The point brought forward against a block size increase is the so called fee market.

In other words, miners want their cake and eat it too.

They don't care if people want to transact on bitcoin. They just want to maximise profit.
Whatever pushes fees higher is a plus for them.

One could say that this is something that couldn't have been predicted when bitcoin was created. Miners have an antithetical interest to the userbase and the need becomes more urgent as emissions keep going down.

The industrialization of mining brought this forward more than ever. Because unless fees return to the levels they were at when the ordinals craze was on, mining will be unsustainable for many miners that don't have access to ridiculously cheap electricity. That's most miners in the US today anyway.

So core Devs taking charge in removing OP_RETURN limits not only serves the purpose of monetising and policing bitcoin transactions, but also at serving the interests of miners.

Soon it will be prohibitive to transact on chain as an everyday user. You'll be able to do so through Jack Dorsey's Cash App, Adam Back's Liquid and other permissioned and centralised solutions. They'll be batching everyone's transactions on-chain and paying the costs collectively. Surely it's centralised and less secure than P2P. But to reach that point you have to put roadblocks for P2P usage first.

Removing OP_RETURN limits is the first step.

Why is there a mod edit to my post 

UEFA changed the drawing process and the effect was that it made some small country teams more welcome because previously it would be super rare to see any small country reach the champions league. Now league winner teams from many small countries enter directly into the second round of qualifications.

Now with the Conference League around it's also easier to see smaller teams in international competition. But UEFA seems to have rehauled the format for Europa and Champions league too.

Certain countries now enter the second qualifying round directly. In some other international forums I heard that there's some dissatisfaction of this because now mid-tear teams have it easier to enter and effectively take spots of better teams.

I'd venture to guess that UEFA decided it's about the money because there's some really passionate ultras in more disadvantaged parts of europe too. Or am I missing something. Feel free to give your thoughts.

I'm doing my best to also include Cypriot teams here because Cyprus is like a sister country to Greece, the only place in the world where Greek is also an official language.

A tiny country but these years their teams are entering in international competition more and more.

Cyprus hadn't been in Champions league for 8 years which is nice to see again now.

Jack Dorsey has become extravagantly rich from his run with Twitter.
This is a well known fact as Jack himself tends to publicize about his funding grants to various organizations.

In the last few years, his organization initially founded to support bitcoin core development monetarily, spiral.xyz, has become the most major source of funding for bitcoin developers and related events.

The majority of the developers pushing updates for bitcoin core are now directly funded by Jack Dorsey through Spiral.

More recently, some of these Dorsey funded developers openly declared they'll now be running bitcoin development as a lobby. Founding an invite-only bitcoin core developer group by the name of coredev.tech. They even have the nerve to openly announce that invitations are only extended to ideologically aligned developers.

Here's where it gets nasty though:

The upcoming bitcoin core update, so called "Core 30", has already merged some changes that directly benefit Jack Dorsey's corporations.
For one, Square already entered big in the mining game in 2021 by investing 5 million USD:
https://decrypt.co/72930/square-teams-with-blockstream-for-solar-powered-bitcoin-mining-farm

Jack Dorsey has also invested in chip manufacturing and claims to want to fundamentally change bitcoin:
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/jack-dorseys-block-inc-reveals-potential-upgrade-on-industry-standard-bitcoin-mining-rigs/

Well, what better way to instate your own will on an open source project than to directly place your favorite people on top of it?

Jack's vision of bitcoin seems to be full of off-chain transactions. Where he'll be a major player of permissioned "bitcoin payments" through his company. Obviously bitcoin's blockchain is the only way to create truly immutable transactions taking advantage of bitcoin's decentralized infrastructure. But sadly, this can't be monetized. But if the only viable way to transact BTC becomes through permissioned layer 2s like the ones Dorsey is trying to promote, they would have successfully managed to monetize bitcoin for just existing.

Jack was hopeful of also dominating chip manufacturing and even tried to cozy up with the Trump administration touting "American made chips". Thankfully the Trump admin hasn't bought into this fraud (yet).

What could be done from now to prevent this?
If you're a miner ask your pool if they're going to support Core 30. If there's no response, switch to a pool that clearly won't support this craziness.
If you run a node, you can symbolically run bitcoin Knots as an alternative. Mining is what makes a difference so keep in mind that node running is just symbolic. 

Ordinals are dead. Regular users are enjoying transactions of 1 Satoshi per virtual Byte, and it seems like some are plotting a revival of the so called bitcoin NFT economy by increasing OP_Return limits.

This is the exploit that opened the floodgates to a ton of trash being uploaded directly to bitcoin's blockchain in the first place. Bitcoin's network suffered under this attack given the very limited space in block size storage the blockchain allows for currently. Transaction fees had gone through the roof and some few transactions exploiting this oversight in taproot technology were blocking the way for everyone else.

Thankfully the hype died down, most of these "NFTs" became worthless as expected, and the whole ordinals situation is nearly dead now.

But it seems as if some core developers have ulterior motives? Why else would they want to push through with making an exploitable bitcoin feature official instead of completely removing it?

Let me remind everyone that there are a few parties that profit greatly from the bitcoin mempool being bloated with expensive spam transactions:

Exchanges: They profit form the hype and speculation generated around shitcoins running under the Ordinals brand. They made billions last run and surely would be gearing up to make even more.

Miners: Miners stand to gain a lot if fees go up, especially given that BTC emissions per block keep going down by design. It's kind of an existential issue for them.

Shitcoin developers: Surely those developing shitcoins at the expense of Bitcoin's blockchain stand to gain a lot at the moment, but also they're probably developing for some serious project that stands to gain in the long term if bitcoin goes down.

Meanwhile regular users suffer and transacting abilities on the bitcoin blockchain are neglected. It would be suicide to remove OP_RETURN limits.

You could prove if a slot is rigged by doing like a few thousand rolls and counting the RTP. If ts way lower than the one advertised then yeah there's a high likelihood the slot is rigged.

Consider this, most slots aren't provably fair so the results may be switched based on how the see who's rolling. Are you a streamer? You get the best seed. This is entirely possible with games that aren't provably fair.

So if you want fair games, seek the slots that have provable fairness. Plain and simple.

So what makes intellectual property valuable?
People have to desire it in some way. I wouldn't be interested in slots from a character I don't know as much as I would be to a character I've gotten accustomed to. That's if we're judging just by the character.

But most players will go to certain slots just because they have high rewards and nothing else. Usually when slots with intellectual property come out they're more bland so I personally tend to avoid them.

This matchday was totally disappointing... I was out of town and didn't have time to look at the matches live or bet on anything but in the end I'm thankful.
Panathinaikos already proves to be very lacking by losing to a team like levadeiakos. Surely this sets the stage for another super league taken by Olympiakos unless things change dramatically. But I don't think Panathinaikos will make the surprise this year either. We've gotten used of hopes being shattered early on with this team hehe

Anyway. I looked at the drawings Greek teams had in international competition:

Here's Olympiakos:

Notice also the Cypriot team Paphos made it to the Champions League and is in the same draw also. This is rare for Cypriot teams.

This is almost hilarious. Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayer Leverkusen and Ajax. Could it have been any worse?
I mean yeah it's champion's league afterall but never in my lifetime do I remember a Greek team maching with so many high ranking teams.
At least we can see some quality teams playing in Greece for once ey?

Things are a little more palatable for Panathinaikos and PAOK in the Europa league


AEK is in the Coonference League this year but things look extremely tough for them:

Fiorentina, Shamrock, Aberdeen and Samsunspor are all well acclaimed teams that I think AEK would have an extremely hard time competing against.

Also Cypriot team Omonoia made it to the Conference league. Cypriot AEK Larnaka also in there



Of all these Greek and Cypriot teams in European competitions this year I think realistically speaking only PAOK has some decent chances to win more matches and potentially advance. Panathinaikos is not in great form again so I'm not very hopeful.

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When SegWit was about to be implemented there was a big argument about how much of a potential bandwidth and storage increase current infrastructure could support.

The politics of on-chain scaling need a bit of context for explaining because at the time the largest bulk of bitcoin mining equipment was running from China. And China still had plenty of connectivity issues at the time.

But ever since there has been rapid improvement in terms of high speed bandwidth penetration, and China is also a pioneering country in terms of 5G coverage. Moreover bitcoin mining has largely moved to the US now for various reasons. But even for China, lack of bandwidth would no longer be a problem.

Remember, this is the reason we got 2MB SegWit instead of 4!

As of on-chain storage, pruning is an accepted form of running bitcoin now. But even for storing a full chain of a few TBs, memory prices and reliability have improved a lot over the last few years. We could easily handle an increase in block size now. The technology is here.

Some might say that an increase in block size could lead to various parties exploiting this space, similarly to ordinals.

Well... If we're going to be adding changes to bitcoin's base layer that require a soft or hard fork, along with increasing the blocksize, we might as well cut off some slack like the exploits that allowed ordinals in the first place.
Many of the proposed solutions to address bitcoin scaling require forks on the base technology. Might as well just increase the block size, or just do it alongside these changes.

In my view though, if any scaling tech needs a fork to be usable, it mostly makes sense to just increase the blocksize and see if we really need further scaling along with that, before more radical changes on the bitcoin stack.

How about Antoine Riard as I wrote above?

That's the waste of resources I'm talking about.
It's a gross design flaw by how LN works. More funds sitting there doesn't mean that someone is able to transact $2.3B.
Instead you'd have to split your funds to however much each channel has until you exhaust it.

Contrary to bitcoin, the more decentralized LN is, the harder it becomes to use.

@Satofan44

It's funny how contrary to me posting sources of actual LN developers saying themselves LN is so lacking in security features its unusable, you just resort to name calling to get a point across.

I've seen no counter arguments supporting LN with evidence here. We need more than "transaction speed goes BRRRRR" if we're going to promote a solution for mass adoption.


Right now miners are accepting 0.1 sat/vByte transactions and many blocks are going under capacity since the mempool is nearly empty. This happens allthewhile other networks perceived as "crypto" propagate thousands of transactions per second. Clearly the mark has been missed by BTC. If we're to make a comeback something better than Lightning Network will be needed.

This isn't FUD. It's facts that LN developers would also stand by.

It's just that LN isn't ready for mass adoption, it' can't scale well and it's a big waste of resources to try and adopt it. We're going to need something more seamless by the level the competition has reached by now.
One day BTC will have a scaling solution. But LN ain't gonna be it.

We need to start this conversation from an entirely new base and you aren't helping with this attitude.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YN6BEUA4jNU

Watch this video and you'll soon realize that the "free market" we live in has lead utility companies making below-cost deals with mega corporations to run their datacenters, while prices for everyone else go up to fill the difference.

Awe we supposed to tolerate this?

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I don't know why you would downplay the resignation of major contributors to a project especially when they go with such remarks.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5471172.0

We had discussed this here and maybe you missed the discussion.

Lightning network has no downtime because they have invented the unique feature of decentralised downtime. The loose sense of a network remains but it's realistically very possible for the channels that power your transactions to all be down.

A very flawed system nonetheless.
The proposed solutions aren't better either.

We should avoid forking bitcoin at all costs. Let alone for favouring such a flawed system.
On chain scaling is simpler and we already have the finality and trustlessnes issues resolved.

Yes it was just recently that a lightning network dev quit working on the project hinting that the design and the decisions behind the project are so flawed that he never sees if finished.

https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/1627569?utm_source=perplexity

As you can see, prominent developers have even gone as far as to call lightning network a scam.
It's not a solution, it's not secure, it's complicated and needs a lot of upkeep.

LN will never be bitcoin. No matter how many nodes it has.
This isn't FUD. It's plain facts.

Bitcoin layer 2s are not bitcoin and even the more let's say promoted solutions like the one programmed by Adam Back are flawed in their design.

There's a centralised point of entry and exit for BTC in and out of this system and the issue remains that this ends up being trust based along with all the problems of centralisation.

How independent could a layer 2 remain if the programmers on the payroll for it were arrested and the company developing it disbanded?

We've seen in Coinbase's later 2 as well as in solana chain transactions were halted for extended periods of time until a fix was issued.
These situations are not pleasant and hint to extensive centralisation in these systems.

The most independent form of scaling for BTC is on-chain. Currently with segwit blocks there can be maybe 7 thousand transactions in a block every 10 minutes? Well, surely it's not fast enough to verify a transaction at this pace for everyday needs and also not enough capacity.

Hardware and network infrastructure had improved since this debate was happening last time, so perhaps it's time to start discussing on-chain scaling again.