What is your take on Bitcoin Knotz? Bitcoin node and wallet by Luke Dashjr

[d5000]

I guess the stamps are filtered in Knots by baremultisig=0.

The answer of MikeInSpace (I guess he's the Bitcoin Stamps creator) seems to confirm this. The following sentence is however the essence of the problem with filters:

The problem with a cat and mouse game is that the mouse can iterate much faster than the cat.

Of course they could create a very specific filter for the OLGA protocol (which uses P2WSH) too, e.g. detecting the OP_RETURN metadata attached to them, but the problem with this approach is that "the mouse" can always change the protocol, without any harm, because the existing NFTs are already in the blockchain, and it may even increase their value as "legacy" Stampchain NFTs. In the end you will be filtering a lot of legit transactions too, probably.

Interesting historic insight, by the way

No. You are mistaken. Some filtering is useless, other filtering is very useful and we have all kinds of filters in Bitcoin. Some are policy rules others are consensus rules, but they are filters in both cases.

Policy "filters" all have the problem Wind_FURY states.

I've looked into Protocol Rules to see which rules could be seen as "filters". Apart from the "obvious" rules (e.g. that no transaction can create coins out of thin air, transactions cannot be bigger as the block size limit etc.), I've found the following ones for transactions ("tx" messages):

5. Make sure none of the inputs have hash=0, n=-1 (coinbase transactions)
6. Check that nLockTime <= INT_MAX, size in bytes >= 100, and sig opcount <= 2
7. Reject "nonstandard" transactions: scriptSig doing anything other than pushing numbers on the stack, or scriptPubkey not matching the two usual forms
11. For each input, if the referenced output transaction is coinbase (i.e. only 1 input, with hash=0, n=-1), it must have at least COINBASE_MATURITY (100) confirmations; else reject this transaction
15. Reject if transaction fee (defined as sum of input values minus sum of output values) would be too low to get into an empty block

For those who know more: are rules 7 and 15 really consensus rules? In particular rule 15 seems very loosely defined. I guess here the wiki article is incorrect.

Nevertheless you're correct, there are a few "effective" filters as of now. We could add a Taproot envelope filter to them, but my guess is that TapScript is flexible enough to allow constellations which could store significant quantities of data without being "blockable" if the goal is to not cripple "legit" TapScript use cases.

[Wind_FURY]

Incentives - the ONE that's making the network stick together, and it's not debatable.

You are not making any sense. Whether this network or their network becomes the majority network, the incentive is the same. You claim that they won't fork because of that, I claim that it doesn't make sense.

I'm sorry if you don't understand how Bitcoin as a decentralized network, or any decentralized system for that matter, truly works. It's a FACT, and it's NOT debatable.

-- Snip --

I'll end the discussion there because it's useless talking to you. I debate people in the forum to learn something out of it, but you're not one of those people yet. I'm not trying to offend you, ser. Pardon me.


gmaxwell, you're a mod in this subforum. Perhaps signatures should be disabled in Development & Technical Discussion?

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[Pmalek]

I don't know anything about Bitcoin Knotz, but if I wanted to run a full node, I am not sure that I would want that to be Knotz. Luke Dashjr as the head developer and main maintainer, no thanks. He claims to have been hacked and lost over 200 BTC. Some of those coins he allegedly kept in cold wallets. I wouldn't want the security of my Bitcoin wallet to rely on a person who gets his cold wallets hacked. And if he wasn't hacked and the story was made up, then he is lying. I also wouldn't trust a liar.

[ABCbits]

In Aug 2015, JP Janssen, the creator of OLGA, embedded a 20 kb, stamp-sized image in a Counterparty broadcast, with the data split among 172 multisig outputs. Interestingly, these weren't "fake key" multisig outputs. They were consolidated and spent in April 2017.

However not all multisig outputs in Counterparty or spendable; for what reason I don't really understand, but I would like to.

I don't remember technical spec of Counterparty. But since the TX show each UTXO is 1-of-3 P2MS, i expect 1 public key is real while 2 other are fake (used to store arbitrary data).

The problem with a cat and mouse game is that the mouse can iterate much faster than the cat.

Of course they could create a very specific filter for the OLGA protocol (which uses P2WSH) too, e.g. detecting the OP_RETURN metadata attached to them, but the problem with this approach is that "the mouse" can always change the protocol, without any harm, because the existing NFTs are already in the blockchain, and it may even increase their value as "legacy" Stampchain NFTs. In the end you will be filtering a lot of legit transactions too, probably.

Interesting historic insight, by the way

I don't expect it'll filter monetary/financial TX, since OLGA require OP_RETURN or P2MS that contains Counterparty data and prefix "STAMP:".

[Accardo]

I don't know anything about Bitcoin Knotz, but if I wanted to run a full node, I am not sure that I would want that to be Knotz. Luke Dashjr as the head developer and main maintainer, no thanks. He claims to have been hacked and lost over 200 BTC. Some of those coins he allegedly kept in cold wallets. I wouldn't want the security of my Bitcoin wallet to rely on a person who gets his cold wallets hacked. And if he wasn't hacked and the story was made up, then he is lying. I also wouldn't trust a liar.

Furthermore, Luke hasn't been a huge contributor to core, in volume. His projects barely get the attention of other core developers which debunked most of his contribution from getting added into the network. For him to come with this new controversial approach that got everyone talking made it really open why he's always not getting the approval of most other core developers. Fortunately, he got the attention once more, unfortunately it wouldn't endure.

[d5000]

I don't expect it'll filter monetary/financial TX, since OLGA require OP_RETURN or P2MS that contains Counterparty data and prefix "STAMP:".

You can get rid of everything of that. OP_RETURN is only needed in the Stampchain protocol for historical reasons because it evolved out of Counterparty.

If Knots made a serious attempt to filter the OLGA protocol though, they could simply stuff everything in fake pubkeys, including the STAMP: prefix. Or change the prefix every time a new Knots (or Bitcoin core) version comes up with a renewed filter. This could even be automated so it would need almost no development work once the automatism has been established, and of course if Knots tried to copy the automatism, they could simply include random data (even AI could help the "mouse").

The mouse is always faster. It would force Knots to come out basically with a new version of the client every time the Stampchain guys want. Is this a good anti-spam strategy? IMO not.