We stood on principle. UASFs work because nodes are in control of the network. For all the suits watching: this was a boardroom vote. 20% said aye, 80% abstained, 0% said nay. That means the motion carries.
that's from BitcoinMechanic's exit video. I don't agree with everything in it and he spends half the time admitting he might just be a sore loser. but the boardroom vote framing is the part I can't shake.
what bugs me is how quiet the rejection was. nobody ran a URSF. the pools just ignored it and everyone moved on. he says that's not what a real rejection looks like and I think he's got a point. if thousands of nodes signal one way and a handful of KYC'd mining companies quietly decide the other, that's not a permissionless network deciding anything. that's a board meeting.
where I get less convinced is the "no URSF means they were bluffing" leap. most people who didn't like BIP 110 weren't running node software to protest it, they just shrugged. absence of opposition isn't proof of a fix. but the deeper worry survives that nitpick, which is that consensus by pools is a weird place for bitcoin to have landed
the full thing is here: https://youtu.be/PB6ue-h-3V8
The framing seems wrong to me. The change they pushed for was incompatible with what others had already chosen.
Why would anyone else need to take an extra step to signal their opposition when they were in opposition by default?
They should learn a lesson from that. Most people are not against the idea of anti-spam measures, they just didn't agree with how BIP 110 went about it... and so they ignored it and moved on. For whatever reason, BIP110 supporters just seemed really unable to read the room or work collaboratively. That's why even though I've always been sympathetic to their goals, I wasn't on board with their actions.
My impression is that a very large, probably sufficiently large, group of people were in that camp.
I didn’t understand the frantic escalation. Knots was steadily gaining node share and lots of Core nodes had stopped updating to the controversial version. They might have been able win that hearts and minds campaign.
in regards to the frantic escalation, there is probably some weird social dynamic at play which could be similar to climate or covid hysteria
That’s my sense too. From the outside, it looked like an echo chamber runaway feedback cycle.
Yeah the framing is off. If you're already opting into no-account KYC via Lightning or a coldcard, that's not exactly about 'anti-spam' you're blocking a different mechanism. The change was more about who gets to set these parameters at all.