The filter stupidity gets even more stupider \ stacker news ~bitcoin

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The filter stupidity gets even more stupider github.com/ostromcode/The-Cat

3047 sats \ 33 comments \ @Scoresby 9 Dec bitcoin

I tried to find a journalistic-sounding reasonable title for this post, but couldn't. This filter stuff was stupid two years ago when it started, it was stupid earlier this year when all of a sudden everyone thought op-returns were going to be the death of us, and it was stupid back in the summer when CSAM was all anyone could talk about, and it was stupid when they finally got around to proposing a the Reduce Data Temporary Soft Fork.

It's still stupid now. Some idiot called Claire Ostrom, who started posting on X right about the time "Dathon Ohm" stopped posting, has proposed something called "The Cat - Non-monetary UTXO Cleanup."

A soft-fork consensus change and new spending rules intended to remove an existing, snapshot-based set of non-monetary UTXOs (NMUs) created by protocols such as Ordinals and Stamps, by making those UTXOs permanently unspendable and eligible for removal from the UTXO set.

For people who support things like this, why are you even bothering with Bitcoin? "making those UTXOs permanently unspendable" is not Bitcoin. Bitcoin is peer to peer digital cash. It's money you can send to anyone anywhere anytime and no one can stop you. It's not fucking very good at that if some portion of the community gets to decide whether your transaction counts as "non-monetary."

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102 sats \ 14 replies \ @Undisciplined 17h

Aren’t we always in the situation where some portion of the community gets to decide whether our transaction is going to be counted?

It’s a very large portion, sure, but if that’s an objection on principle don’t you have a problem?

Btw, I’m not pushing back on the merits. I just think your objection might really be slightly different than what was stated.

364 sats \ 13 replies \ @Scoresby OP 16h

I'd say that since the whitepaper it's known that 51% of the hashpower can break some of the guarantees of Bitcoin (double spend protection, censorship resistance) and that with enough hashpower, someone could try to enforce new rules on Bitcoin.

The traditional response to this has been: we'll change the mining algorithm or our nodes will reject your blocks. As far as I know, Bitcoiners have never accepted the idea of freezing or confiscating people's coins or arbitrarily saying that some already existing utxos don't count -- and such suggestions (if anyone had the audacity to make them in the past) were met with the understanding that they were an attack.

So, I would say we are not always in the situation where some portion of the community gets to decide whether our transaction is going to be counted. We may be in a position where some portion of the community decides whether new kinds of transactions (eg. Taproot, Segwit) are valid, but we have never accepted a change intentionally seizes other people's coins.

One of my conceptions about the way bitcoin works is that any coin can always be spent with the same set of rules under which it was received. This is as important as the 21 million supply cap. I'd like to believe that these basic principles of Bitcoin are not always up for grabs in the same way that the size of the op_return going forward might be.

Could some portion of the community try to push for a change to the supply cap? Yes. Are we always in a situation where this could happen? I don't believe so.

Perhaps I should have instead written:

It's not fucking very good at that if we accept that some portion of the community should decide whether your transaction counts as "non-monetary."

69 sats \ 11 replies \ @south_korea_ln 14h

I'd have to find proper reference, but i think there has been serious discussion at some point about what to do if Satoshi's coins ever move. One of the viable options was to actually invalidate his UTXOs. Maybe this wouldn't fly anymore in the current climate.

102 sats \ 8 replies \ @optimism 13h

Sure there has been talk of that. But it's a contentious hardfork to do so. So I propose to burn all satoshi coins on BCH because they love hardforking.

169 sats \ 3 replies \ @Scoresby OP 12h

also, why would satoshi's coins be any different than anyone else's? They're satoshi's coins, not yours or mine, and therefore, the only person who should decide what to do with them is satoshi.

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 12h

I'm of the opinion that they're exactly the same. Your coins, my coins, satoshi's coins, scammer's coins, thieves' coins, even Saylor's coins.

But if in the end Satoshi's coins will be frozen, let's just freeze Saylor's and Blackrock's too. Would be much funnier.

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 12h

One of the conversations around this brought up the coins being stolen as the hypothetical scenario.

I still thought it was better to let the hacker have them.

171 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 12h

Can't make a meme out of Vitalik "stopping all trading" and then do the same.

Edit: this meme:

100 sats \ 3 replies \ @Murch 12h

It’s not clear to me why making Satoshi’s coins unspendable would be a hard fork. That seems like an obvious soft fork to me.

102 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 12h

What if satoshi wants to spend their coins?

Not your keys, not your coins means that you don't get to make decisions over coins that you don't have the keys for. If you do have the keys, OP_RETURN is a great unspendable output, I hear.

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @Murch 11h

You mean, Satoshi would propose a hard fork to reenable spending? Making them unspendable is a soft fork.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 10h

No, a portion of Bitcoiners would. It will be toxic.

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 14h

I remember some of those discussions but the arguments never made sense to me.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 14h

Wait, but why? That feels even less justified than censoring ordinals

123 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 16h

I like your revised statement. The issue, as I see it, is that there’s a push to undermine an important part of the culture that Bitcoin is resting on.

Even if this implementation fails, the cultural shift is itself dangerous.

168 sats \ 6 replies \ @optimism 22h

The utxo set is an implementation choice. Ask Voskuil why libbitcoin doesn't have it, or ask utreexo about their solution.

333 sats \ 1 reply \ @Murch 14h

Yes, but this is a separate issue. The UTXO set is a way of presenting current state of the Bitcoin network with the minimal necessary data. libbitcoin simply chooses to store more data than that, whereas utreexo introduces a framework where other nodes can prove that some UTXO exists and is spendable. Everyone still needs to agree that these UTXOs exist and are spendable.

This proposal seems to delegate the authority to declare some UTXOs unspendable to some underdefined process/council. Basically, it proposes a framework to regularly softfork out some UTXOs at the whim of whoever gets to author that blacklist.

Edit: Oh, I see. You mean that the motivation for the fork is poor. — I agree with that.

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 13h

Yes, what I mean is that if the utxoset size is an issue for you, then:

If you are worried about the utxoset and you're not mining, utreexo is a better solution. If you run libbitcoin you don't care about it at all because you basically run full txindex. If you are a miner then don't mine what you don't like. And if you are worried about other miners, buy more ASICs until they are all bankrupt.

100 sats \ 2 replies \ @Scoresby OP 17h

Making different architectural decisions is one of the things I find most interesting about alternative implementations. It seems crazy to me that people will suggest things like their reduce data soft fork and now this cat ridiculousness to "fix" implementation details. Voskuil was making this point on X yesterday.

102 sats \ 1 reply \ @Murch 13h

Have you seen Hornetnode?

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 13h

Yes (#1233022), but I would be very curious to hear about any updates to the project.

121 sats \ 0 replies \ @sedited 19h

Indeed.

Also hard work happening in Core at the moment on making maintaining it way more efficient.

283 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 9 Dec

So much spam... I mean how will we ever survive???

128 sats \ 0 replies \ @denlillaapan 20h

totally.

I'm so sick of these people, just fingers massively crossed that their silly efforts won't split the chain.

"making those UTXOs permanently unspendable" is not Bitcoin. Bitcoin is peer to peer digital cash. It's money you can send to anyone anywhere anytime and no one can stop you. It's not fucking very good at that if some portion of the community gets to decide whether your transaction counts as "non-monetary."

100%.

113 sats \ 0 replies \ @SHA256man 9 Dec

wow, this is amazing! desperation is getting even more obvious; "The Cat" - my posts are going to literally write themselves at this point; #1287304

The MeowTrix 😹😹😹

102 sats \ 3 replies \ @SimpleStacker 9 Dec