Removing OP_return limits seems like a huge mistake

[nutildah]

spamtoshi made $2400 to first create Libre Relay: https://x.com/lightcoin/status/1733257392668766494

By a guy from Alpen Labs who want to run stablecoins and shitcoins on Bitcoin. Pathetic, a lot of them are invested in this crap startup.

What's the problem? Its an alternative bitcoin client for people that want to do transactions Core can't do, without forking the network. Nobody has to use it, and you won't catch anyone here saying you should use it. Pretty sure he's allowed to do what he wants. There have been shitcoins on Bitcoin for over a decade now; not to mention Tether first got started on Bitcoin.

[d5000]

That said, everyone has the right to protest by making the relay of such data less efficient. By enforcing their own relay policies, non-miner nodes can slow down the spread of unwanted transactions -- not to actually stop them, of course, but more to get that warm fuzzy feeling of "I'm doing my part for the network."

I think the question of "keeping the datacarriersize knob or not" boils down to an evaluation of different possible effects:

- Spam [1] cost: If a significant percentage of nodes use the datacarriersize knob, then spammers (particularly those with a time-sensitive plan, e.g. a NFT on a certain block height) may be incentived to bribe [2] miners directly, increasing their cost. The crucial question here would be, how high is the average cost of this effect?
- Centralization risk due to direct miner bribing: Big miners and pools can increase their income due to direct bribing. This can increase the difficulty and price solo miners and not-that-profitable miners at small pools out of the mining game (may be a small effect, but it probably exists). [Edited, see here.]
- Social consensus: It may be helping to deter spam that nodes "protest" against it, making spammers "feel bad". I believe this however to be weak against financially profitable spam schemes. An indication that this could work would be for example a spam project which has reduced their data footprint due to user claims, or used commitments, or even other blockchains.
- Block propagation. Slower if the nodes have many different policy settings (as far as I understand it).
- Development cost. Higher if the knob stays there.

Some of these effects seem to be possible to be measured, so this could be an idea to move the discussion forward in a constructive way (I'm not following the PR discussion so that may have been mentioned there, but I think it's not a bad idea to list these effects here in simple language for those joining the discussion.).

Regarding development cost, a "compromise" could look like this: Core removes the knobs, but links to a patch or a patched version which is maintained by another team (and only contains these changes). Of course this would only solve this point, and the effects on the remaining points would still have to be evaluated.


[1] Yes I have read gmaxwell's comment on it, but I'm just using the popular term for it, as the effects on the user experience is a bit similar.
[2] Idem.

[mikeywith]

- Block propagation. Slower if the nodes have many different policy settings (as far as I understand it).

I think this is the only noticeable effect, and yes, your understanding is 100% correct. Different policy settings cause an overall public network performance degradation. If you don't store X data in your mempool, then when you receive a block that includes X, you'll still need to verify it -- meaning you’ll have to download it anyway, but only on demand. That’s very different from having it already downloaded and propagated a dozen times. It’s like a torrent client forcing you to download and seed the entire network, including files you may never need.

Mind you, this propagation delay won’t affect most miners, since they will certainly relax their settings. And more importantly, mining pools don't rely on the regular P2P network (the one you and I use) to relay blocks between them. They mostly use protocols like FIBRE, which are obviously much faster than using the public network.

bribe [2] miners directly, increasing their cost. The crucial question here would be, how high is the average cost of this effect?
- Centralization risk due to direct miner bribing: Big miners and pools can increase their income due to direct bribing. This can increase the difficulty and price smaller miners/pools out of the mining game (may be a small effect, but it probably exists).

More transactions in blocks = more profit for every miner, no exceptions. If a bribed pool drops a standard transaction to make room for an OP_RETURN transaction, that standard transaction doesn’t just vanish -- another miner will pick it up. So the overall mining revenue increases with more transactions, regardless of type.

Now, since spammers may be forced to reach out directly to mining pools, those pools will likely charge them more. And honestly, isn’t that a good thing? Don’t we want spammers to be paying higher fees so they eventually get tired and give up?

And let's not forget: miners are also part of the community. Individual miners can pressure pools to reflect their preferences -- like saying "don’t include those trash transactions or I’m leaving your pool." That’s already happening with Ordinals.

You would think a pool like Luke’s Ocean, which bans all sorts of transactions (and as a result earns less, ignoring variance and fees), would be irrelevant by now. But nope -- they've managed to gather nearly 6 EH of hashrate and are still growing!. That tells you there are plenty of miners who don’t want their hashpower used to mine what they consider spam.

[d5000]

More transactions in blocks = more profit for every miner, no exceptions. If a bribed pool drops a standard transaction to make room for an OP_RETURN transaction, that standard transaction doesn’t just vanish -- another miner will pick it up. So the overall mining revenue increases with more transactions, regardless of type.

Of course, but I meant another issue (already mentioned by @gmaxwell if I remember correctly): Only the big miners/pools will have significant extra income due to Slipstream-style bribing. Thus the big pools offering such services will be able to increase their advantage over small pools and solo miners.

The "difficulty increase" may happen because the big miners earn extra $$$, and thus can buy more hardware. And thus, the profitability margin for miners who connect to smaller pools, and solo miners, gets smaller, and some of them may get "priced out".

Clarification: I've written in the earlier post that "smaller miners" get priced out, this is incorrect. It's the miners in the smaller pools and solo miners, which is a small but important difference. I'm correcting that in the other post too

You would think a pool like Luke’s Ocean, which bans all sorts of transactions (and as a result earns less, ignoring variance and fees), would be irrelevant by now. But nope -- they've managed to gather nearly 6 EH of hashrate and are still growing!. That tells you there are plenty of miners who don’t want their hashpower used to mine what they consider spam.

This is interesting, but as long as the miners/pools who do accept bribes exist, the miners connecting to such pools like Ocean will have a disadvantage, and some few may just fall below their minimum profitability margin due to that. I guess the effect is small, as already wrote, but it's at least ethically questionable, even if the centralization effect is very limited. It would be interesting though to know about estimations of the amount of this extra income -- just to know if there's a problem or not.

Edit: I guess Ocean happily mine "fake public key" transactions too, or did they find a method to ban these transactions? If yes, problem solved, but I guess the only thing they could do is for example hard-coding the Stampchain format into their rules and ban it ...

[mikeywith]

but I meant another issue (already mentioned by @gmaxwell if I remember correctly): Only the big miners/pools will have significant extra income due to Slipstream-style bribing. Thus the big pools offering such services will be able to increase their advantage over small pools and solo miners.

In the broader context, virtually no one mines BTC entirely solo anymore. Solo miners now use solo mining pools like CK and ViaBTC. These pools are well-connected and have excellent propagation capabilities, so I don't think we need to worry about "mining pools." In fact, mining pools must be well-connected not just to fetch those transactions but to avoid losing entire blocks.

Again, even for the few solo gamblers out there, they only hit a block once in a blue moon--almost never--so we shouldn't include them in the equation.

As for direct reach to miners, this is an "extra" service that some pools provide while others don't, and it's really independent of pool size. ViaBTC, for example, offers transaction acceleration for non-RBF transactions (the reason I stopped using them was because they failed to explain where the money goes), while other much larger pools don't do that--probably for the same reason. Once you start including transactions that are not in the "default" getblocktemplate, you have no way to prove to your users that you're not ripping them off.

So, the majority of those spam transactions (similar to the current situation of purged transactions) will have to face their fate until they find their way into a block, and all pools have almost equal opportunity to reach wallets and app wallets that first propagate those transactions.

Furthermore, the whole concept of "small miners" simply doesn't exist in any meaningful scale anymore. 80% of blocks are mined by only six pools, and 90% of blocks are mined by the top nine pools. None of these are small, and we certainly shouldn't be worrying about them--at least, not more than we have to worry about the little guy running his node on limited bandwidth who can't afford to be relaying all those transactions.

As for Ocean, last I checked, I believe they were using the Knots template, which filters out inscriptions and limits OP_RETURN data to 42 bytes. I believe the reasoning behind 42 bytes is that it should fit data commitments, which are 32 bytes. Not sure what the remaining 10 is for--maybe for a 10-byte identifier or just a random number Luke pulled while reading the Bible, which he inscribed into the very blockchain he's now trying to keep clean.

Obviously, this method, while effective, isn't perfect since:

1-It could filter other "legit transactions."

2-Some spam can still make it in.

But in general, it does the job.

[d5000]

As for direct reach to miners, this is an "extra" service that some pools provide while others don't, and it's really independent of pool size.

Even if this was true (I think still the bigger pools have advantage here, because they are more well-known) I think my problem with that is that still those offering the "spam passthrough" are benefitted with a higher fee average due to the extra fees of Slipstream-style services. It's like the whole incentive system encourages "breaking the standardness rules". Those miners/pools who do it, get more income.

That's a point none of the (pretendedly?) super-angry and borderline conspiracionist defenders of a low OP_RETURN limit has responded to, up to this moment, in this thread.

Furthermore, the whole concept of "small miners" simply doesn't exist in any meaningful scale anymore. 80% of blocks are mined by only six pools, and 90% of blocks are mined by the top nine pools. None of these are small [...]

I agree but I'm worrying about these 10-20%. Or do you think they're all altruist/hobby miners? Of course some of those miners will get priced out "normally" over time, but they could become priced out earlier due to the effect I was describing. It's an acceleration of an existing gradual process.

We can however agree to disagree if you like, it's probably a small effect, but I still don't think it's really "ethically correct".

As for Ocean, last I checked, I believe they were using the Knots template, which filters out inscriptions and limits OP_RETURN data to 42 bytes.

Stampchain uses 34 bytes seemingly for metadata in OP_RETURN, but the rest of the data is stuffed into fake public keys / scripts. See this earlier post.

So no, I don't think it "does the job". This is the most harmful spam, and we can't do anything against it. The Stampchain tx I linked in my earlier post alone creates 28 UTXOs (plus the OP_RETURN which is discarded, and one change output) for a minuscule Pepe image, which will never be spend. Imagine a spam wave based on this technique.

Just a little calculation: Let's say we had a moderate Bitcoin Stamps spam wave with 100 50 of these transactions per block (Edited: 100 is too much, it would barely fit.). That means 1400 "never spendable" fake public key UTXOs per block, 201600 per day, and about 6 million per month.

What's your response to this, angry low OP_RETURN limit defenders? (not aimed at you, @mikeywith, of course )

[mikeywith]

I agree but I'm worrying about these 10-20%. Or do you think they're all altruist/hobby miners? Of course some of those miners will get priced out "normally" over time, but they could become priced out earlier due to the effect I was describing. It's an acceleration of an existing gradual process.

I think it's important that we define a few terms so we're all on the same page -- also for those following along. There's a clear distinction between miners (as individuals or entities operating hardware) and mining pools (as services coordinating hashpower). When spammers reach out to mining pools, they're effectively increasing the earnings of all miners in those pools. Contrary to what many believe, small miners are often found in large pools -- not the other way around. Why? Because large miners can afford to mine solo or in small pools with tolerable variance, while smaller operators need consistent payouts that large pools offer.

Those 10-20% you worry about are mostly coming from large private farms that deliberately avoid tagging their coinbases to stay under the radar -- not from tiny hobbyist miners.

Now, separating miners as people from the equation, let's talk about mining pools. If direct bribing is happening, it’s not related to pool size. How do I know? For example, Foundry -- currently holding triple the hashrate of ViaBTC -- doesn't offer transaction acceleration for non-RBF transactions. The idea that spammers are constantly using out-of-band channels like private APIs or transaction accelerators is overblown. These services are usually used as a last resort -- when users or wallets miscalculate fees or make a non-standard transaction that doesn't get relayed well enough, and need to pay out-of-band to recover stuck transactions. They're not the go-to for routine usage.

Spammers won’t use these channels unless they have to. Why would they pay a premium off-chain when they could leverage the mempool like everyone else and compete in a fair fee market? To do that, they need their transactions visible to as many mining pools as possible -- meaning the wallets and apps that create them must maintain solid connectivity to pool nodes. And conversely, mining pool infrastructure needs to be connected to sources of these transactions. That's their business problem to solve, not the average node operator's.

I’m not denying that some entities benefit more than others under the current settings. But that's exactly why mining pools and spammers -- both of whom are making money -- should solve their own problems. We shouldn't let their needs become a burden on the rest of the network. Let's prioritize the average user and ensure their transactions get reliable relay treatment. If the spammers want in, they can work harder for it.

Let me post a random example of this frog's video can be looked in this transaction
It breaks a default policy rule  (MAX_STANDARD_TX_WEIGHT of 400) -- All nodes with stock settings did not relay this transaction. Why would we want everybody relaying a 1-minute video of a dancing frog holding a drink? That transaction still made it to Terra Pool (a tiny pool that probably nobody has heard of)

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Good lord... they paid a fee of 49,295,940 sats $12,265 for that...
Ja I can see Terra pool manually adding it for a up front added fee ... "A fool and their money" an all that...

[mikeywith]

Good lord... they paid a fee of 49,295,940 sats $12,265 for that...
Ja I can see Terra pool manually adding it for a up front added fee ... "A fool and their money" an all that...

The fee rate he paid was roughly around the median for that block, he only ended up paying a large total fee because the transaction size was massive.

The upfront added fee is a possibility -- we can't know for sure unless the user or Terra Pool tells us the truth. It's possible that Terra Pool connected directly to whichever node relayed the frog transaction.

The funny thing is, the video is basically a 2-second clip repeated 30 times. He could have paid 1.6 million sats and gotten the frog on-chain instead of a 60-second video. It's obvious the guy is too rich to care about an extra 10k usd.

The main problem is that the frog video is now part of the UTXO set. Had this been done using OP_RETURN, it wouldn't create a spendable output, and full nodes wouldn't need to keep track of it in the UTXO set (a very expensive process). But since it's encoded as a standard output, it remains in the UTXO set until it's spent, unnecessarily bloating the set.

[ABCbits]

As for Ocean, last I checked, I believe they were using the Knots template, which filters out inscriptions and limits OP_RETURN data to 42 bytes. I believe the reasoning behind 42 bytes is that it should fit data commitments, which are 32 bytes. Not sure what the remaining 10 is for--maybe for a 10-byte identifier or just a random number Luke pulled while reading the Bible, which he inscribed into the very blockchain he's now trying to keep clean.

Isn't it because 42 bytes was old limit OP_RETURN that considered as part of standard TX? And i'm sure 2 of 42 bytes is overhead for OPCODES that specify size of data to be pushed.

As for Ocean, last I checked, I believe they were using the Knots template, which filters out inscriptions and limits OP_RETURN data to 42 bytes.

Stampchain uses 34 bytes seemingly for metadata in OP_RETURN, but the rest of the data is stuffed into fake public keys / scripts. See this earlier post.

So no, I don't think it "does the job". This is the most harmful spam, and we can't do anything against it. The Stampchain tx I linked in my earlier post alone creates 28 UTXOs (plus the OP_RETURN which is discarded, and one change output) for a minuscule Pepe image, which will never be spend. Imagine a spam wave based on this technique.

They could go one step further by excluding TX that create new P2MS output, since AFAIK there's no wallet software create P2MS output these days.

[Volgastallion]

I was reading all this conversation and all the coming and goings between people who knows a lot about BTC, and i dont understand so much only the minimal to be at practical level of using it and knowing the basics behind it.

What caught more my attention was how silly some people can be, and dont get my wrong but in some cases its seems like most of the problems become from people who wants to troll? Or how we can name the people who makes spam and spend ton of money only because they can and they enjoy doing it only to probe or to destroy a well worked and system?

All that reminds me the quote from Einstein "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I am not yet completely sure about the universe."

If the OP feel like this is not proper technical or OT feel free to deleted my post.

Just my 2 cents.

[d5000]

Those 10-20% you worry about are mostly coming from large private farms that deliberately avoid tagging their coinbases to stay under the radar -- not from tiny hobbyist miners.

Okay, I may be a bit less worried in this case. Basically you state that in the current mining landscape a centralization effect is negligible. I'd still argue there may be a long term effect that could change this (e.g. all larger pools offering Slipstream-style accelerators) and above all smaller pools could be at disadvantage, but that's speculation as we don't know what will happen in a few years.

(Edit:) What I wanted to add is that these problematic effects could increase if such things like the "non standard tokens" gained traction. I hope we'll not see this, but it is a possibility, as we have seen with BRC-20 even completely stupid protocols (I don't want to insult the creator as it was an experiment, more those who used it afterwards to speculate) can generate enormous and potentially harmful fads.

The main problem is that the frog video is now part of the UTXO set.

At least they used the Taproot exploit and not the "fake address" method, so only one small output is in the UTXO set. And I guess it may be even spendable, as it's value is above the dust limit. I don't know the Ordinals format well enough however, I guess this output will only be spent when the owner of this Inscription changes.

In the case of OP_RETURN, such "accidental" outputs can also occur (as long as there is no Ordinals variant based on OP_RETURN  ), but as they're not related to ownership they should be spent fastly.

They could go one step further by excluding TX that create new P2MS output, since AFAIK there's no wallet software create P2MS output these days.

But then we would again arrive at the cat and mouse game gmaxwell mentioned. They would probably simply use other kinds of outputs for their next version, and that one would potentially not be distinguishable from regular payments anymore.

[ABCbits]

If the OP feel like this is not proper technical or OT feel free to deleted my post.

FYI, this isn't self-moderator thread.

They could go one step further by excluding TX that create new P2MS output, since AFAIK there's no wallet software create P2MS output these days.

But then we would again arrive at the cat and mouse game gmaxwell mentioned. They would probably simply use other kinds of outputs for their next version, and that one would potentially not be distinguishable from regular payments anymore.

I know, i was just mentioning what they could do to achieve their goal. But after verifying on their website[1], some of their mining templete already disallow that by using -permitbaremultisig=0. For better or worse, OCEAN mining pool only have 0.7% hashrate[2], so spammer either don't know or don't care about it.

[1] https://www.ocean.xyz/docs/datafreepolicy#blog-bottom_post
[2] https://mempool.space/mining

[LuyXNYUd]

While it may seem like garbage in OP_RETURN at the moment, we have to consider the issue of miners' income after years of insufficient block rewards. Transaction fees currently account for less than 2% of miners' revenue, which is unsustainable. If you can generate more revenue for miners by developing use cases on OP_RETURN, like Ordinals, it's good for the overall security of the Bitcoin network.

[stwenhao]

we have to consider the issue of miners' income after years of insufficient block rewards

Even in testnets, like testnet3, miners can get a lot of coins from fees alone. People will use a lot of things, to spam the chain in many different ways. Changes to OP_RETURN alone wouldn't matter that much, when it comes to fees, because there are a lot of other ways to spam the chain, and most of the spam is done in much cheaper ways than OP_RETURN. Simply using future Segwit versions, and pushing everything as witness data, would allow to ignore many limits, and make 4 MB blocks.

Transaction fees currently account for less than 2% of miners' revenue, which is unsustainable.

The basic block reward in mainnet is currently set to 3.125 BTC. That's still a lot of coins. Meanwhile, in testnet3, you have 20 halvings, and 4768 satoshis per block, so everything else comes from fees (and miners can still get whole testnet coins).

So, I wouldn't worry about insufficient rewards for miners, because even in worthless testnets, miners can get a lot of coins from fees. And also, as long as 1 sat/vB minimal fee de-facto-standard rule is not lifted, miners are guaranteed to earn 0.01 BTC per block, as long as blocks are full.

[nutildah]

While it may seem like garbage in OP_RETURN at the moment, we have to consider the issue of miners' income after years of insufficient block rewards.

We do not need to consider that. The miners are doing just fine. If the rewards were insufficient, we'd be seeing a decrease in hash rate, yet the opposite is occurring. Eventually, yes, the fees will need to account for a bigger proportion of the reward, especially if the price of BTC doesn't double with each subsequent halving. But we are talking several years down the road before attracting miners becomes a problem.

[alaakaazaam]

While it may seem like garbage in OP_RETURN at the moment, we have to consider the issue of miners' income after years of insufficient block rewards. Transaction fees currently account for less than 2% of miners' revenue, which is unsustainable. If you can generate more revenue for miners by developing use cases on OP_RETURN, like Ordinals, it's good for the overall security of the Bitcoin network.

Monero opted for tail emission : a way for miners to get 0.6 xmr eternally with each resolved block
But for that to happen in Bitcoin, it should hardfork

[mikeywith]

we have to consider the issue of miners' income after years of insufficient block rewards

Even in testnets, like testnet3, miners can get a lot of coins from fees alone. People will use a lot of things, to spam the chain in many different ways. Changes to OP_RETURN alone wouldn't matter that much, when it comes to fees, because there are a lot of other ways to spam the chain, and most of the spam is done in much cheaper ways than OP_RETURN. Simply using future Segwit versions, and pushing everything as witness data, would allow to ignore many limits, and make 4 MB blocks.

Transaction fees currently account for less than 2% of miners' revenue, which is unsustainable.

The basic block reward in mainnet is currently set to 3.125 BTC. That's still a lot of coins. Meanwhile, in testnet3, you have 20 halvings, and 4768 satoshis per block, so everything else comes from fees (and miners can still get whole testnet coins).

So, I wouldn't worry about insufficient rewards for miners, because even in worthless testnets, miners can get a lot of coins from fees. And also, as long as 1 sat/vB minimal fee de-facto-standard rule is not lifted, miners are guaranteed to earn 0.01 BTC per block, as long as blocks are full.

The economic incentives behind mining on testnet and mainnet are fundamentally different, so I believe using testnet as a model for how things will unfold on mainnet is far from accurate. While the long-term sustainability of miner incentives isn't an immediate concern, it's still something worth considering. We don't want to end up with an ecosystem where a relatively low hashrate makes the network vulnerable to attacks by any moderately resourced asshole.

That said, the future of mining incentives is a complex topic on its own. Personally, I like to assume that the value of BTC will continue to rise indefinitely relative to the cost of energy and semiconductors. This has, more or less, been the trend over the past decade -- block rewards may drop in BTC terms, but their fiat value tends to increase. The result has been a steadily strengthening blockchain.

[stwenhao]

The economic incentives behind mining on testnet and mainnet are fundamentally different

Yes, but when testnets are no longer worthless, and they get some value, then they start competing with altcoins, rather than testnets. And in that case, if you have a long chain, where coins are traded at 100 satoshis per test coin (at the time of writing in testnet3), then if you can still see, that people are transacting, and moving whole coins without any problems, you can assume, that if mainnet in the future will be worth more, than testnets are worth today, then the network will still be in use.

Also, that fact alone, that even test environments, which were supposed to be worthless, gained some value in the long-term (and are more frequently used in practice, than many competing altcoins), can show you, that things are at least designed properly (and developers have the opposite problem, when trying to make coins worthless, to make a working testnet, instead of trying to increase the value of newly released networks).

We don't want to end up with an ecosystem where a relatively low hashrate makes the network vulnerable to attacks by any moderately resourced asshole.

Note that even if the hashrate of the whole network will be low, then you can still require a given Proof of Work in your own transaction, by enforcing making a signature, below a given size. So: even if you have 32-bit testnet header, then you can still have 64-bit signature s-value (enforced by the Script), so even if someone will reorganize the chain, then still, that person will be unable to change the chain of signatures, without re-mining them.

But for that to happen in Bitcoin, it should hardfork

Oh, tail supply of course can be made as a soft-fork. Because it doesn't matter, if you increase the total supply, or if you change proportions of owned coins, between network participants. Instead of having a tail supply of 0.01 BTC, people can be simply forced, to send at least 0.01 BTC in fees. And even if moving fees to consensus rules is a bad idea, then it is still better than tail supply (because you can explicitly see, how single satoshis are taken out of all users, and sent to the miners).

[BayAreaCoins]

The economic incentives behind mining on testnet and mainnet are fundamentally different

How or why?  Are you sure?

Testnet may likely be normal POW in 2026 because the 20 min mining difficulty is getting pwned by people who found an incentive to test the test network...  point an ASIC at v4 and watch your ass get handed to you. I view this as a good thing in all ways.

so I believe using testnet as a model for how things will unfold on mainnet is far from accurate.

I would have agreed with you 10 years ago, but through my experience... Testnet is a KILLER forecast for what is to come to Mainnet.

I've seen it over and over.  I saw this OP_Return literally coming in Testnet... Testnet is the best indicator of what is to come if you are paying attention.  Jameson Lopp attacking v3, preparing v4 for his *whatever* in the company Citrea, which was brutally obvious from my point of view.  

Blew my mind as well, all of Testnet has blow my mind, it's hella interesting.

Watch them launch v5 Testnet after Citrea finishes with v4 and goes to mainnet without needing to do their work around.  (my guess )

All of this started in Testnet... like most other things.  It's a great place to break "the rules" and a tiny mix of the two (mainnet/testnet) makes Testnet "spunky". As it should be, but Bitcoin isn't $0.03 like it was when Satoshi made his post.  Times have changed.

which were supposed to be worthless

It has never been worthless.  Period. (Perhaps in the future)

One human can not assign another human's opinion of worthless.  It's not even a crypto thing at that point.  Just kind of a crypto blanket.  It's interesting.

0 is a BIG fucking goal for something global.  It's not possible.  It's like dividing x by 2 (x= the POW, work any work[clicking a mouse even]) and expecting zero.  (Unless you "rob" them!  Which perhaps they deserve(?), but I don't think they do... they seem like OK folks tbh from what I can tell.  Goofy, but that's cool in a way.  You have to be goofy to be fucking with a testnet, which ironically I see as a smart way for smart people to potentially prepare for mainnet.  Making everyone a bit goofy.)

I'm 99% sure I could reboot v1 and v2, want to see me do it or nah?  Just a little shock and these fuckers come back to life.  People think that old POW is cool.  

How hard do you want me to try to go with this test?  If it fails, who cares, it's testnet!  Fuck anyone that does anything with it, right? (god I fucking LOVE it)

If the OP feel like this is not proper technical or OT feel free to deleted my post.

FYI, this isn't self-moderator thread.

^ But the mods could still get you, but they got bosses here too. Bitcoin is sectioned off interestingly.  It's so fucking cool... no one knows anything unless you know something.

I don't take any one bitching too seriously in or about Bitcoin if they aren't on the Blockchain and/or Bitcointalk "talking" their shit. (Unless it's "obvious" )