs slowed down our nodes. Fewer impulsive purchases! Maybe bitcoiners buy fewer useless lambos because they come to their senses waiting for their nodes to sync. 🤔 Idea!💡Maybe since fees are still high, we should increase the blocksize further and give the spammers a bigger discount? Surely if it worked so well the last time, maybe we should do it again? We can never have too much efficiency, amirite? 🤨 I never once heard a mea culpa or any accountability for what seems to be the biggest f’up in core’s history. No post mortem, just gaslighting that everything is “fine” and how the devs “understood” the risks. This ossification talk is probably just a symptom of the lost trust.

insightful post indeed. "we knew the risks" is worse in my opinion than "we had no idea how bad we were fucking up" as it implies malice. Core fucked up massively with segwit, then again with taproot, and now they won't even fix their filters or address their prior mistakes. Ego or malice, I'm not sure which. Either way core is not to be trusted. The good news is that more people are realizing just how vulnerable Bitcoin is to the addition of new opcodes and softforks and are starting to gather around the idea that "if it aint broken, don't fix it". Meanwhile vain developers with small bitcoin stacks yearn to make a name for themselves by adding new bullshit to a perfectly functional network. And that's why I tell them to stuff their new opcodes up their asses. Nothing but an attack on bitcoin and deserves no debate on ridicule.