BRC-20 transaction patterns could be identified regardless of their size, so a complete "block" is technically possible, Luke probably knows this, and wouldn't be risking dropping "normal" transactions for false positives. however, what Luke is trying to do now is add an opt-out feature to make your node reject Ordinals.  Bitcoin allows all inscriptions by default, adding a new option to reject Ordinals-like transactions won't fix it, I mean even if the new core version comes with that opt-out enabled by default, people can still disable it, correct me if I am wrong.

Reading into Luke's comments here and there regarding this "ban" he does refer to it as "spam filtration" and he seems to be counting on the fact that most people including miners would activate the change, I find it very hard to believe that mining pools will opt-in for a new upgrade that makes them lose proft.

I don't know about Hiveor os BOs, but I remember one of the devs of Vnish telling me that they don't even read EEPROM at all, so if what they say is correct (assuming my understand was correct as well) then I suppose if it's only an EEPROM related issue, by passing it by Vnish should be doable, but then again, even with the stock firmware it's easy to test this, you would just leave a single hashbaord plugged and see if it hashes right away, if it does -- you confirm it's compatibility issue, if it doesn't -- then it's not.

That's true, at least, he did do his best to explain to us and was willing to listen to what the community had to say, although, it's almost obvious that his decision was already made and there was nothing that any of us could say to make him ditch the change altogether, but ya, at least we did negotiation the mixer discussion part!

As for the mixers, we could at one point in the future see the rules change, meanwhile, this ban could serve as an excuse/reason for them to actually evaluate the feasibility of advertising their mixer services here, the average mixer spends a few thousand dollars weekly here, there exists a chance that they would generate a better revenue with the same or less amount spend elsewhere, I personally do not know a better forum than this one -- but mixer services and campaign managers will probably strive to find other places to carry on.

امممم! , في الواقع الاحتيال والنصب لايتعارض مع قوانين المنتدى, بمعنى اخر, لنقل ان شخص نصاب قام بالنصب على 100 شخص هنا, وقام بالاعتراف على نفسه, فهدا لن يعرضه للحظر من قبل المشرفين, لن يقومو حتى بحذف تعليقاته ان لم تكان تخالف احد شروط المنتدى (مثل وجود روابط ملغمة).

طبعا قد يتسائل الكثيرون كيف هدا ممكن, في الواقع الامر منطقي جدا, لايمتلك المنتدى الموارد البشرية الكافية لمنع النصب والاحتيال, لذلك تركت ادارة المنتدى هدا الامر للاعضاء حيث يوجد شي يسمى نظام الثقة, وقائمة الثقة الافتراضية, يعني اننا كأعضاء مسؤولين على كشف النصابين والمحتالين وتبيه الناس حولهم بعيدا عن صلاحيات المشرفين.

I don't have any experience with the miner in question but here is a piece of info that might help you move further, it's possible that all 3 boards have a good running hex / EEPROM but they simply are not interchangeable/compatible, which was the case with the 17 series, you couldn't just mix and match different hashboards,  so the first thing you try would be to extract the hex file from one of the boards and write it to the other two, try all 3 boards.

If that fails, then I would find it pretty odd that all 3 hashboards have the same issue and the likelihood of this problem will be the control board.

if you calculate the probability of a 5% diff increase without an actual 5% hashrate increase in 2016 blocks, or in other words, what are the chances 2016 blocks take 5% less time to mine than the expected 10 mins without any real hashrate change, I think using the exponential CDF to get a clue, the probability is close to zero, ya it gets better if you were to assume that it's possible that 50% (2.5% of that increase was caused by an actual increase in hash power) while the other 2.5% was caused by pure randomness, but still the probability of that 2.5% is also close to zero.

I agree, there is no definite way to measure the network hashrate, nothing you can take to court and present as clear cut evidence, but generally speaking, a 5% increase in difficulty is most likely the result of an almost 5% increase in hashrate, ya it could be 5.1% or 4.9%, nobody knows, but 5% in 2016 blocks is fairly accurate.

I only commented on this part


So tweak what exactly?





Great then, the burden is on him to prove his claims, he needs to post solid evidence or else, nobody would take his claims seriously now that someone has came up with a counter claim.

How can you be so sure?


There are exactly ZERO ways to tweak that locally, the share diff is set by the pool, not the miner, the majority of pools nowadays don't even let you choose the diff, but they are smart enough to adapt to the miner hashrate, all pools would start with some low diff and then climb their way up to the point where shares at kept at a reasonable pace between the miner and the pool, too high diff and you can't check your work on the pool, too low diff and your miner is going to submit dozen of shares every second which is plain foolish.




I underlined the keywords.



I have not tested the pool nor do I have the intention to take the gamble, but I don't think that person is lying, it's stupid to lie about something that could be easily verified by others, I mean I just happen not to give a shit about said pool, or else, it takes little to no time to actually confirm/deny his claims.

oh boy, tell me about it, I just had a 3-4 day long debate on repution last week (in case anyone missed me here) . I hate debates.


You could call them whatever you want, it doesn't change the answer to your initial and main question which was/ still is




Ok, we have to stop here, at this point, I can't help but think that there is a major misunderstanding at the core of this topic, you are confusing two things, block weight and block size.

When Segwit/Block weight came into existing (bip 141 IIRC), the introduction of a new "way" to measure segwit transaction was introduced, and it's a simple formula;


In plain English, the segwit upgrade added another 3MB which could only be facilitated by witness data, so a non-segiwt block will still be capped by 1MB, so in theory a 100% segwit block could have the size of 4MB which is 4vM or 4M weigh units.

Nowadays, the VAST majority of transactions are segwit, which means, almost everyone using BTC is getting what you call a "discount", so everyone is using/abusing those 3MB added by the core devs.

So now we need to think of a Bitcoin block as 2 disks in 1, something like a bus where the bus cabin has a max capacity of 1000KG worth of people, and 3000KG in the luggage compartment, of course, people are free to cut their hands and put them in the compartment to spend less on those limited 1000KG,

Now if someone is pretty fat and weighs 1000KG and isn't willing to cut any of that fat to put it in the luggage compartment to allow other people to ride with him, that person will need to pay for the 1000KG + the 3000KG luggage compartment.

I like this analogy so let me keep going;

if that fat ass offers the bus driver 1k for the ride but then come 50 people who weigh 80KG each (4000KG in total) and are willing to cut 3000KG of their body parts to send it to the luggage compartment, each of them offered to pay only $40, the bus driver will then collect $2000, so he would pick these people first because he makes an extra $1000 in profit.

The bus driver here does not care about how the bus is going to be filled, he just runs a simple code that picks the best combination of people that would give him the highest reward for the trip, it could be 5 fat people or 500 apes who could squeeze themselves in and pay more per KG, he just couldn't give a flying fudge.

اتفق معك اخي يحى, فان المكسرات ليست شيء اساسي يستحق التضحية بكامل المنتدى من اجلها, ففي النهاية هدا المنتدى لا يتاوجد في الفراغ بل هوا موجود على سيرفر في الولايات المتحدة ويمكن برسالة قصيرة من الحكومة الاستحواذ عليه واغلاقه, لذلك وجه نظر المشرف في الابتعاد عن المشاكل يتخللها الكثير من المنطق, واعتقد (او على الاقل اتمنى) ان هدا القرار جاء بعد مشاورات كافية تم تلخيصها في ان الابقاء على المسكرات يشكل خطر واضح لمستقبل المنتدى.

It all boils down to how much thought theymos gave this decision.

Let me highlight another very similar example in the shadows of mining pools, Mara pool (a U.S based pool) has been censoring OFAC listed addresses since 2021, on the other hand, Foundry (another U.S based pool 8 times bigger than Mara) does not censor those transactions, so what gives?

There are a few possible scenarios here, one of these two large corps has a bad lawyer who did not point them to the "right" direction, so it's either Foundry is in the wrong and is going to be in deep shit for not banning those transactions, or Mara sucked the government's dick for nothing.

Judging by the size of Foundry, I find it hard to believe that they do not know for certain that they are perfectly safe without censoring those transactions, or else -- it's a huge risk for not too much reward for them.

So now if we reflect this on the forum/theymos, I hope that if we have to bend over, we should at least do it while knowing that it's worth it and that any other option is not viable.

I hope that Theymos will do his best (assuming he has not) to evaluate the situation by consulting some good lawyers who would either point him to a complete ban or maybe just a warning and a set of rules that indicate using certain mixers that engaged in "laundering" criminal funds is against the forum rules and to delete and ban everyone who promotes those particular mixers but not mixers in general.

I asked AI about the legal status of forum content and its owner (ya may not the best place to ask but anyway)


So there is still a slight possibility that the forum could get away with just

1- Banning all sanctioned/seized mixers.
2- Banning everyone who encourages the usage of mixers for criminal purposes.

Of course, going with the assumption that mixers (in their bare form are not illegal)

at least this shouldn't be an unconditional submission to the government: if theymos has concluded that retrieving is the only option here, we should accept it and remember the fact that while we as members are only subject to losing the forum, he could lose his freedom.

This is not true, which is what I have been trying to explain to you, I literally gave you the code logic that does the sorting, the number of transactions is irrelevant, it is all about how much they pay per space unit.

You are probably better off with ignoring virtual size, just think of the block as 1MB in size ( that is what it actually is on the desk anyway).

If 1000 transactions each of the size of 1kb and all are paying 1 sat per kb, the total fee reward for the miner would be 1000 sat, if someone else has a transaction size of 1kb and decides to pay 1000 sat per kb, one of those 1000 1 sat guys will need to waite, if comes a guy with a transaction size of 1MB and is paying 1001 sat per kb all those 1 sat guys + the 1000 sat guy will have to wait till the next block.

So it is all about bitcoin spent per space unit ( be it byte or Vbyte), so every transaction that gets included always makes economical sense.

OK but what is your argument? here is another random non-Ordinal transaction from the same block the got some good "discount"


had it been non-Segwit, it would have doubled the fees.

Why does it look like the transaction you linked tricked the pool in anyway? it did not, it used segwit+taproot to minimize it's virtual size, it paid 40 sat / Vbyte which was the median fee rate for that block, so he did not outsmart the mining pool, he paid a nice 207,778 sats on a transaction that consumed ‎19.99 kB on the desk, the fee/space checks out, nobody cares if that was a discount, the core code allows them to do so -- so they do it.

So based on this logic, if you ask miners to block those transactions, then they would also block segwit transactions, because without segwit, transactions would take more space and thus increase miners profit, so they would censor P2TR, P2WPKH and force everyone else to back to P2PKH.

Miners do not oppose any protocol upgrades that make transacting on the blockchain cheaper, so nobody should expect them to oppose transactions that pay more, miners would take every sat they can off the table.

Also, keep in mind that most pools use the default getblocktemplate made by core devs, the way it operates is rather simple, it sorts transactions by sat/byte, something like


There is no "transaction type" or "who" is transferring "what", it's all about sats.

It does not, this is what I have been trying to explain all along, this is the mining section where most people are miners who pay bills and invest a lot of money, the majority could not care less if you are transacting btc to buy coffee or to upload some stupid worthless Jpeg.

So miners can't fix this issue because they do not view it as an issue, but rather as a solution to the low income, if you post the same thing in the bitcoin discussion board -- the answers will differ, but again, if this is actually an issue, it needs to addressed before the core devs, miners simply do not care.

And BTW, i do not have a crystal ball but if any pool starts to actually ban Ordinals and start to pay less than other pools that do not, said pool will go broke, i so want to be proven wrong if one of the pools is willing to launch this experiment.

The way I see it, it only shows how easy it is to gamble with money that isn't yours  (investors' money), back in the day when the Chinese miners were dominating, you could always sense some rational movements in the hashrate, probably because it was the miner's own money, nowadays where the U.S is the largest mining hub, things just don't make much sense anymore.

All these large corps are betting on the price of BTC to hit the roof after the halving, if it doesn't, many of them will be in deep shit.

T21 burns roughly 87KwH a day, for 6 cents rate that is 5.2$ paid daily, as it stands right now it makes $14.5 so $9.3 a day in profit, so without the halving the ROI on these is 280 days, for the 4 cents miners it's $11 profit a day or 240 days ROI.

If the halving hits and BTC isn't at 80k, then this profit will fall right away, if BTC stays below 40k for long enough, the ROI on these gears could easily extend to over 500 days which more so like never.

Of course, the other bet besides the price is that "others will fall before us", and ya that's a bet you can make if you have <4 cents, maybe 2-3 cents all-in including all operational costs and 0% failure rate, but it seems like all these big boys are betting on each other's failure, the math states that it's not possible for all of them so survive the halving, so who is going to fall first? we will find out when the time comes, Q3 of next year will be fun to watch.

Loosening up a bit is nice, but I would personally prefer a very clear set of rules regarding mixers because reading these two lines alone


It could be understood that I could still wear mixers' signatures as long as they don't contain a URL and my username isn't mixerABCD.

Not just Ordinal, every type of transaction could use/abuse/exploit those upgrades to make their transactions smaller in size and thus save on fees, but that does not matter, what matters is sat/Vbyte, so to answer this question


I am not sure, and it does not matter, the transactions that pay the most per the space they use -- make perfect sense to be included, you could argue that Ordinals are spam and should be banned on a protocol/node level, but that would be a different topic to discuss, the majority of miners would want to make the most profit regardless.

I am sure many miners would settle with lower payouts using a pool that does not censor certain transactions (like ditching F2pool for another pool), but settling with less profit due to the censorship of Ordinals isn't going to work, you may get a few miners to side with you on that regard, but I wouldn't be so optimistic, of course, this would also apply to pools that would for example do the opposite, like ban non-Ordinals transactions that pay more just to accept Ordinals that pay less.

genocide propaganda is probably illegal in most if not all countries, such comments could be removed by "authority force",  these comments put the forum at risk, probably not much less than mixers, except that -- nobody had ever cared enough to point fingers at the forum for being an open-platform for genocide encouragement, but for how long? I think it would be best to remove the P&S boards altogether -- delete everything non-crypto.

What does Bitcoin gain from debating these conflicts here? exactly.

You can criticize theymos as much as you want, but you should at least be fair.

The forum does not exist in a vacuum, it sits on a computer probably physically located in the U.S, owned by a U.S based company, the same thing goes for the domain, it's not truly owned by anyone as long as the government can seize it, it only takes a two-line letter for law enforcement and then you will be a welcomed with


So what do you expect? do you want him to risk the whole forum along with his freedom for BTC mixers advertisement? ya that would make him a hero but a stupid one, because the government would want any excuse they can use against the forum to take it down.

He probably gave them a bit more than they would have wanted "banning everything mixers" but he managed to run the forum for all these years, he probably knows some things that you and I don't, it's not easy to be his place, it's a place I sure wouldn't want to be at.

I understand the ambition and "fuck the police" kind of stuff, but this is the real world, you need to live -- to fight another day. When and if enough time has passed, and we as BTC community start engaging in real legislation, we would write the new laws accordingly, as it stands right now, the legislators are just old farts controlled by banks and large corporations, and we are just a minority that the majority of the world view as "Crazy group of nerds wasting their precious dollars on some imaginary internet coins", it's way too early to flex against governments, this is the sad reality that we need to live with.

Good luck getting any support for that flag, any rational person would evaluate the accusation in its full context not just the part that says "Royse777 did not pay me"

But seriously, who wants to be on OFAC list for a hundred dollars or so? And do not tell me "this is all the money I got, I will starve without it" because it is better to be broke than on that sanctioned list.

Given that some participants take payments directly to exchanges, there is no doubt that the payout will immediately put many people at risk including Royse, this is a risk not worth taking IMO.