drgo on Nostr: Oh, the issue about time locked transaction filtering isn’t important. But neither ...

Oh, the issue about time locked transaction filtering isn’t important. But neither are any of the issues you are seemingly concerned about.

I can take a stab at reframing your understanding.

Issue #1 Arbitrary data storage on chain, including potentially unlawful numbers like CP (remember, all data is merely long strings of 1s and 0s; this is a fact that can not be argued with).

If I send you an email with additional numbers attached that can be unambiguously and statistically undeniably interpreted as CP, does that make YOU a criminal? Shouldn’t you filter your incoming emails to prevent CP? Or maybe your email provider should go to prison for not filtering it for you?

*Also, please do remember that bitcoin blocks stored on disk are scrambled using a very simple algorithm to prevent antivirus software from detecting problems and deleting files you don’t want deleted…* If you want to interact with the illegal numbers, it will require you to install software or write commands to reconstruct those illegal numbers from blockchain data…it would be beyond incredibly unwise and foolish to say bitcoin isn’t allowed to exist because people could choose to disseminate and reconstruct CP privately…Karen-esque catastrophizing of CP on chain is a direct attack on Bitcoin’s existence and by definition there is no preventing illegal numbers from being on chain (hint, there already are illegal numbers on chain, you just don’t know how to access them).

2) Hobbyist support for archival nodes matters

This might have been true for me when I was very briefly roughly 1% of the bitcoin hash power back in 2010, but even then probably not. Bandwidth isn’t in short supply but even if it were, broadcast transmission of the entire blockchain makes more sense than peer to peer transmission for all humans on earth (fun fact, I run an offline bitcoin node with a receive only satellite connection to one online node and have since before the pandemic…see https://blockstream.space, it’s free).

Bitcoin owners running a node to validate their own bitcoin and the validity of the entire chain does matter. It’s a big part of what brings value to bitcoin: rejection of invalid coins. But as far as helping other people to download blocks or relay transactions, the effects of many thousands of home nodes is minimal compared to the over abundance of superiorly resourced nodes at data centers. Not that I am advocating for a data center only node approach, that’s folly, but it doesn’t take many such nodes to serve all users and be remarkably censorship resistant.


In summary, I think technical misunderstanding, the very natural human reaction of feeling disgusted and revolted about CP, and the understandable fear of government persecution have all combined to make really dumb ideas like BIP-444/110 come about…

That said, I think it a bit premature to abandon filtering entirely…it’s a gift to miners that we don’t need as users to give them right now. On a social level, it’s best to avoid unimportant technical issues like filtering lest we invite undue attention and misunderstanding from the general public, law enforcement, and legislators. But sometimes programmers only see the end state of long complex processes and autistically jump to the inevitable end game.