Yes, and maybe a small SBR could be done by executive order. 

https://www.btcpolicy.org/articles/can-trump-order-a-strategic-bitcoin-reserve 

 🤮 

 True. To me, it felt like people just all snapped out of their trance a month before the election. There were a few signposts that I noticed, like Bezos’s op-ed explaining how the media had lost everyone’s trust. An obvious and true statement, but one few could say out loud previously.

I’m optimistic. Hoping for the best but keeping my back up plans just in case. 

 🤣 

 To me, dynamic block sizes sounds like a way to make blocks bigger and subject to political whim. 

My view is that we should maximize decentralization of the main L1 to maximize bitcoin’s resistance to state attack. Generally speaking, the larger the blockchain, the fewer the number of nodes that can run it. 

Does that mean we should shrink the blocks to the size of one transaction? No. But if people are putting large volumes of non-financial data in the blockchain, then maybe the block size is too big. 

My view is that the main L1 should serve the global role analogous to FedWire today. A global settlement system for large transactions. All smaller transactions should move to L2s and L3s. 

 Yes, the L2s need work. I believe that’s ok because we still have time. The progression is store of value —> medium of exchange —> unit of account. 

We are still early in the store of value phase. Few people will want to spend bitcoin when they receive and can spend worse monies like USD. 

Once a good chunk of the population is on zero and only has bitcoin, then the volume of spending will increase. People will be then forced to spend bitcoin for their day to day expenses. We’re still far away from that. Maybe a decade? Obviously hard to know. 

We’ll know that we’re moving to the medium of exchange phase when those who only accept and hold bitcoin gets to a significant percentage of the population. 

 I thought it was fake at first. April already? Didn’t he just lose big time in the UK? Honestly don’t get it. 🤷‍♂️ 

 Like those people who bought at $500 in Nov 2013 and it was still $500 in May 2016. I wonder if we’ll look back on it the same way?

Personally, I think it must have been harder for them. They didn’t have the extended price history that we have. They must have seen the big spike to 1000 then thought everything was over when it dropped to $500. 

I suspect our boredom will be over soon. Then we’ll be back in the “I can’t focus on work” phase. 

 The people who are surprised by bitcoin don’t understand Gresham’s / Thiers law. 

Yes, some early folks believed that it was just P2P currency. Nope. It’s mildly amusing to see them dump their coins in disgust.

Ya gotta understand the process. 
Store of value <— you’re here
Medium of exchange 
Unit of account 

At some point it will move to the next level and be a medium of exchange. No point in getting upset that it isn’t there yet. We’re making good progress. 

 The sad fact is that most people trust the government, trust banks, and generally trust authority. When told, they inject their children and themselves with experimental genetic therapy. They follow the American Heart Association’s advice and wonder why they’re fat and unhealthy. Etc. 

Even the few who don’t trust authority are scared to be their own bank. They know they forget their  passwords all the time. 

Very few people are willing and capable of being sovereign individuals. 

I wish it were otherwise but most people need a custodian. I’m bullish on systems like Fedimint. Local custodian managed by people you know. 

 It’s hard for me to see your point. People are flocking to ETFs. I talk to wealthy people all the time and they don’t “get” the benefits of being sovereign. I just shake my head. It’s all I can do. They vaxxed their children too. Go figure. 

Of course, I expect they’ll figure it out eventually. 

When they do, I still don’t see the issue. Bitcoin L1 isn’t going to choke to death. Fees will be similar to wire transfers. Payments for our morning coffees will move to ecash. Every few months we’ll transfer from funds from cold storage to a few mints to top up our spending money. 

 If you find or build any rust APIs for integrating ecash into apps, let me know please. Thinking about a future project. 🙏 

 I’m not quite ready to dig in but will eventually. Will be watching your feed for any tidbits you throw out. 🙏

I was thinking there might need to be some magic to make it usable. Maybe a framework to mange mints, balance discovery, transfers, persistence, etc. 🤷‍♂️ 

 Ah, someone who thinks that nuclear war is winnable. 💣☢️ 

 Yep, that’s why I got rid of mine. They actually give off a surprisingly high amount of EMF radiation incredibly close to your head. Sure it’s non-ionizing radiation but the long term health impacts are not clear (and obvs nobody wants to pay to study it). Didn’t want to take the risk. 

 Got rid of mine. No idea if it’s a problem, but just didn’t want the radiation so close to my head. 

 Presumably this doesn’t apply to bitcoin, as it’s not a security?

https://bitbo.io/news/sec-chair-bitcoin-not-security/ 

 Now he’s trying to remove spam filters from Bitcoin core. 

 Lift weights and get stronger. Sit on the couch, nice and easy, and get fat and unhealthy. 

Which free speech protocol do you want, the strong one or the fat and uselessness one? 

 Auto immune makes sense to me. It’s the first thing that comes to mind when it’s idiopathic. Hard to find the root cause because the patient needs to have a preexisting susceptibility, a depleted immune system, and then some external trigger. To observers it seems random. 

 💯 

 That person was helping to improve the system. Kinda ironic to use the “authorities” to fix a problem with our decentralized technology. 

 ➡️ Can you elaborate on how they increase mining centralization? 

I’m getting a crazy sense of deja vu given that we’ve been discussing this for the last week. 

CTV has the risk of promoting private out of band payment to miners, which can create centralizing MEV. 

[1] Peter Todd admitted that CAT / CTV potentially encourage out-of-band fee payments to miners:

https://petertodd.org/2024/covenant-dependent-layer-2-review

[2] Matt Corallo explains why private out of band payments can motivate miner centralization:

https://x.com/TheBlueMatt/status/1780558009841643833

I pointed out that Peter identified one case but missed other cases. 

Our long thread is here:

nostr:note1yur8m6lrk4z88q7dae06pf5r9lwgn3fc0smpaa653hx8ygw2k9qseadpzq 

 More news on that “conspiracy theory”. Let’s hope this law passes. 

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/media/reps/dr-paul-introduces-risky-research-review-act-to-oversee-gain-of-function-research-funding/ 

 Just saw this email. August 2020. What couldn’t the head of the NIH talk about on email? Something about Ecohealth and Wuhan. 

Perhaps it was about the wet market where the virus would be discovered the next month?

This email wouldn’t exist if the virus was natural. But this email does exist. https://image.nostr.build/6e4fc3bcec4adcf2f19d2387cad299e54a3df20800bb48b37a97b2561e729f2e.jpg  

 ➡️ “Very fair point. However if folks are okay with “slow”, what’s the likelihood they’re also okay with just waiting for lower feerates for their tx to be confirmed in the first place?”

They might be, but you’ll recall that this was the risk that Peter had identified in his paper — paying for cheaper transactions. My point was that Peter had overlooked the other case, specifically the risk that CTV could motivate people to pay for faster transactions. I believe both of these cases are risks and I don’t know for certain what the magnitude is (and I don’t believe anyone can know for certain — because our assumptions are based on the past and not what people might invent in the future). 

➡️ “AMMs are not possible with CTV only, because there is not sufficient transaction introspection to achieve this (aka you can’t look back at previous txs which is necessary to have the price update in an AMM).”

I could imagine that this could be solved by the coordinator frequently reissuing the contracts with the current value. 

Another possibility is to somehow link specific UTXOs in chains to track state. This is abstract; hope you understand what I mean. 

Reissuing the contracts frequently or creating chains of UTXOs might also address your other point on the need to recalculate the contract for all the registered addresses. Creating more contract instances may reduce the complexity of trying to cram everything into one contract. 

I recognize that republishing the contracts frequently would slow down trading, but again, this is me brainstorming for five minutes. Since it’s technically possible, it becomes an optimization problem. How do we know some clever person won’t solve it?

I understand your point that it looks infeasible and doubtful that a meaningful on-chain market could arise. But I recognize that this view is based on assumptions of past events, current technology, and current maturation of the bitcoin network. I don’t think we can look at it like this. We have to think about the future — the long and unknown future. Once these protocol changes are in, we can’t easily pull them out. 

I believe that if something is technically possible, a sufficiently motivated person will eventually find a way. We can’t assume that it will never happen just because it seems infeasible today. 

From another thread, but additional details on why I believe we should be conservative:

nostr:note1r4tjlj5yfmpu5rkq8n8f7k3t576gaut40uf7l3yk3kwamtzcu3pq004sjk 

 ➡️ “Why would CTV motivate people to pay for faster transactions more than any other normal transaction?”

It appears that it might be possible for CTV to create on-chain AMM-style marketplaces. On chain marketplaces create arbitrage opportunities which motivate people to pay for faster transactions:

https://www.coindesk.com/opinion/2024/07/09/mev-has-spread-to-bitcoin-in-subtler-forms-than-on-ethereum/

➡️ “CTV has been pretty well researched over the past 4 years since its inception.”

Please show me where the non-technical risks were discussed. I haven’t been able to find anything other than Peter identifying the risk of cheaper OOB payments. 


➡️ “The key thing here, is you can't exit the contract if your counterparty is offline. So once the DLC options contract is created[…]”

It looks like you’re now referring to DLC contracts. We were previously discussing AMM style marketplaces. 

You raised the issues of how the parties could be known. I suggested that a preregistration step might work. 

You raised the issue whether the prices could be known. I suggested that perhaps specific UTXOs could represent points on the hyperbolic constant product curve (x * y = k) that’s used in AMM marketplaces. 

You haven’t yet shown me why it’s impossible to create AMM style marketplaces using CTV. 

 ➡️ “That article doesn't mention AMMs at all.”

The term “AMM” appears 19 times in that article. 🤷‍♂️

➡️ “You can't do transaction introspection with CTV, so this isn't possible”

You don’t need introspection if the addresses are preregistered. Scanning the address will list all the UTXOs. Once you know the UTXOs then you also know the amounts. 

➡️ “First of all, you need to do multiplication to do x * y = k.”

No, you don’t need multiplication if you can determine the product in another way. You might be able to create a state machine through a chain of predefined UTXOs that represent the AMM’s balance ratio. 

Specifically, I’m suggesting to model the AMM's pricing curve through output UTXOs. Each UTXO represents a specific state of the liquidity pool at a point on the curve, with predefined balances of Bitcoin and tokens. 

Trades are executed by consuming a state UTXO and creating a new one corresponding to the next state along the curve, effectively moving the liquidity pool's balances according to the AMM's pricing function. 

CTV would enforce that only valid state transitions can occur by committing to specific transaction templates. If input A and input B, then move to point on the curve #1. But if input A and input C, then move to point #2. You’re determining the product based on the inputs provided. It has the same effect as multiplication, just doesn’t require computation or introspection. 

➡️ “Great question. Let's see what folks say”

Looks like nobody responded with any information showing the non-technical risks were considered. I still haven’t seen anything either. It’s on the proponents to show safety. It would be negligent to not fully consider all risks. 

 ➡️ “It doesn't talk about AMMs in relation to CTV creating on-chain AMM-style marketplaces”

Of course not. It was explaining how AMM marketplaces create centralizing MEV. 

➡️ “The need for introspection relates to needing to look at the previous price of the AMM, to determine what the new price should be.”

I explained how you might create a state machine using output UTXOs to model the AMM pricing curve. If you don’t understand the concept, you could ask an AI to explain it to you. 

➡️ “I'm not sure how exactly this would be done, but even if it were possible to validate or invalidate certain pathways, you would still need a ridiculous amount of compute for this.”

You don’t fully understand the concept so you assume it must take “ridiculous” compute. 

I showed how it might be possible, but it may or not be feasible. I don’t know and neither do you. The point is that nobody knows for sure and it’s likely that nobody has looked into it either. 

I don’t need to prove it’s safe. The people advocating for the feature do. 

➡️ The BIP119 PR is probably the best resource for risks discussed

I reviewed the links you sent. I didn’t see any analysis of non-technical risks. If I missed anything, please forward it to me. 

You seem like a well-read person on the topic and you can’t seem to refer me to anyone who’s done a non-technical risk assessment. 

I guess we can leave it there unless you want to discuss anything further.